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essence of the being as a completely determinate individual. thought we can abstract quality from substance; and so, accordantly with formal logic, it is common to speak of the relation of substance and quality. But in concrete or realistic thought substance and quality are inseparable. Substance is nothing without quality, and quality is nothing without substance. Hence the qualities and powers of a being are not really in relation to the being. In speaking of the differences and relations of beings we assume the distinctness of beings as individuals and speak of their differences from and relations to one another. Difference and relation have no reality except as the difference and relation of being.

A numerical total must be distinguished from a complex whole of· interacting beings, as a steam-engine, a solar system, a family, a nation. These are unities by the relation of interacting powers; not mere numerical totals in which the units have no content and in the totality simply count so many. Of a numerical total the maxim is always true that the whole is equal to the sum of all the parts; but this is not true of complex wholes which consist of beings related in unity by interaction of power. A steam-engine, a watch, a family, is far other than the numerical sum of all the parts. We see here the fallacy of those philosophers who accept the maxim as declaring the fundamental constitution of the universe and think they prove the Absolute Being unknowable because they cannot construct it under this maxim; or who propound the numerical triad, unity, plurality, totality, as the basis of all the laws and the limitation of all the matter of thought: or who deny the knowledge of the Absolute because it cannot be found by counting or by the arithmetical rule of addition. These are examples of the evils brought on philosophy and theology by substituting empty abstractions for beings as the objects thought,

By tracing out the differences and relations presented in intuition and inferring others not perceived the mind distinguishes beings as personal and impersonal and comprehends them all in these two classes. It knows all impersonal beings in the unity of a Cosmos or system of Nature, all personal beings in the unity of a Moral System and all finite beings in the unity of a universe in its relation to God.

31. Inferences.

I. Knowledge, at its beginning in perceptive intuition, is ontological; that is, it is knowledge of being.

Ontological knowledge arises at the beginning of knowledge, in perceptive intuition, not in its advanced stages in the knowledge of Absolute Being. This is the critical point in defending the reality of knowledge against agnosticism. It is sometimes thought that the ontological ques

tion meets us only in the question whether the knowledge of absolute being is possible. It is really the question whether the knowledge of any being is possible. And this resolves itself into the question whether knowledge begins as the knowledge of being. If it does not begin thus, then the knowledge of being cannot come in afterwards. We have already demonstrated that if knowledge begins as the knowledge only of sensations and impressions it can never issue in the knowledge of being.

But it has been shown that knowledge is ontological at its beginning; then it goes on continually as the knowledge of being and must issue in the knowledge that Absolute Being exists; it continues to be the knowledge of being in its regress through conditions and causes up to God. Comte in his Positive Philosophy affirms that, if it is once admitted that we have knowledge of cause or force as distinct from the phenomena of motion, we must eventually admit that there is a God.

II. In man's perceptive intuition of himself and his environment his knowledge begins as knowledge of personal and impersonal beings. The two classes of persons and things are discriminated and comprehended in thought. But the beings distinguished and their distinctive attributes are perceived in the very beginning of knowledge, and equally in all subsequent perceptions. They are presented, as has been shown, in one and the same intuition.

Mr. Mansel objects that consciousness is an attribute of the Ego, and in the consciousness of self the knowledge of being arises; therefore a body cannot be known as a being because, in denying that it is conscious, "I deny the only form in which unity and substance are known to me." The objection would be valid if my knowledge that the out ward object is a being were an inference from my knowledge of myself; but it is the immediate perception of power acting on me, and the rational intuition that all power is exerted by a being. The objection would be valid if the outward object were only known negatively as a not-me, as J. G. Fichte teaches; but it is known positively in my knowledge of my own body and the power impinging on it. Moreover, if every peculiarity of myself is an essential attribute of being, then necessarily I am the only being in the universe. We may know beings in different modes of existence or endowed with different attributes, just as we know dogs of different characteristics.

Phenomenalism has been excluded by the fact that knowledge is ontological in its beginning in perceptive intuition. Now Materialism is excluded by the fact that knowledge in its beginning in perceptive intuition is the knowledge of self, endowed with the attributes of a per

* Prolegomena Logica, p. 125.

sonal being; and Idealism is excluded by the fact that in the same act of perceptive intuition man knows outward bodies occupying space and moving in it, and endowed with the attributes of impersonal being. And the knowledge of each is positive knowledge in one and the same mental act, so that if the knowledge of either is unreal the knowledge of the other is unreal also.

Kant recognizes the "I think," the synthetic unity of all consciousness, as going along with all knowledge, but only as a phenomenal unity of apperceptions separated by an impassable gulf from the real being. Therefore his Ego, Cosmos and God remain mere ideas, necessary indeed, but void of content. To escape from this phenomenalism, J. G. Fichte starts with the knowledge of self as real being. He teaches that things are really and in themselves what they are necessarily thought to be by rational beings, and that therefore, to every rational Ego of which a finite mind can conceive, that is the truth of reality which is necessarily true to thought. But he teaches that the matter of knowledge is itself given by the same synthetic activity of the intellect which, according to Kant, gives the forms of sense and the categories of the understanding; that the outward object is known only as a negation or not-me, not as a power positively acting on the sensorium and revealing a being that causes it. Thus, as Kant himself suggested, Fichte's attempt to attain a knowledge of the world from self-consciousness without empirically given matter, gave only a shadowy and ghostly impression instead of real being. And in all his later modifications of his philosophy he cannot transcend nor escape from his primitive idealism. His God is the moral order of the universe, his universal or absolute Ego relapses into an idea coming to consciousness of itself in individual form in man.

Hegel seems often close to the most fundamental comprehension of the true reality. For instance, with him the antithesis between phenomenon and essence, between what appears and what is, is only an antithesis of two human modes of conception which are afterwards identified in a synthesis. This synthesis is the reality; the phenomenon is pervaded with the essence and is thus its entire and adequate manifestation. Again, according to Hegel, there is one spiritual being to whom man is related, not merely as a part of the world, but as participating somehow in the self-consciousness of that being-a mode of presentation which involves Pantheism, though suggestive of the truth that man is so constituted and so related to God that the normal development of his own consciousness insures his consciousness of the presence of God. Again he presents the great truth that the Absolute Reason reveals or expresses itself in the natural worlds and in the rational and moral systems of finite persons. But here again his method of presentation

is pantheistic. The Absolute underlies the finite universe of matter and mind, not dynamically and rationally, but as their Substance, itself coming to consciousness in man. It exerts, or thrusts itself forth ad extra in nature; it "externalizes" itself, "becomes other than itself." By means of a progressive development of nature from the lowest to the highest stages the Absolute Reason returns from this "otherness" or "self-estrangement" into itself in rational spirit. Nature is striving" to recover its lost union with the idea;" this union is recovered in spirit, which is the goal and end of nature. A fourth instance of near approach to the true statement, while yet missing it, is found in his famous identification of things with thought. This approximates to the true synthesis of the two, which is that the universe is the progressive expression of the archetypal thoughts of God; that the necessary principles which are forms and laws to thought are eternal in the Absolute Reason and thus are forms and laws of things; that the absurd cannot be real; and whatever exists is amenable to reason and capable of rational explanation. Hegel's own statement of the identity seems sometimes to convey this meaning, when he says that the rational is real and that the real is rational. Here again by his a priori method developing his own thought he seems to identify things with the subjective process of thinking, and so to establish idealism. We find another instance when he says that God, aside from what we know of him through the finite universe of nature and spirit, is pure Being, without determinate attributes, entirely void of content, and therefore identical with Nothing. This is the truth that the idea of the Absolute, aside from what we know of it as the ground of the universe and accounting for it, is void of content, and every attempt at an a priori development of what it is, is nugatory. The purely a priori development of the Absolute is not legitimate to the human mind. This bold attempt Hegel makes. Clearly seeing that the purely a priori absolute is entirely indeterminate and equal to nothing, he fails to recognize this zero as a symbol of the cessation of thought; he founds his philosophy on this zero and attempts to develop from it both the universe and the content of the Absolute itself. He immediately asserts that the nothing is a Becoming, and so, saltu mortali, violently springs back to the idea of determinate Being. He conceives of the Absolute as externalizing itself in nature; his philosophy passes out with it into nature and returns with it through nature to spirit and to the Absolute now known as Absolute Reason. But from his starting point this passage to the knowledge of God is impossible. He effects it only by taking up truths belonging to a different system. Hence, after all, the ideality of the finite is inseparable from his system and every true philosophy must be an Idealism. The Absolute itself, even in the highest fullness of mean

ing which he attains for it, is merely an Idea. Its development must be primarily, as he himself avows, a mere logic or science of thought; and his curious identification of the processes of the world's development with processes of logic is a legitimate and necessary result of his system. Had he rightly understood his maxim, "Being=0," as a symbol of the cessation of thought, warning him off from a wrong and abortive method; had he begun with the knowledge of beings, personal and impersonal, as they exist and are known to us in the universe; had he passed beyond the entanglements of formal logic and used the scientific methods of concrete thought, he would have established an impregnable philosophy of real being. Then by the rational intuitions which are regulative of all thought he would have reached the knowledge that Absolute Being exists not as a zero but as a Being, the ultimate and fundamental Reality; not as a Being of which we know that it is, but know not what it is, but a being endowed with all the attributes necessary as the Ground of the universe; thus would he have found the ultimate Ground and Unity of the All in Absolute Reason, the personal God. Then he would have found the synthesis of being and thought:-thought eternal and archetypal in God, the eternal Spirit—the constitution of the universe in the truths, the laws, the ideals, the worthy ends which are eternal in the Absolute Reason, and of which the universe, with its personal and its impersonal beings, is the always incomplete, but the always progressive expression.

The failure of these great systems demonstrates that we must know being in ourselves and our environment, before we can know being or even have any real idea of it in other finite persons or in God.

III. In perceptive intuition knowledge begins as knowledge of determinate being. It is the knowledge of myself or of outward beings in particular modes of existence. The concrete determinate being is the unit of thought. It is determinate as an individual being, never lost by being blended into another being. It is also determinate by its peculiar modes of existence.

1. This excludes the error that being is in the genus, and phenomenon alone in the individual; that the human race, for example, is the reality, and the individual but an aspect or appearance of the universal man; that we must begin with the genus or the universal, and from that descend to the individual. This error is contradicted by human consciousness in every conscious act. Here it is objected that if we proceed from the existence of finite beings to the existence of God, we make God's existence dependent on the finite. "A God proved by us," says a brilliant writer, "would be a God made by us." This is the fallacy, very common in agnostic and pantheistic philosophy, of identifying the order of our own mental process with the real order of the

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