Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/316

302 their constituents and undermined the existence of everything but themselves. ... These ideas are as free and independent as the birds of the air. ... Yet, after all, these self-existent and independent ideas look pitifully naked and destitute when left thus alone in the universe, set adrift without a rag to cover their nakedness." In exactly the same way, though along different lines, 'experience,' which was introduced into philosophy in a doubly dependent character, as the experience by a real being of a real world – experience, which by the very structure of the term seems to cry aloud for a real subject and a real object – has substantiated itself as the sole reality. First the object disappears before negative criticism, and the world, as Hartmann puts it, is transformed into the dream of a dreamer; at this stage we have a purely subjective Idealism or Solipsism. Then the subject shares the fate of the object, and the dream of a dreamer becomes a dream which is dreamt by nobody, but which, if one may say so, dreams itself, and among its other dream-forms dreams the fiction of a supposed dreamer. This self-evolving, unsupported, unhoused illusion is all that exists.

I am not aware that absolute scepticism or absolute illusionism admits of any direct logical reply. But it has hitherto been regarded, not only by the common sense but by the enlightened common reason of mankind, as a reductio ad absurdum of the line of thought which leads to it. It is a result which we deliberately refuse to accept as true. In face, however, of such a sceptical dissolution of reality, we do not merely intrench ourselves in this deliberate refusal, leaving the sceptic in possession of the intellectual field. The nature of the result leads us to examine the nature of the premises and the principles of argumentation which have led to it. This was what Kant and Reid both essayed to do in face of the Humian scepsis. Now that a definite development of the Kantian Criticism brings us face to face with a subtler scepsis of the same description, a similar course must be adopted; we must endeavor to lay our hand