Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/123

107, then, as an inquiry into the validity of knowledge in general, is impossible. The second question falsely assumes that at first we know nothing but our own subjective states, i.e., that thought moves from a fixed datum by external aggregation. Thought moves by differentiation from within and re-integration, and its datum only gradually reveals what it is. Reality is one and certainly consists only in a consistent view of the world as an organic whole. Every datum implies the total real, and the distinction of subjective and objective falls within it. The development of the implications of subjective states as data belongs to Ontology. Epistemology, as dealing with knowledge without reference to reality, is Subjective Idealism, as a special science dealing with subjective facts as data, it is admissible. It might better be called Psychology of Cognition.

Transcendental Idealism says, in opposition to the theory which makes sensations or groups of sensations the real, that the real is unknowable unless sensations be worked up by the thinking subject into a world of relations. But Idealism reduces all experience to an experience of relations, and overlooks the something related. All that the Transcendental argument requires is a 'manifold' of relations, and a bare self-conscious principle of unity. In Theology, on this theory, we have either a bare principle of unity without any concrete qualities, or we have this principle in union with all the qualities, good and bad alike, of the concrete world. In Ethics we have mere abstract, metaphysical, not concrete, moral freedom. Or if we have the latter, it is really a determinism excluding only external constraint. On this theory it is difficult or impossible to unite the pure and the empirical 'I' in one personality, and equally so to conceive the relations between the 'pure' limited and the eternal self-consciousness or God. The criticism only establishes that my experience depends upon a unification by my self-conscious 'I' of a 'world of relations present to me alone. To this 'I' all other 'I's are objects. If God can only be object for 'me,' then 'for me' he does not exist, since he could only exist as eternal subject. In Science, Idealism says experience is constituted by categories. This gives us no guide for the application of subordinate categories.