Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/77

] mandate of reason to run in a completely foreign domain. No sort of knowledge, indeed, would be possible of a world of things whose relation to consciousness and the forms of thought was conceived as mere negation. The opposition had already led legitimately, in the history of modern philosophy, to the denial of the possibility of knowledge, and was not to be overcome by a mere assertion of the immediate presence of the one to the other in the knowing act. A real metaphysical dualism would cleave the universe in two, leaving two absolutely non-communicating worlds. The possibility of knowledge becomes, on the other hand, the surest guarantee of metaphysical monism—of a unity which underlies all differences.

The metaphysical position of Cartesianism into which the Scottish philosophers thus relapsed was connected, there can be little doubt, with the old mechanical or deistic conception of creation and of the relation of God to the world of nature—matter being looked on as something absolutely dead, absolutely undivine, except that once upon a time an immense quantity of it was 'created' and set in motion, since which time it continues to exist as a kind of brute fact so long as its 'being' is not terminated by another special fiat of its Creator. I confess I know as little as Berkeley what is meant by the being or existence of such matter, nor can I conceive the possibility of any existence placed outside of the divine consciousness and will in the manner suggested. The feat is one which even a divine being could not perform; there is no region outside of God into which he could extrude his creature and cut it adrift from himself. The world of nature cannot be understood by an intelligent theist otherwise than as the ever-present working of a divine power. This is a lesson which most of us have learned, as children of the nineteenth century. But the abstract dualism of metaphysics was in its way a counterpart of the mechanical theology which banished God from his own world, and so made that world an unintelligibility to thought. The world conceived thus, as a mere brute fact, is formulated in philosophy as the unknowable thing-in-itself. It was a survival of this dualistic feeling in Kant which led him to scout, as he did, the idea of what he calls a preformation system, or pre-established harmony between the mind and things, in respect of the categories and forms of thought. He means by the phrase the possibility that the forms of thought are both subjective and objective, forms of the subjective intelligence and forms of the real world at once. This supposition, which we have seen to