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Rh compass. Thought, this view goes on to say, must either surrender all claims to establish reality and to know it, or else it must cease to regard reality as a “thing in itself”; so “things in themselves” are dismissed from critical philosophy, and henceforth thought and reality must be conceived as inseparably conjoined. But how alone is such a conjunction conceivable? — how alone is the validity of thought specifically possible? To this it is answered: There is no way of having the required conjunction but by presupposing the unity of the thinker’s self-consciousness to be intrinsically a synthetical unity — a unity, that is, conjoining in itself two correlated streams of consciousness. These are, the abstractly ideal and the abstractly real, mere thought and mere sense, mere idea and dead “fact.” Torn from the life-giving embrace of this true unity of self-consciousness, neither of these correlates has any true reality at all, — any meaning, any growth, any being. And, reciprocally, there can be no real unity of self-consciousness apart from its living expression in this pair of correlates. No knowledge — no objective certainty — is possible, if once this magic bond be broken. The price of knowledge, the price of certitude, is this inseparable union of concept with percept, of thought with sense. Sever the idea from its sensory complement, and it vanishes in the inane. The only true Ideal is the Real-Ideal, is the unity presupposed in this correlation, and embracing it, — the unity implied in every item of experience, which is always just a case of this synthesis, — the unity still more profoundly implicated in every colligated group of experiences and in that progressively organised