Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/252

236 awaken in our beholders a group of percepts constituting our body, and at the same time is the bearer of its own conscious content. It far transcends the nature both of what we call our body and our mind. This being itself is neither mental nor physical; both mind and body are merely its functional activity. It is more permanent and essential than either. All knowledge of motion, both in ourselves and in nature, is symbolical. It is not strange, then, that we can know no more of activity than that it does not follow purely mechanical rules. In vain has science labored to reduce activity to merely mechanical laws. The specific indwelling power, possessed by every substance, of reacting to external forces, has baffled every attempt at a purely mechanical explanation of nature. The more elaborate the form of matter, the more complex its specific mode of reaction to external impulse. A purely mechanical explanation would leave no place for thoughts, emotions, and volitions, except as a useless by-play of non-sentient activity. We may say, then, that the activity of living beings is an activity of their non-mental natures. The accompanying molecular motion is of a kind far transcending mere mechanical motion. The inter-dependence or concomitance of conscious states with activity, either volitional or automatic, results from their being manifestations of the same hidden nature. The conscious state is one form of the activity of the most essential nature; the bodily activity is another manifestation of the same essential nature. In the spontaneous activity of his own hidden being consists man's freedom.

There are three attitudes possible towards the concept of an Unknowable. First, one may refuse to assert either existence or non-existence of it. Second, one may deny both the reality and the possibility of the Unknowable. Third, one may maintain it to be both possible and real. The first, or purely critical, attitude recognizes the fact that knowledge has an objective and a subjective limit: an objective limit, inasmuch as we have no assurance that reality is wholly intelligible either for us or for any consciousness; a subjective limit, since a part of our conscious content, namely, feelings and volitions, cannot be conceived as referring to anything external to, or more ultimate than, itself, and hence cannot be explained. The critical thesis may therefore be summed up in two