Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/73

Rh name; a substance in itself that shall not be known through its qualities; a cause that has no necessary reference to its effects; a man that shall not be known by his thoughts and actions; a God that shall be concealed by his own manifestation—such is the idea that underlies all varieties of Agnosticism; and, in truth, it is one of the most curious delusions that ever possessed the mind of man. Yet it is an idea so common at the present day as almost to have passed into the structure of language. The very function of the phenomenon would seem to be to expound, express, manifest, or reveal the noumenon; but the exact contrary is implied in the current use of the terms. It is hardly possible to open a scientific or semi-philosophical work without meeting the complacent admission that our knowledge is 'only of phenomena.'. . . Certainly the objects of our knowledge are phenomena; for phenomenon is the name we give to an object in relation to our knowledge of it. But, in knowing the phenomenon, we know the object itself through and through—so far, of course, as we do know it, so far as it has become a phenomenon for us. . . . If, ex hypothesi, a thing were completely to phenomenalise itself to us—i.e., if we had an exhaustive knowledge of the qualities of any single thing—then the knowledge of the phenomenon would be, in that case, in the strictest sense the knowledge of the noumenon" (pp. 174-7). Mr. Watson may say that he has no knowledge of Scottish Philosophy, and that his review is expressly confined to Hegelianism and Personality. But the above argument is cited there and accepted as valid; and if Mr. Watson condescended to comment upon my views at all, he should have taken pains to ascertain, at least in a general way, what these views were. Moreover, there is nothing in the later volume which in any way conflicts with the position taken up in the earlier. What I have maintained in Hegelianism and Personality, against certain phases or tendencies of Hegelian thought, is that knowledge, though it may be a correct and complete description of things, is not the actual existent things themselves. Another man's subjective experience of his own states is not to be identified with my knowledge of them through their manifestation in word and action. But the man is not therefore an unknowable for me; I know his nature or character in the only way in which it is possible for me to know anything. Every real existence has these two sides, being-for-itself and being-for-others. What is true of other men will be true, therefore, of God, if we attribute self-consciousness to him. But neither is God on that account converted into an Unknowable.