Page:Works of Thomas Hill Green, Volume 1.djvu/409

274 persuade. The current theories about soul and mind have got too far apart from, if not ahead of, the question which Hume (in effect) raised and Kant took up, to be brought back to it by any inquiry into the antecedents which rendered it inevitable, or by any exposition of the logical obligations which it imposed on the next generation, but which English psychology has hitherto failed to recognise. Only by a direct examination of that psychology itself, as represented by our ablest writers, can we expect to produce the conviction that this primary question of metaphysics still lies at its threshold, and is finding nothing but a tautological or preposterous answer.

2. What is that question? It cannot really be better stated than in the formula of the schools, ‘How is knowledge possible?’ Let the reader withhold for a few moments the derision which this statement may possibly provoke. It is not to be confused with a question upon which metaphysicians are sometimes supposed to waste their time ‘Is knowledge possible?’ We are not inviting any one to inquire whether he can do that which he constantly is doing, and must do in the very act of ascertaining whether he can do it. Metaphysic is no such superfluous labour. It is no more superfluous, indeed, than is any theory of a process which without the theory we already perform. It is simply the consideration of what is implied in the fact of our knowing or coming to know a world, or, conversely, in the fact of there being a world for us to know. Why such a consideration should occupy the mind of man at all, is a question which comes strangely from a generation which has been taught by Positive Philosophy that the only reason why for anything is a sufficiently general and uniform that. At any rate, it is a question which may for the present be postponed. That the mind of man is inevitably so occupied, even unto weariness and vexation, whenever it has won sufficient shelter from the pressure of animal want, is what popularised materialism, no less than histories of philosophy, may be taken to show. How, indeed, should it be otherwise? How should that busy and boundless intellect, which is evermore accounting for things in detail on supposition of their relation to each other, avoid giving an account to itself of the system which renders it possible for them thus to be accounted for; in other words, of the process in virtue of