Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/222

208 being, however, is supposed to express its activity in two ways, directly in consciousness and indirectly by manifesting itself as phenomena. Consciousness, then, is supposed to be correlative with the activity of being that represents itself in consciousness as phenomena. I must confess that this is a tangle from which I can hardly extricate myself.

The view bears on the surface a resemblance to that of Spinoza, except that for Spinoza's substance we have substituted the more colorless word being, or transcendent being, and for the two attributes we have the two activities of transcendent being, consciousness and phenomena. Being acts and is thereby consciousness; being at the same time acts and thereby manifests itself to other consciousness, as well as to itself, as phenomena. Is not the meaning of being exhausted in this double activity? Why then call it transcendent? Is not the meaning of any reality exhausted in the account of its behavior, and do we add anything when we say that it is that which behaves in such and such ways? The answer would seem to turn on the obvious reflection that the consciousness which is mine, or which I am, contains as part of its own contents phenomena which I am constrained (in order to fill up the gaps in empirical reality) to refer to activities other than my own consciousness. Although from one point of view the world is my oyster, I cannot make it intelligible without supposing that there are other oyster-worlds inaccessible to me, but whose owners have the power of irrupting into mine by proxy, so to speak, and indicating their presence in the realm of being and their right to recognition, I, of course, also having the same privilege so far as they are concerned. One might suppose that the being which thus transcends my consciousness is simply other consciousness, and so indeed it is, but Professor Read thinks it must be more than this since "no one steadily regards consciousness as self-existent: attempts to do so end in verbal jugglery" (p. 366). This transcendent being is a name for the condition, ground, or cause, alike of the various consciousnesses and of their cor- relative manifestations as empirical reality to one another. But inasmuch as the category of cause gets its meaning for us, according to our author, wholly within empirical reality, being "exclusively a physical category," what right have we to carry it over to transcendent being? Confronted with this difficulty, Professor Read replies that "’something equivalent to causation' may perhaps be predicated of Being considered as a condition of phenomena. If we assume a transcendent condition of phenomena, we may regard it on the same grounds as the condition of changes in phenomena, and of what are called the 'forces of Nature.'" This seems to me no answer, but rather an evasion of the difficulty. Nor is much light thrown by the further comment which Professor Read adds by