Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/38

Rh he limited the field of our knowledge to the connecting judgments that link our sense-presentations into permanently identical objects in a permanent cosmic whole; that is, to physical things, and their physical laws, alone. But in so doing he failed to notice what Hume, had the Scottish sceptic lived to read him, could justly have told him reduced all knowledge to an isolated self-knowledge merely, and thus stripped science of the very quality of truth, — which required an objective meaning; a meaning, that is, referred quite beyond any single self, and, indeed, to a world of total and absolute reality. When our assurance of such an absolutely real world is rested simply on our fealty to its idea, the world of supposed science must also, in its turn, become but a world of pure faith — of sheer belief. So futile does our inmost mind declare the endeavour to maintain a judgment of worth for what we cannot crown with the judgment of reality.

Thus, since the counter-attempts of Kant’s great idealist successors, following the second branch of the alternative and culminating in the Absolutism of Hegel, philosophy is manifestly at fault before the much profounder dilemma of either winning an objectivity for physical and metaphysical judgment at the cost of casting out from the moral judgment the very principle of autonomy which Kant had triumphantly shown to be its quickening essence, or