Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/33

6 as manifested in its individual physiognomy. Any form of consciousness, however embryonic and rudimentary, is already a knowing of the content which is manifested in it. The pain which I feel at a given moment is an actual fact, known by me to be such, though I may not be able to subject it to law, classify it in a system of concepts, or explain it scientifically; real too is the world of colour, sound, and form in its unending variety. The error of abstract rationalism, in its scientific and speculative forms alike, lies in its claim to be able to reduce reality in its entirety to a system of relations, since there exists an individual aspect of things which cannot be expressed in its concreteness by means of abstract relations. It is for this reason that we find ourselves confronted by insoluble antinomies when we attempt to realise this pure system of relations, that we vainly endeavour to find a fixed point in the process of reasoning which leads us from one relation to another, a goal which cannot be in its turn a relation unless we are prepared to continue the process indefinitely. Thought, whose function is the establishment of relations, cannot reach this absolute goal, but our consciousness is not forced to seek it beyond the indefinite series of relations, since it is found within itself as an original possession in immediately experienced facts. Knowledge founded on pure logic is thus doomed to grope in the empty darkness of its own contradictions, unless it will take refuge in the luminous atmosphere of concrete consciousness. If by “knowing” we understand simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their dissolution into abstract elements, then the unknowable will be found, not beyond the bounds of experience, but in the facts themselves in as much as they possess a concrete physiognomy which cannot be translated into abstract relations, and even our own individuality, as presented to us by experience, will be unknown to us! If, on the other hand, we understand by the term “knowledge” not merely logical reflection, but also the immediate