Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/144

128 single principle. It is not the business of human reason to falsify the world of experience, but to understand it; it keeps before itself the ideal of unity and simplicity, but it is not bound to bury all differences in a single grave. It is itself a unity in diversity, a one and many, and it will not do violence to its own nature.

There is nothing to hinder us from calling the method of thought which results in the mechanization of experience intelligence and giving another name to the function or functions through which we reach a different conception. We may distinguish, if we will, between intelligence and intuition, Verstand and Vernunft, regarding the former as the method of scientific study, the latter as the source of metaphysical knowledge of a higher order. But the distinction would be an artificial one, the very kind of distinction against which Romanticists inveigh as cutting up what cannot be cut up. There can be no intuition that is absolutely devoid of intelligence, no philosophy, no knowledge, where intellect is dumb. Radical empiricism, naive realism, and intuitionism, all represent an effort to get directly at the heart of things, all are expressions of an intense longing for reality, symptoms of metaphysical home-sickness. Rationalism can accept any one or all of these heroic attempts at taking reality by storm,—if they can pass muster. But can any experience, pure, immediate, or intuitive, be made the basis of philosophical truth without being inspected by the same intelligence that operates in ordinary life; can this intelligence be silenced, can it lose itself in mere unintelligent mystical gazing, and if it can, of what use will it ever be to science or philosophy? No theory that endeavors, as every theory must, to validate its methods and sources of knowledge, can or does refuse to reflect upon its immediate experiences, to analyze them for us, to tell us how they are constituted, and to employ categories in doing all this. The pure experience as described by the new philosophers is not an experience at all, but the product of analysis and reflection, the result of the very conceptual operations which they condemn. The voice is Heraclitus's voice, but the hand is the hand of Parmenides.