Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/257

232 you will put the matter in the reverse order, and will say, with seeming modesty, that our thought is so constituted as to have a certain likeness to reality, do you really make the matter clearer? The mysterious conformity between our thought and what is no thought of ours remains, and we have to make clear our assurance of that. This assurance itself, if we got it, would seem to be in just the same position as is the conformity of which it is to assure us. Itself again would be outside of the external real world, and in our thought. Yet this assurance is to tell us something about that external world, namely, its conformity to certain of our thoughts. What can we thus know about any external object at all?

The difficulty is an old one. Our solution of it, if we get any, must determine the whole of our religious thought. Let us see at all events where the difficulty arises, and why. Whether or no there is possible any solution, the difficulty plainly lies in a certain conceived relation between us and the world. All the common metaphysical and religious doctrines begin by setting a thinker over against an external world, which is declared independent of his thought, and which his thought is then required to grasp and know. This supposed relation of subject and object gives metaphysics its seemingly insoluble problems. This thinker, whose thought is one fact, while that world out there is another fact, how can he learn by what takes place in his thought, that is, in the one of these two supposed entities, what goes on in the other of these entities, namely, in the world? Once for all, this marvelous relation of preëstablished har-