Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/73

57 which this question must be answered: the view of ontological Idealism, and that opposite view which may be called Naturalism or Materialism.

Naturalism maintains that wholly unconscious and unspiritual realities—e.g., the 'Unknowable,' 'Unconscious Will,' 'Unconscious Intellect,' the 'Atom and Void,' etc.,—though by no means necessarily the undefinable 'matter' of ordinary phraseology, are the most fundamental realities in the Universe; our ideals of Value are of no more significance for the nature of the Whole are no less the product of blind struggles with circumstance—than is the fact that we are bipeds. The weakness of this theory, from the purely rational point of view, becomes apparent when we consider the way in which the Ideal of Value, as a fact of conscious experience, is 'explained.' Nature,—in the lower or narrower sense in which the term is used to denote all that happens in the known world except the conscious activities of human beings,—is hypostatized, treated as a Ding-an-sich or self-existent thing, and then man's conscious life is explained as its 'product,' as evolved or developed 'from' it, etc., according to the current phraseology. But what is not explained is the fact that the mind of man has persisted, and seemingly always will persist, in the attempt to think consistently about Reality and to make it rational and intelligible. Materialism itself, like every science and every philosophy, does homage to this tendency, and practically acknowledges its Ideal as supreme; and the problem, What is its significance? Whence comes it? presses for solution. It is curious that neither evolutionists nor associationists have endeavored to 'explain' how it is that ,—how it is that inevitably, 'by nature,' all men endeavor to understand and comprehend things for the sake of understanding them. It would seem that a really consistent Naturalism must be tantamount to Skepticism.

It is most reasonable to regard the three aspects of the Ideal of Value as coördinate, so that whatever significance is attached to one of them may be claimed for the others also.