Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/60

 The whole meaning I take to be that the Idealist or Criticist is a subjectivist, and starts from "Knowledge" (how it should be knowledge I cannot conceive) as a jumping-off place to get across a gap to reality. The possibility of this miracle he is concerned to demonstrate by a science dealing with knowledge as such [it would be just not as such, I should have thought] and prior to his theory of Reality. A theory, on the other hand, which, treating of first principles of Reality, includes in its treatment an account of cognition and truth, is not, as I understand the question, epistemology in this incriminated sense. If I am wrong in my understanding of the polemic, of course my immediate criticism of it ceases to apply. But my account of modern speculative philosophy, I venture to think, remains the only true one.

The priority alleged to be assigned to Epistemology, I suppose, is taken as connected with the priority which the Idealist ("Criticist") is believed to ascribe to immediate experience. He begins from his own mind, and has to bridge a gulf to reality.

If I am right in taking this to be the true bearing and intention of the Realist's criticism as directed, say, against those of us who acknowledge a special debt to Hegel, I must hold that the conclusion is inevitable. The popular conception of "psychological idealism" (Wallace's phrase of repudiation) has in this criticism been insufficiently distinguished from the attitude of what Hegel calls Logic, Green Metaphysics, and Mr. Bradley, I think, the study of first principles. What at once amazed me in the polemic before us