Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/48

 to be a primitive and original datum, the opposition and irreducibility of the two terms to be due to faulty perspective, and to be the outcome of an unconscious metaphysic; it further maintains that as soon as this illusory superstructure is removed, and a return made to the pure sources of immediate experience, which are still unsullied by philosophical reflection, we shall be able to grasp the undivided unity of the real without going beyond the limits of the phenomenal. The unity of the two worlds, the physical and the psychical, is a presentation, not a structure raised by thought; it is the starting-point, not the goal, of philosophical speculation. There are various degrees of this new form of monism — which may be designated empirical as distinguished from the older metaphysical monism — which spread rapidly during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and is prevalent at the present day. We shall see that in its most advanced form it has the adherence of the critics of the empirical school, of the French intuitionists, and the pragmatists, all of whom agree in denying to original experience the distinction between subject and object, which they regard as a product of posterior reflection, determined by motives of a practical order. A more moderate form of empirical monism is that supported by the philosophers of immanence, who are at one with the radical empiricists in maintaining that subject and object are but two abstract aspects of the phenomenon, or of the content of concrete consciousness, but who assert on the other hand that it is impossible to conceive of conscious reality without making such a distinction, and that the two terms, subject and object, although neither can exist independently of the other, are nevertheless real, in so far as they are distinct though not separate aspects of experience. In short, whilst empirical monism in its earlier form asserts duality to be illusory or at most of purely practical value, the later form views it as the fundamental characteristic of consciousness, and hence also of reality, which without the two terms would be