Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/72



Professor Watson's article on "Metaphysics and Psychology" in the September number of this is calculated to make one despair of the capacities of language as a channel for the communication of ideas. I do not intend to refer to Mr. Watson here, because I have already dealt fully with any serious criticisms his paper contains, in an article which appears in the current number of Mind, in answer to Professor Jones's two papers on "Epistemology and Idealism." For the rest, I think no one who has read my books or articles with ordinary intelligence and a desire to understand them, is likely to be misled by Mr. Watson's ingenious travesty of my positions. For those, however, who are dependent on his article for their knowledge of my views, I desire to make the following statements:—

I nowhere start from "the assumption that by no possibility can the conscious subject have a knowledge of anything but his own mental states." On the contrary, I have expressly said: "We do not begin by studying the contents of our own minds, and afterwards proceed by inference to realities beyond. We are never restricted to our ideas, as ideas." (Scottish Philosophy, p. 103, and, I, 507.)

I have never held or said "that we can have no knowledge of God as he really is" or, in general, that "existence must be essentially different from what we conceive it to be," or, in fine, that "reality is unknowable." On the contrary, if there is one thing more than another which I have persistently combated, it is the view expressed in these quotations. I have devoted a whole lecture in Scottish Philosophy to exploding and ridiculing the philosophic superstition, as I call it, which underlies the doctrine of Relativity and Agnosticism. A single passage may suffice for illustration: "The substance is not an existence distinct from the qualities—something that can be separated from the qualities and known by itself. The substance exists as qualified, and we know it through its qualities. How else should we know it? The idea of an existence in each thing, beyond the existence which we know and