Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/217

No. 2.] retract – especially as Mr. Ritchie prefers to raise minor points rather than to meet the chief issues. Thus in the matter of epistemology and metaphysics: he seems to confuse them worse than ever. This may account for his inability to grasp my use of the latter term; for it would otherwise be pretty clear that I mean by metaphysics the science of ultimate principles and conclusions as to the nature of phenomena. Such a science would depend for its materials on all the sciences, and not exclusively on epistemology, and would certainly decline to be saddled with " things as they are in themselves" and "apart" from phenomena – abstractions which, I believe, we owe to Mr. Ritchie's friends, the Kantians. On the other hand, such a view of the field of metaphysics does require some mediation between the deduction of a category and the assertion of the phenomenal ('real') existence of an object corresponding to it, which constitutes the transition from epistemology to metaphysics. But what, I ask in vain, is the creative charm by which Hegelians hypostasize their categories? Mr. Ritchie is as silent as his master's grave. Instead of elucidating this crucial point, he raises a deal of dust about the "external world" and my supposed identification thereof with reality, as if I had not shown myself to be perfectly well aware that phenomena (and the inferences from them) constitute the world, and are all "inside" consciousness, and as if the phrase could possibly mislead in a preliminary statement like mine on p. 536. To say that there is reality or an 'external' or 'objective' world is merely to refuse to acquiesce in the primal chaos of phenomena, and to attribute to them (rightly or wrongly) inner connections and distinctions, in the hope of regarding it as a cosmos. If this attempt to interpret phenomena is found ultimately to involve the discrimination of the self and the world, and to issue in (metaphysical) "realism," that is no ground for the charge that the primary subjectivity of phenomena has been ignored. So all my realism amounts to – I cannot speak for Prof. Seth – is a refusal to reduce either of the mutually-implicated factors of a given context to the other, without a more sufficient cause than the chaos of phenomena which is the datum explicandum. It is unfair, therefore, to treat this attempt to transcend subjective idealism as uncritical, especially while we are left in doubt as to the manner and validity of Mr. Ritchie's method of taking the self-same step from phenomenality to objectivity.

Coming next to the question of the criteria of reality, it seems as if Mr. Ritchie did not take any great interest in it, else he would