Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/445

4.] place to some of our representations. The contradiction of free will and necessity is of a purely gnoseological character, and never can be reduced, as was proved by Kant. Our ideals grow out from reality, but, once formed, they become one of the forces of human development. The question as to how a human being would behave, knowing exactly the future, is a psychological one. Psychology is also the field where gnoseological contradictions may be considered under a harmonious light.

Science, morals, and religion, i.e., the theoretical, practical, and religious dialectics, are matters of convenience. The theoretical dialectic, for instance, is simply a coordination, which plays the part of assistant to the weakness of human understanding, and replaces intension by extension. Unfortunately, this entails an increasing separation from the primitive consciousness. Science, the truth of coördination, gets further and further away from the truth of fact. Again, it is necessary in one dialectic to recognize the existence of the others. No one of the three is sufficient, if taken alone. The object of the present series of articles, of which this is the first, is to justify the distinctive characteristics of the dialectics, and to show the good and bad results of the gradual separation from the primitive consciousness. Since the religious dialectic has been most neglected, especial attention will be devoted to that. In the theoretical dialectic it is a question of knowing, not of producing. Nevertheless, one cannot grasp reality without modifying it, and so, in a sense, producing it. Facts are distributed into groups, and so rendered dependent upon one another. The first stage of the dialectic is the empirical, that which keeps close to the facts of the primitive consciousness. Before distinguishing the different elements of objects, it coördinates those which are given, confining itself strictly to the plane of the concrete. Upon this primary arrangement are dependent the secondary categories of space, time, and causality. The next moment in the theoretical dialectic is rationalism, which does not take whatever presents itself, but distinguishes that which is favorable to coördination. It even converts unfavorable elements into those suitable for its purpose. At first rationalism was qualitative, but the modern world has left this position, and gone on to that of quantity. Of course the qualitative cannot be omitted altogether, but the abstraction from content increases the ease of coordination. Another useful abstraction is the elimination of the psychical element from the physical. So far rationalism can go; but it is unable to complete the coordination. It can form no conception of an infinite, qualitative unity, which embraces