Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/225

No. 2.] our own inner life is manifest, if, discarding the untenable hypothesis of a mysterious 'substance,' we regard the soul as simply the unity which is presupposed in all our inner experiences. Feelings, desires, ideas, thoughts are as they appear. No doubt we have empirically a limited knowledge of self, but this does not show that there is any noumenal self different in kind from the self that we know. Nor is it any real objection to urge that we can only know ourselves under the subjective form of time; for, though to an absolute intelligence our inner life would not appear as in time, its content would be the same. Now, this knowledge of self is the key to the knowledge of the not-self. I know the real as it is in itself, in so far as it is of the same nature as myself. The world, it is true, exists for us only in and through our own ideas; but this does not prevent us from having an assured belief in a reality independent of those ideas. The Not-I is revealed to us in the experience which we make as willing beings, whose efforts are checked by an external limit. The further development of the opposition of I and Not-I arises from (1) the distinction of one's own body from other bodies, (2) the distinction between possible and actual perceptions.

To attempt anything like an adequate criticism of a book so comprehensive in its character, is obviously impossible here, and I shall only indicate the lines upon which such a criticism might proceed, (1) The whole method seems to me false. It is the method of seeking for unity by the elimination of differences, instead of seeking for it by the inclusion of differences in a higher unity. Thus, in his theory of reality, the author seeks to show that all forms of existence have an inner life, by eliminating the self-consciousness which is characteristic of man, the sensibility which is characteristic of animals, and the growth which is characteristic of plants, and then affirming that all things are in their essence identical. But surely, if it is a valid answer to the materialist to say that "thought is thought, and not motion," it is equally valid to say that self-consciousness is self-consciousness, sensation is sensation, and growth is growth. (2) The same false method is employed in the reduction of the psychical life to what is called 'will.' It is mere confusion to call by the same name blind and unconscious effort and self-conscious effort. Were it not for this confusion, it would be manifest that there is no more reason for calling will primary than for calling intelligence primary; the fact being that there is in the lowest form of being merely the potentiality of both and the actuality of neither. (3) It is but another instance of the same perverse method, when all