Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/320

304 Schopenhauer is not such an arch-illusionist after all! A philosopher who gives us a personal introduction to the thing-in-itself, and allows us to penetrate the veil of Maya, cannot be accused of illusionism merely because he distrusts conceptual knowledge as a means of revealing the innermost essence of things. Besides, if Schopenhauer is an illusionist, Professor Caldwell comes pretty near being one himself. "If by knowledge," he declares, "we mean the dissecting intellectual activity of the understanding, then in that case we know the world only in sections and 'in part.' The knowledge of the world in sections has, of course, more of a practical than a theoretical value" (p. 499). "Of course the real—I wish to avoid the expression the ultimate real—is in its central life or essence unknowable, in the sense that life is greater than knowledge and cannot be grasped by something that it merely engenders or creates (knowledge), and that it cannot be grasped by anything short of the impulse after life which it essentially is itself" (p. 502; cf. also pp. 122, 159, 161-166, 447, 455, 478, etc.).

But let us turn to Professor Caldwell's own philosophy, which we shall have to dig out of the chaotic heap in which the author has buried it. I must leave it to the reader to explain its naïve dogmatism, and to reconcile its glaring inconsistencies.—It is absurd to talk about the hidden essence of things, of a something behind things which we either know not at all, or which we know only in so far as it affects the intellect. The subjective and objective are not separate; the categories or forms of thought (space, time, cause, substance, number, and plurality) are real aspects of things, real in the world that we know. The real has both subjective and objective factors. The world that we know is both spiritual and material. Our experience of reality is reality. What we perceive, or experience, or are compelled to think about the world, is true of the world; indeed is part of the world. Things are what they appear to our consciousness; there are no things 'apart from' consciousness. The world is a spiritual world, a world in which psychical beings really exist as fundamental or ultimate constituent elements (pp. 81 ff., 90 ff., 93-98, 110, 147 ff., 159, 375 note, 419).

Now take the following: We have a sense for reality, through which we know the will. Reality is for us what we find it to be in our volition, and what we make it to be in our volition. In a sense, reality is what we evolve or will. Reality is not merely something that we know on the outside, but something that we in a sense are. Our knowledge of reality is the sense we have of reality as affecting