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v v : .0 ,tf % 4 S \ .*>* *+ * ^ '-' " f > -^ otf -\ v ,0 o • v^. 5^, ^ /- '• ' fi * * '"*, PHILOSOPHY OF KNOWLEDGE PROFESSOR LADD'S WORKS. PHILOSOPHY OF KNOWLEDGE. An Inquiry into the Nature, Limits, and Validity of Human Cognitive Fac- ulty. 8vo. $4.00. PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. An Essay in the Metaphysics of Psychology. 8vo. $3.00. INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY. An Inquiry after a Rational System of Scientific Principles in their Relation to Ultimate Reality. 8vo. $3 00. PRIMER OF PSYCHOLOGY. i 2 mo. $1.00 net. PSYCHOLOGY; DESCRIPTIVE AND EXPLANA- TORY. A Treatise of the Phenomena, Laws, and Develop- ment of Human Mental Life. 8vo. $4.50. OUTLINES OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. A Text-book on Mental Science for Academies and Colleges. Illustrated. 8vo. $2.00. ELEMENTS OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. A Treatise of the Activities and Nature cf the Mind, from the Physical and Experimental Point of View. With numer- ous illustrations. 8vo. $4.50. THE DOCTRINE OF SACRED SCRIPTURE. A Critical, Historical, and Dogmatic Inquiry into the Origin and Nature of the Old and New Testaments. 2 vols. 8vo. $7.00. WHAT IS THE BIBLE? An Inquiry into the Origin and Nature of the Old and New Testaments in the Light of Modern Biblical Studv. r2mo. $2.00. THE PRINCIPLES OF CHURCH POLITY. Crown 8vo. $2.50. Philosophy of Knowledge AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE, LIMITS, AND VALIDITY OF HUMAN COGNITIVE FACULTY BY GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN YALE UNIVERSITY AX \ V f\\3 "■. V NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1897 *f> Copyright, 1897, by Charles Scribner's Sons. J- $f?tft Hntasitg ^rcss: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. TO THOSE WHO BY SERIOUS AND PROLONGED INQUIRY, HOWEVER SCEPTICAL, ASPIRE TO APPROACH THE TRUTH, THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED ,0 & : " Shall we not look into the laws Of life and death, and things that seem, And things that be, and analyze Our double nature ? " PREFACE 'TH^HIS book is an Essay in the interests of some of the -*- most profound and difficult of the problems which can engage the reflective thinking of man. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the nature, limits, and guaranty of knowledge afford subjects of inquiry which exceed all others in the demand they make for deep and earnest reflection. If one were at liberty to construct a Theory of Reality which should be simply a logically consistent and symmetrical affair, satisfactory to the ideals of the architect but without regard to foundations of fact or questions of the right to occupy the ground in this way, the task would seem compara- tively light. But in this day, and in the face of history, such a liberty cannot be intelligently claimed ; much less can it be successfully exercised. Facts must be considered, and ques- tions of right cannot be thrust aside or overlooked. For the former part of one's philosophical basis, the particular sciences are now responsible ; for the latter part — the search after guide and guaranty — a particular form of philosophical discipline, sometimes called epistemology, is invoked. It is this form of philosophy which this book undertakes. Its author asks that the intrinsic character of its problems, and all the perplexities it entails, should be constantly remem- bered by the reader. I should probably have found my self-imposed task some- what less troublesome if I had more predecessors among vin PREFACE modern writers on philosophy in English. But, so far as I am aware, there are none from whom any help is to be de- rived. 1 In Germany a considerable number of books, with the title UrJcenntnisslehre, or some similar title, have recently ap- peared ; and German works on Logic and systematic Philos- ophy have generally the merit of dealing in a more thorough way with the epistemological problem, wherever they touch its sensitive points, than is customary in England or this country. Now and then a French writer, too, has afforded a hint, or suggestion, of which I have availed myself. So far as these helps have been consciously received, they have been acknowledged in the few references of the text. But I think it fair to ask that this book should be regarded as, much more exclusively than often occurs, the outcome of its author's own reflections over the difficult questions it essays to answer. It asks and should receive the treatment due to a pioneer work. At the same time it is also true that no other questions, practical or philosophical, are being more anxiously considered or are more influential over life and conduct than those which merge themselves in the epistemological problem. While this problem is reflected upon, largely in an unguided and illogical way, by multitudes of minds, the authorities, who ought also to be guides in reflective thinking, have been of late accustomed to reiterate the cry of " Back to Kant ! " As a student for years of the critical philosophy, I have not been unmindful of the demand to place myself in the line of its development of the epistemological inquiry. I have had the method and the conclusions of the great master in criticism before me, from the beginning to the end of my work. Yet 1 An exception cannot be made in the case of Mr. Hobhouse's elaborate work, " The Theory of Knowledge," since it is confessedly a treatise in Logic rather than Epistemology, as I conceive of epistemological problems and method. PREFACE ix the positions to which my independent investigations have forced me are chiefly critical of, and antagonistic to, the posi- tions of the Critique of Pure Reason. If I may claim any peculiar merit for the method followed in discussing the problem of knowledge, it is perhaps chiefly this : I have striven constantly to make epistemology vital, — a thing of moment, because indissolubly and most intimately connected with the ethical and religious life of the age. I have no wish to conceal, therefore, the quite unusual interest which I take in the success of this book ; I sincerely hope that it may be a guide and help to not a few of those minds to whom I have dedicated it. GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD. Yale University, Mav, 1897. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I The Problem PAGE The Anthropological View — Standpoint of Psychology — Appeal to Rea- son — Kant's Position in History — Relation to Metaphysics — Freedom from Assumption— The Primary Datum — The Dilemma stated — Sources of an Answer— The Implicates necessary — The Method to be pursued — Practical Benefits expected 1 CHAPTER II History of Opinion Purpose of the Sketch — The View of Plato — The Doctrine of Aristotle — Post-Aristotelian Schools — Origen's Doctrine of Faith and Knowledge — Augustine's Merits in Epistemology — The Middle Ages 30 CHAPTER HI History of Opinion {continued) The Position of Descartes — Pioneer Work of Locke — Views of Berkeley — Scepticism of Hume — Position of Leibnitz — Kant's Critical "Work ; His Problem and Conclusions — Kant's Ethical Interests — Hegel and Schopenhauer 57 CHAPTER IV The Psychological View Psychology and Epistemology — Origin of Knowledge — Psychic Factors of Cognition — Corollaries following — Possibilities of the Case — Cognition as Consciousness — as Awareness of an Object — Misstatements criticised — Problem restated .„,....•. 94 Xll CONTENTS CHAPTER V Thinking and Knowing Eelations of Thought to Cognition — Views of Others — Thinking as Activ- ity — and Positing of Relations — Nature of the Cognitive Judgment — Implicates of all Judgment — Conceptual Knowledge and Reasoning . . .30 CHAPTER VI Knowledge as Feeling and Willing The Psychology of Feeling — Emotional Factors in Cognition — Influence on intellectual Development — Impulsive Emotions — Ethical and JEs- thetical Feeling — Feelings regulative of Logical Processes — So-called " integrating " Emotions — Place of Will in Cognition 160 CHAPTER VII Knowledge of Things and of Self Distinction of Subject and Object — Position of Formal Logic — Office of Self-Consciousness — Implicates of Reality — Identity of Self as implied — Distinction of Things and Self — Diremptive Work of Intellect — The Function of Analogy — Epistemology of Perception — and of Science . .193 CHAPTER VIII Degrees, Limits, and Kinds of Knowledge Meaning of Terms — Standards of Measurement of Cognition — Relation of Knowledge to Life — Nature of Opinion — Possibility of Knowledge in Dreams — Distinctions Relative — Essentials of Cognition — Limits not Presuppositions — Kinds of Limits — Limits of Perception — and of Science — Kinds of Knowledge — Case of Mathematics — Immediate and Mediate Knowledge . 228 CHAPTER IX Identity and Difference Experience and Cognition — Fundamental Principles of all Knowledge — Views of Logic — Meaning of Identity — The Principle as applied to Reality 268 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER X Sufficient Reason" PAGE Nature of Reasoning —Development of Reasoning — Application to Reality — Kant's inadequate View — Causation and External Nature Origin of the Principle — Use of Cognitive Judgments — Difficulties of Syllogism — Concerned in Self-Knowledge — Assumptions involved — Goal of En- deavor — The Grounds of Natural Science — Einal Purpose implied . .283 CHAPTER XI Experience and the Transcendent Meaning of Experience — The misleading Figures of Speech — Experience necessarily Transcendent — Conditions of Experience — and its Laws . 322 CHAPTER XII The Implicates of Knowledge The Question stated — Modes of Implication possible — Necessity of Com- pleteness of View — Being of Self implied — and of Not-Self — Influence of ethical and sesthetical Considerations — System of Ontology involved — The principal Categories guaranteed 337 CHAPTER XIII Scepticism, Agnosticism, and Criticism Attitudes of Mind toward Truth — Unity of Experience — Sources and Value of Scepticism — Limits of Scepticism — Doubts in Perception and in Science — Necessity for Agnosticism — Limits of Agnosticism — Knowledge positive 367 CHAPTER XIV Alleged " Antinomies " J * Effect of the Antinomy — Meaning of the Term — Denial of the Doctrine Antinomies — Claims of Kant examined — Mr. Bradley's Views critic Ar nest — Application of the Categories to Reality lOIlistic xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER XV Truth and Error PAGE Nature of the Distinction — Error as non-Truth — Error and Wrong-doing — Truth dependent on Judgment — and on the Meaning of Judgment — Nature of Mathematical Truth — The Truth of Perception — Truth and Error in Science — Foundations of Scientific Knowledge — Sources of Error — True Cognition of Self — Criterion of Truth — Belief and Reality 424 CHAPTER XVI The Teleology of Knowledge Cognition and Action — The Teleology of Perception — and of Conception — Final Purpose among the Sciences — Knowledge as End in Itself — ' Knowledge as Part of Life — Final Purpose in Reality 472 CHAPTER XVII Ethical and ^Esthetical " Momenta " of Knowledge Character and Cognition — Influence of Feeling on Judgment — Attribu- tion of Ideals to Nature — Benevolence of Law — Limits of the Ethical " Momenta " — Characteristics of JEsthetical Consciousness — Beauty in Reality — The Epistemological Postulate . . 500 CHAPTER XVIII Knowledge and Reality Cognition as Species of " Commerce " — Failures of the Identity-hypothe- sis — Distinction in Reality necessary to Knowledge — Truth in all Kinds of Cognition — Variety of the real World — Causation as Connection in Reality 530 CHAPTER XIX Idealism and Realism Experie. * exclusive Views — Tenable Positions of Idealism — Negation of Views? ernes — The Truth of Realism — Criticism of its Denials — The Reality ;ure of Reality 559 CONTENTS xv CHAPTER XX Dualism and Monism PAGE Conceptions of Number applied to Reality — Unity and Duality of Body and Mind — Unity of the Self — Defects of extreme Dualism — The Truth and the Limitations of Monism 574 CHAPTER XXI Knowlege and the Absolute Final Position of Agnosticism — Explication of Terms — Danger from ab- stract Conceptions — Unchanging Laws of Cognition — Presence of the Absolute in Consciousness — The comprehensive View of Epistemology . 591 INDEX , 611 Of o deter- ild have .^iientioned ss fade n ce, if memory ? sciously earnest " eudaemonistic Co h of Co Reality Experie. * exclusive Views -ernes — 'I Reality ;ure of PHILOSOPHY OF KNOWLEDGE CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM THE struggles of the mind of man to come to a satis- factory understanding with itself are among the most interesting exhibitions of his greatness. This is true from whichever of several points of view we regard the phenomena. For suppose that — disregarding for the moment the more distinctively metaphysical considerations — we appro" oh the subject in the light of the biological and anthrorJto ghoul sciences. The surpassingly strange spectacle of anh" are which is not content with the occupations prompts which restless and almost unceasing practical curiosity, nor £ hypo- simply to learn how it may possess and use the instrier the of its own temporary well-being, is certainly most atgnition, to a reflective mind. During certain periods ake, we intro- existence the human animal exhibits a sols problem cannot the truth of its own being; it becomes cropological point of validity of its knowledge of the being : things. But why should not man be sat research to deter- mere living, a fairly uninterrupted succekince would have states of feeling, and to let the painful expert-mentioned trouble the flow of the stream of consciousness fade n ce, if in the dreamlike illusoriness of an animal's memory ? Like the other higher animals, man is consciously earnest and absorbed in the pursuit of various forms of eudaemonistic 1 2 THE PROBLEM good. But unlike all the other animals, so far as we are able to get behind the barriers interposed between us and their psychical states, man comes to regard this very concep- tion of " truth " as something in itself good. Then he turns upon his own reason with a complaint which is frequently bitter, or with a self-accusation of impotence which may become savage, in the demand that it should furnish him with a more complete authentication for the good which bears this peculiar form. Moreover, the truth, as he con- ceives of it, is in his thought correlated with what he calls " reality. " Indeed, what he means by that kind of truth, which he needs to possess in order fully to satisfy the demands of reason, is not definable without an implicate of reality. But why, again, as merely the highest form of animal life, should man alone among all the species not be satisfied with appearances, if only they be of a pleasant char- acter? Why should he insist on dissecting his puppets to dete- ne whether they have the anatomy of actual living or not ; why be so eager to disturb the interest in the z appearance by exposing too cruelly the actual mech- )f the strings ? We can discover no wholly adequate — no very convincing partial answer — which modern has afforded to inquiries such as these. And yet ' ?. of this kind are undoubted facts in the complex %., 'same phenomena to be approached from h and historical points of view. Here it of u mied that the unsatisfied need for valid- Reality in conscious attitudes, the various presen- ce, the trains of associated ideas, and the incepts, as well as the varied and ceaseless efforts jd men make to satisfy this need, have always been most important factors to aid in the evolution of the race. All merely anthropological theories of evolution, however, appear unable to account for the existence of this need ; and we THE PROBLEM 3 believe that they not only are now, but will always remain, quite outside of such a task. The right claimed by the majority of the students of modern science, distinctly to aim at keeping clear of all metaphysics and so-called " theories of knowledge," may be conceded. And indeed, if there could be knowledge that is not something much more than this majority will admit it to be, science itself would consist of a succession of presentations of sense, associated ideas, and thoughts, about the truth of which no one would ever even raise a question. From the merely logical and formal point of view, the peculiar kind of syllogism which belongs to science, as such, may fitly be called the hypothetical syl- logism. Its form is as follows : If A is B, then is D ; but whether or not A really is, and whether, admitting that both it and B really are, they are actually related as belong- ing to the same species, or as reciprocal influences in deter- mining the same result, — with this, science need not concern itself. Only now, such science could scarcely be called knowledge ; much less, truth. For, as we undertake to show in detail later on, the words " knowledge " and " truth " are significant of mental processes and mental positions which can neither be attained nor stated by the use of the hypo- thetical syllogism merely. But the moment we consider the evolution of science itself as a growth in actual cognition, whether on the part of the individual or of the race, we intro- duce the epistemological problem ; and this problem cannot even be considered from the merely anthropological point of view. It would furnish a most curious bit of research to deter- mine what the development of physical science would have been, if only its students had really held the above-mentioned conception of it. Would it now continue to advance, if investigators and the people generally attached to its con- clusions only the significance and validity which belong to dreams ? However we might incline to answer this question, 4 THE PROBLEM one thing is sure. " Science," thus conceived of, would suffer a mighty and pathetic fall from its place of dignity in the present estimate of mankind. Theories of evolution as applied to the human race, stand in respect to this instinc- tive metaphysical faith, less in the relation of satisfactory explanatory causes than of partial effects. They are them- selves mental phenomena, for the understanding of which we must resort to a study of the constitution of reason itself. The conclusion which has just been drawn from a brief survey of the merely biological and anthropological aspects of our problem may be summarized as follows. What man- kind calls its knowledge, or science, of Self and of Things, is assumed to be something more than mere self-referring, psychical occurrences,— mere presentations of sense, asso- ciated ideas, and subjectively connected thoughts. It is assumed to be the truth, either already attained or capable of being reached and verified. And by " truth " men generally understand a form of mental representation which has its correlate in reality, in the actual being and matter-of-fact performances of things. Yet doubt is constantly arising as to the meaning and as to the validity of this universal assumption. The doubt is productive of restless endeavor, as well as of sadness, increased doubt, and even of indifference and disgust, when the assumption itself is made the subject of inquiry. It is somehow thus that the problem of knowl- edge has progressively defined and emphasized itself as an influential factor in the development of the reflective thinking of man. The problem is by no means new, as the history of this thinking conclusively shows. It is to the increasingly keen and searching analysis of mental processes, to the science of psychology, and to the critical examination of reason — first undertaken in a thor- ough and methodical way by Kant — that we must resort for the more definite, technically exact statement of our problem. Now psychology, as its very nature and lcgiti- THE PROBLEM 5 mate mission compel it, considers all cognitions, whether of the ordinary or of the so-called scientific variety, as merely mental (or subjective) phenomena. For it, all beings are resolvable into states of consciousness. Its definition is, " The science of states of consciousness, as such." And as its means for analyzing the content of consciousness become improved and are more faithfully and skilfully applied, and as the laws of the combination and succession of the dif- ferent states of consciousness are brought to light, the entire domain of knowledge is made the subject of its investigations. All cognitions, all sciences, undoubtedly are states of con- sciousness ; from the psychological point of view, they are simply this. The one psychological assumption, from which no escape is possible, the assumption which is presupposi- tionless and absolutely undeniable, is this : My cognition is a process in my consciousness. But this assumption is as true for you, and for him (for "the other," whoever he may be), as it is for me. It is as true, when the object of cognition is a thing, a stone or a star or a microbe, as when the ob- ject of cognition is definitively recognized as my own state, whether in the form of a toothache or a thought about God. The ultimate psychic fact is simply : " I know." Further, all the researches of modern psychology tend to show that in those mysterious beginnings of psychic life, which are forever hidden from direct observation and from ■recognitive memory, ideation and object existed as in a common root of consciousness. One may speak of these beginnings as the "original unity of our perceptive life," as the original "unity of apperception," or as one please. Nothing more impresses students of Kant than his elaborate architectonic in exhibition of the complicated nature of that mental edifice, ascribed in part to imagination and in part to intellect, which the unity of apperception constructs. But those who dissent from the Kantian method and its conclu- sions, and will hear nothing of "psychic synthesis," even 6 THE PROBLEM as a conscious and self-active energy, are compelled either to resort to the hypothesis of sensations that somehow get together or put themselves together ; or else they have alto- gether to abandon the problem of psychic unity of any kind. What all are aware of, however, whether psychologists or not, and independently of learned or thoughtless talk about "synthesis" and "apperception," is a most startling experi- ence of an opposite kind. It has already been said that the one indisputable fact upon which epistemological doctrine must build is the "I know" of every man's consciousness. This fact, when repeated and generalized, becomes the foun- dation of the most presuppositionless of all psychological truths, — " all cognition is a process in consciousness. " But on the very first experience of this fact, and in connection with all experiences of this truth, knowledge appears no longer as a one-sided affair. It appears rather as an affair of Subject and Object ; and, in the greater number of its most impressive instances, it becomes an affair implying a fundamental and unalterable distinction between Self and Things. The general fact of cognition requires restatement, then, in the following way. It is still, undoubtedly, a state of consciousness ; or rather, it is a conscious process. It is also a state of my consciousness, a conscious process which — including, as it must, its object-thing — I attribute to myself as subject, and call my own. But this object, which is my object-consciousness, my state objectively described, is cog- nized as not-me, as " out of " me. Objectivity, in the sense of imws-subjectivity, the really existent out of my conscious state, is, then, as will be shown in detail elsewhere, the implicate of every truly cognitive act of mine. The inquiries, how this can be, and what is implied as to a reality that is trans-subjective, constitute the problem of the philosophy of knowledge. The descriptive science of psy- chology, in its study of the plain man's consciousness, shows THE PROBLEM 7 beyond all doubt that knowledge, even as admitted fact and state of consciousness, cannot be faithfully described, on the basis of a full and satisfactory analysis, without recog- nition of this implicate of what is not a present fact and state of consciousness. Thus much, at the very least, must be insisted upon. For the time being let those think, who so think can, that knowledge is explicable without recog- nition of the reality both of the object and of the subject, as a self-active and self-conscious synthesis, a unifying life-force. It appears, then, that the subjective and the formal lies, in the process of cognition, actually inseparable as an expe- rience from the trans-subjective and the real. The two ex- ist, as it were, side by side and in a living unity; and yet the two are not incapable of being distinguished both by immediate introspection and by reflective thinking. For cognition is a modification of consciousness that is depen- dent, in part, for its existence and for its particular form, upon reality outside of consciousness (upon not-my-con- sciousness). On the one hand, it cannot be, or even be conceived of, other than as a modification of consciousness. It must be explained as dependent, both for its existence and for its form, upon the fact and the laws of the cognizing subject. On the other hand, its existence implies, and its form requires for explanation, some other being than that which is present in the modified consciousness. As to the further analysis and explanation, the import, and the validating of the import, of all this, the philosophical theory of knowledge inquires. The problem of knowledge is not, however, grasped in its entirety and handled in a manner to promise a solution which is either theoretically satisfying or practically help- ful, until it is seen that both problem and solution lie embedded, so to speak, in the very heart of reason itself. It was the distinctive merit of Kant, as has already been 8 THE PROBLEM implied, to make this truth clear as it had never been made clear before. Since his day, the theory of knowledge (Epistemology or Noetics, sometimes so called) has been one of the most active and fruitful branches of philosophical discipline. Indeed, some have gone so far as to make the formation of a theory of knowledge coincident with the entire function of philosophy. That which calls itself knowledge of the universe "we call self-knowledge," says Kuno Fischer. 1 We cannot agree to this restriction in the definition of the sphere of philosophy. And how widely the method we shall follow, and the results at which we shall arrive, differ from the method and conclusions of the immortal thinker of Konigsberg, should appear at the end rather than at the beginning of our task. But when Kant asserted, "Human reason has this peculiar fate, that, with reference to one species of its cognition, it is always burdened with questions which it cannot cast aside; for they are given to it by the very nature of reason itself, but they cannot be answered because they transcend the powers of reason," 2 he indicated beyond question for all time the sources of the epistemological problem. The history of reflective thinking, and indeed of the literature which either embodies, or is tinged by, the results of reflective thinking, has during the last century shown that Kant did not fully realize the success which he claimed for his critical philosophy. By following "the secure pro- cess of science," in his "elaboration of the cognitions which belong to the concern of reason," he expected, on the one hand, forever "to deprive speculative reason of its preten- sions to transcendent insights," and, on the other hand, "to furnish the needed preliminary preparation in furtherance of 1 " Philosophic ist die Wissenschaft und Kritik der Erkenntniss," says Riehl, — Der Philosophische Kriticismus, iii. p. 15. 2 Opening sentence of the Preface to the first edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. THE PROBLEM y a fundamental metaphysics in scientific form. " 1 But, strange to say, Kant's destructive effort was followed in history by the erection of systems of metaphysics which made, above all others since man began to think, the most enormous "pretensions to transcendent insights;" while his positive intent has left behind few traces of accepted metaphysical science. It is the sceptical and agnostic conclusions as to the cognitions of reason which so-called neo-Kantians accept. The determination and defence of the subjective origin and the objective reference of the "categories," and the rationalized faith of Kant in the postulates of the practical reason are accepted, when accepted at all, by quite other schools of thinkers than those commonly called by his name. It is not the chief interest at present, however, to define epistemological truth with reference to the author of the modern critical doctrine of knowledge. It is rather the purpose to point out that the origin, nature, and importance of that problem which knowledge, with its essential objec- tive implicates, offers to the knowing subject, have in some sort been settled once for all by the critical work of Kant. The human mind, by virtue of its necessary and constitu- tional way of functioning in all its cognitive acts, contains at once the proposal and the answer, if answer there be, to the problem. Neither the biological and anthropological, nor even the distinctively psychological study of the nature and growth of man's mind will avail fully to explicate or to answer the epistemological inquiry. The rather is this, fundamentally considered, a philosophical problem. And it is inextricably intermingled with the prob]em of the Nature of Reality, as this conception of reality is ap- plied both to the mind of man and to the object of his knowledge. It will appear as an opinion for which we shall constantly 1 Preface to the second edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 10 THE PROBLEM contend that the problem of knowledge cannot be properly stated, much less satisfactorily discussed, without unceas- ing reference to the conclusions of a scientific psychology. The reference must even be a deference. The point of start- ing must be psychological. Epistemological discussion must begin by understanding analytically the actual, con- crete content of consciousness. But the consciousness which enfolds the problem, and which must be analyzed, and so far as possible understood in order to the best mastery of the problem, is a developed human consciousness. It is the consciousness of a being who has already become appercep- tive and self-conscious. It is not, therefore, an animal consciousness; nor is it an inchoate and beginning human consciousness. The study of the psychological origin and growth of knowledge is, indeed, a valuable contribution toward apprehending and solving the philosophical problem which gives rise to a theory of knowledge. But inasmuch as this problem is given in processes of cognition whose essential characteristic is that the knowing subject already distinguishes the forms of his cognition from the forms of existence implicate in cognition, and either naively identi- fies the two or raises the sceptical question about their iden- tification, psychological study is not in itself a sufficient indication or instrument for its solution. The more dis- tinctively epistemological problem now emerges; the criti- cal inquiry is raised as to whether, and how far, the forms of cognition coincide with the forms of existence. The fundamental problem of the philosophy of knowledge is, then, an inquiry into the relations between certain states of consciousness and what we conceive of as "the really existent. " 1 But at this point a reflective study of human knowledge reveals the fact that its problem is already inex- tricably interwoven with the ontological problem, — the meta- physical inquiry, in the more restricted meaning of the 1 Compare Hartmann, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnisstheorie, p. v. THE PROBLEM 11 much-abused word "metaphysics." 1 For suppose that the two spheres be distinguished as follows: Epistemology, or the philosophy of knowledge, deals with the concept of the True; and Metaphysics, or the philosophy of being, deals with the concept of the Real. We find ourselves, however, quite unable to form any concept, or even to hold in con- sciousness the most shadowy mental picture, of what men affirm, with genuine conviction, to be true, without impli- cating the for-us-real in this concept, this mental image. On the other hand, no meaning can be given to the word "real " without stating a judgment as to what is considered true. Yet the two words are by no means precisely identi- cal. For the more correct usage speaks of presentations of sense, of images of recognitive memory, and of certified thoughts about things, as true; and they are thus distin- guished from images of fancy or from unverifiable thoughts. But men speak of minds and things as real — meaning thus to imply a sort of existence which belongs neither to the true nor to the false mental representations. We have already (in the Preface) stated that we intend to discuss separately the epistemological and the ontological problems. About the order and the method of these two dis- cussions something will be said later on. The connection of the two — intimate and inextricable as it is — is emphasized at this point in order to show that the impulse to the quest, which it is proposed in subsequent chapters to follow, is indeed set fast in the very heart of human reason. To explicate the problem of knowledge, it is necessary to search to its depths the mind of man. To solve it completely would be to comprehend and expose all the profoundest mysteries of his mind. And not only this : it would be, as Kant held, to prepare the way for a systematic and defen- sible exposition of the inmost nature of Reality, so far 1 Note the phrase of Riehl, — die metaphysischen Erkenntnissprobleme. See Der Philosophische Kriticismus, Vorwort to Part ii. 12 THE PROBLEM as this knowledge comes within the possible grasp of our reason itself. But, doubtless, this will remain for a long time to come one of the most alluring and important, yet difficult tasks of philosophical discipline. And one thinker can scarcely hope to do more than bear a small portion of the burden of so great a task. There will probably not arise another Copernicus in this stellar science of mind. Something more should at this point receive at least a passing notice. It would not be surprising if a critical inquiry into the nature, extent, and validity of knowledge should bring us, at various points along its course, in sight of, if not into closest contact with, certain important con- cepts of ethics and of the philosophy of religion. It will be the declared purpose and fixed rule of the prese'nt investiga- tion to avoid contested ethical and religious questions as much as is consistent with a thorough treatment of the epistemological problem. And where foresight makes con- tact inevitable, we shall still try to accomplish our task without undue influence from ethical and religious preju- dices. But it should be remembered that, in the discussion of all the problems of philosophy, and perhaps in the discus- sion of the epistemological problem in particular (since over it the forces of dogmatism and agnosticism, of extreme idealism and extreme realism, of crude evolutionism and old-fashioned theology, come to a sort of life-and-death struggle), prejudices are not likely to be all on one side. No author can promise more than we are ready to promise, — namely, to do the best that in him lies. And if it should be discovered that knowledge cannot be divorced from faith or separated from the life of action (from conduct, which is the sphere of ethics), why ! whose fault will it be that this is so ? Will not the discovery serve to make the unity of man's total life, and its oneness, in some sort, with the Reality of the Universe, yet more undoubted and more comprehensive ? THE PROBLEM 13 The nature and extent of the epistemological problem, the discussion of which is a philosophy of knowledge, can be better comprehended only by emphasizing certain considera- tions somewhat more in detail. And first of all the follow- ing consideration: this problem is the most primary and fundamental, in the sense that it is of all philosophical problems the most free from the influence of necessary pre- liminary assumptions. To argue it is as near as the human mind can come to presuppositionless reflective thinking. This is, in part, but in part only, what Fichte meant by calling his critical examination of the primary and perma- nent content of consciousness a Wissenschaftslehre. For the same reason this kind of philosophical study is sometimes said to aim at a "science of science." All the particular sciences necessarily and fitly cherish their own particular assumptions. They cannot be successfully pursued, or even seriously approached, without taking for granted many important principles and not a few fundamental entities. Some of these principles and entities are assumptions of the most ordinary human knowledge ; others are presuppositions which have been won for the modern student by the re- searches of the past along different scientific lines. For example, chemistry adopts the work-a-day assumption of an extra-mentally existent matter, which is capable of actual subdivision into parts that are too minute to affect the senses, and that can therefore never have their existence verified by immediate testimony from sensuous observation. It also assumes the entity called an " atom, " with its mar- vellous non-sensuous characteristics and its faithful obe- dience to the law of equivalents. In common with all the physical sciences it assumes the capacity of the human mind to arrive at the truth of things, to bring its forms of mental representation into agreement with the forms of the actually existent. All the particular sciences presuppose, as truths which enable them to be "particular," the extra-mental 14 THE PROBLEM validity of the so-called categories of time, space, relation, causation, etc. Those branches of philosophical discipline which are called metaphysics of ethics, philosophy of art, of nature, and of religion, as well as of rights and of history, have a complicated net-work of presuppositions, which is the very substance of what holds them within their proper bounds. The actuality of the existence of multitudes of men, in the present and through the past, with a real history of develop- ment, and standing in a great variety of actual relations to nature and to one another, is taken for granted in the very attempt to establish a philosophy of conduct; while any- thing approaching a philosophy of nature receives from the hands of the natural sciences a vast body of alleged, and not a few (we venture to suspect) of only conjectured, principles and entities, which become the necessary presuppositions of its constructive effort. But with the philosophy of knowledge the case is not the same. It at once and distinctly puts all the above-mentioned assumptions to one side. They may be true, but they can- not be adopted from the beginning by a critical theory of knowledge. The very aim of this theory is to get behind and underneath all these and other similar assumptions. And if there are assumptions back of which the mind cannot go, — because it is compelled to make them by the very consti- tution of its own most sceptical and critical life, as it were, — then epistemological inquiry will get down to these assumptions also and view them face to face, in calmness and with purified and sharpened vision. For it is not the nature and validity, or the value, of this or that class of cognitions with which the philosophical theory of knowledge aims to deal, — it is the cognitive faculty itself; or, to state the problem in more abstract and objective fashion, it is human cognition itself which is the subject of critical examination in every attempt at an epistemology. This THE PROBLEM 15 inquiry is, therefore, the most nearly presuppositionless of all possible inquiries. It assumes nothing but the one general fact in which all individual cognitions, whether so- called scientific or not, "live and move and have their being," — the one fact, I know. It soon appears, however, as analysis and reflective study of the fact of knowledge moves forward and downward, that this fact is itself no simple affair. By this we mean some- thing more than that " our experience is an extremely com- plicated web of sensations and intellectual elaboration of sensations, and of the results of their elaboration." Locke would have had little doubt to throw upon a statement like this ; and even less doubt would have proceeded out of the mouth of the great sceptic Hume. The successors of Locke in France, the most extreme of sensationalists in the psychol- ogy of to-day, might admit as much. Modern psychological analysis, especially of the experimental type, in its effort to disentangle the " web " of experience, has thus far succeeded in increasing rather than diminishing its apparent com- plexity. Even the most presuppositionless of all inquiries, then, since it must assume the fact of knowledge, has also to assume a history of the complication of sensations, of the intellectual elaboration of sensations, and of the gathering of the results of their elaboration. That is to say, in the ' very reception of the datum, "I know," the assumption of an organization of experience has already, of necessity, been made. Nor is it possible to get back of this process of organization, with its complex results, in order, freed from its influences, to examine the fact of knowledge. So obvious is the truth to which attention has just been called that its statement is often made in half-jocose form. When I most carefully and critically examine this datum, "I know," and when I push my presuppositionless and sceptical inquiry to its extremest limits, what is all this but a going-round in an endless circle? I know; and I 16 THE PROBLEM propose, without favorable or unfavorable prejudice, to dis- tinguish the ultimate nature, to get the full import, and to estimate the real value of this fact. But the conduct of the examination is itself, at best, only a series of similar facts : "I know," and again, "I know," or it may be, "I do not know." But this last, "I do not know," is only another way of saying Iknow, — at least, something, namely, that I do not know. At its best, too, the result of critical exami- nation is itself a cognition, which lies still further from the certitude of envisagement or of the concrete judgments of daily experience. At its worst, the same examination ends in a series of opinions, which are far enough from laying claim to be any kind of knowledge. Put into more serious philosophical form, the dilemma may be stated in something like the following way. A fun- damental critique of the faculty of cognition is now proposed ; but if this critique is really to be fundamental, it must be free from all the assumptions which belong to any of the special systems of cognitions, the sciences so-called. Theory of knowledge aims to be presuppositionless, to have no assump- tions beyond the one primary datum of my knowledge. In studying the data of actual cognitions, however, so as thus to frame a critique of the faculty of cognition which shall be based upon the facts, I am always using this same faculty. Hegel thus accused Kant of allowing to creep in " the mis- conception of already knowing before you know, — the error of refusing to enter the water until you have learned to swim. " And Lotze compares those who spend their strength upon a theory of knowledge to men constantly whetting the knife, and feeling its edge to see if it will cut; or to an orchestra which is forever tuning its instruments and still wondering if they can play in tune. To objectors in general, we shall either propose our answer in due time, or else conclude that a much needed work will be better done if they are silently passed by. THE PROBLEM 17 Two things are enough to say at present. Of these the first is this: if the critical theory of knowledge must be satisfied with a completely sceptical or agnostic outcome, then all human science is but consistent dreaming, at its best. For the very guarantee of truth which consistency gives is itself dependent upon trust in the constitution of reason. But, second, the absurdity of an utterly presuppositionless cri- tique of reason must be acknowledged at the very beginning of every epistemological inquiry. All reflective thinking upon this class of problems must be content to move within the inevitable circle. The human mind cannot contemplate itself from an outside point of view, as it were. It must accept at its own hands the terms upon which it will under- take and complete its task of self-understanding. Here, then, we get the first strong intimation of charac- teristic difficulties besetting the path which must necessarily be followed in the attempt to investigate with critical thor- oughness the philosophical problem of knowledge. Nothing, we assure ourselves with encouraging confidence, must be taken for granted, beyond the ultimate and indisputable datum of all science, — the fact, above or behind or beneath which no one can go. This is the datum and the fact of knowledge itself. But surely this datum must be received as being all that it in fact is; this fact must be held for all that it, as conscious datum, is worth. This is to say that a philo- sophical theory of knowledge must deal with the whole circumference, as it were, and with the most intimate and inclusive significance, of the psychological process of cogni- tion. Criticism must accejrt, as its prohlem^ cognition includ- ing all its necessary implicates. What is it to know, in respect of all that knowledge is, of all that knowledge guar- antees, and of all that it necessarily implicates ? It is in the primary fact of cognition, when critically regarded, that we find the sources of the possible forms of conclusion con- cerning the true philosophical theory of knowledge. The 2 18 THE PROBLEM permanent sources of philosophical scepticism and agnosti- cism exist in the incontestable fact that all knowledge is subjective; that, proximately considered, it is a conscious process in time, a mental state which arises and then passes away. Moreover, one of the first discoveries which criti- cism makes is the truth, also incontestable, that the laws of the knowing faculty, and so the limits of knowledge, are firmly set in the constitution and characteristic development of the cognitive subject. Human cognition, therefore, con- tains in its own nature a standing warning, and even a vin- dication of the necessity for doubt of the most fundamental sort. It issues a perpetual call to those self-searchings which lead into a theoretical reconstruction of our concept of knowledge. Equally certain is it, however, that the sources from which must come the healing of the wounds which reason receives at her own hands are with reason herself. The primary datum of cognition contains within itself the cor- rective of agnosticism, the chastening of raw and unbridled scepticism ; or else no such corrective and no such chasten- ing are anywhere to be found. The sources of a philosophy of knowledge and of a trustworthy metaphysics also exist, inexhaustible, in the incontestable fact that knowledge is trans-subjective, and, in its very nature, implicates existence beyond the process of knowledge; that cognition itself guar- antees the extra-mental being of that which, by the very nature of this process the cognitive subject is compelled to recognize as not identical with its own present state. Thus the most primary problem of epistemology becomes a concern of reason with the ultimate, the unanalyzable and irreducible momenta and principles of objective cognition. 1 The further advance of this concernment may be described as reason becoming more self-conscious in the way of bring- ing to its own recognition what is implicate in conscious- ness as objective. 1 Compare Volkelt, Erfahrung und Denken, p. 35. THE PROBLEM 19 Mere recognition of the implicates of cognition is not in itself, however, enough to satisfy all the demands made by the self-searching and critical activity of man's mind. These implicates must themselves be made the matter of a further concern of reason. Suppose, for example, that I have come to a consciousness of what is involved in saying, " I know " — any simplest truth of fact or of a physical law ; such as that the chair is over yonder, or that the force of gravity varies inversely as the square of the distance and directly as the mass of the two bodies taking part in that transaction which reveals the existence of this force. Here, as in every act of knowledge, are two classes of implicates. One of these is the implied control of consciousness by what are called the "laws of the mind." It is an invin- cible persuasion, belief — use what word you will, if you do not like the term "rational assumption" — of all men that truth is somehow to be attained by the mind. This is the indestructible self-confidence of human reason. Dis- appoint her as often as you may, deceive her as badly as you can, accuse her of unlimited audacity in enterprises that concern what appears to transcend her powers, and yet you can never wholly destroy her self-confidence. So often as she falls, she rises again and makes once more the persistent effort to stand and to walk alone. Or in her more pious moods, if much chastened by rebukes for her many errors, she still "trusts in God and is not confounded." This trust of reason in herself, which is always at least a silent and concealed postulate of all her distrust, itself needs critical investigation; in order, to drop the figure of speech, that the mental principles of those processes of knowledge which all involve the persuasion, or the conviction of knowl- edge, may themselves be criticised in detail. Certainly we shall not by the critical method escape the necessity of using and of trusting these principles; nor shall we succeed in establishing their claims in a more fundamental way by 20 THE PROBLEM smart and consecutive dialectic and trains of argument. Something better than merely this, however, may be hoped for, which it is by all means necessary to attempt, and which is not without a certain large positive value. We may hope to bring to light the truer meaning of these forms of the constitution of mind, these ways of the functioning of all human reason. Moreover, since there is no little apparent conflict among these principles, as well as vague- ness and uncertainty respecting the best ways of stating each of them, we may attempt to effect something in the interests of harmony and clearness. The doctrine of irreconcilable conflict, of fundamental and irremovable " antinomies " of intellect so-called, is favorite with many acute students of the mental life. This doctrine, in itself so distasteful or even abhorrent and frightful to the higher interests of ethics and religion as some conceive it to be, certainly requires perpetual re-examination. To speak technically, the critical and " reconciling " discussion of the " categories " is an important problem for the student of epistemology. And when he is incontinently and even coarsely accused of foster- ing scepticism and agnosticism, of emasculating a sturdy and effective manhood by calling in question its most fun- damental faiths, he may answer : " Nay, not so ; for no faith can lay claim to be fundamental, or to contribute to a sturdy and effective manhood, which cannot submit itself to the freest criticism." To-day and throughout all history, the struggle of a posi- tive and critical philosophy with scepticism and agnosticism over a theory of knowledge is a life-and-death struggle. War to the knife is already declared between the two. He is the emasculator of reason, the effeminate student of the mind's life, who would deprive us of the power to answer ever anew the call : " Let the thinker arouse himself and respond to the demand to give reasons for the faith that is in him, by an effort at improved self-knowledge." But THE PROBLEM 21 surely self-knowledge cannot be improved, or made true knowledge of Self, unless we look below the superficial area of particular cognitions and undertake to validate the prin- ciples of all cognition. Surely it is no less true now than it was in mediaeval times, when the principle of authority was wellnigh universal in its sway, that the friends of human reason are not those who refuse to have its claims examined. What higher principle of truth can there be than this: That must be true which is so connected with the knowing sub- ject that he must either relinquish all claim to any kind of knowledge or else assume the same to be true ? What is actually thus connected with the knowing subject can only appear as the result of a critical investigation into the fun- damental laws of the mental life in its acts of cognition. For the theory of hnoivledge must be a theory of certainty. But the process of thinking may conform, at least in cer- tain respects, to logical laws without putting the thinker in possession of material truth. Whether an agreement of the total activity of knowledge with all the formal laws of intel- lect would unfailingly guarantee the truth is a question which need not be raised at present. Certainly, neither what is called ordinary knowledge, nor what is called science, con- sists simply in weaving into a consistent totality a number of universal and necessary laws. A critical analysis will establish the conclusion that thinking alone — the pure dia- lectical process, mere thinking, if that were possible — can- not produce a certified experience of Reality or a sure convic- tion as to the essential and unchanging nature of Reality. This truth emphasizes the necessity of extending still further the problem of the epistemological branch of philosophy. Besides the formal laws of intellect, another class of impli- cates is found in every act of cognition, and furnishes a demand for more detailed examination. These are impli- cates of beings, of entities, of the really existent. The exercise of "metaphysical instinct," if we may for the 22 THE PROBLEM moment employ such a term, is an indispensable form of functioning in every act of cognition. To know is to make an ontological leap, a spring from the charmed circle of pure subjectivity into the mystery of the real. This in- stinctive metaphysics maintains its inexorable rule over the human mind, in spite of all sceptical inquiry ; and just as inexorably after we have adopted the agnostic view regarding the validity of human knowledge, or the most extremely idealistic theory of the nature of experience, as before. But in its uncritical and instinctive form it is neither theoretically nor practically satisfying. There must be substituted for this uncritical metaphysics some postu- late, thoughtfully wrought out, which will show how the contents of developed and carefully guarded human con- sciousness may be true and valid representations of actual transactions in the world of reality. The detailed critical discussion of those conceptions which fall under the general concept of Reality constitutes the peculiar field of metaphysics proper. This field, in not a few places, overlays the field of epistemology. The path by which both fields are reached follows the same method, — beginning in psychological science and continuing by reflective thinking upon the problems which this science, as applied to the presuppositions of all the other sciences, brings to our view. Some adjustment of our examination into the problem of knowledge, so as to make it fit in with conclusions that belong to the problem of being, seems not only desirable but even indispensable. Otherwise the criti- cism of man's cognitive faculty must inevitably fall into one of two extremes. To assume, uncritically, that the forms of our conscious life — our representations of sense, our trains of associated ideas, and even our connected thoughts — necessarily correspond with the actual transactions of the real world, whether we make the assumption according to the plain man's " common-sense " or in the more elaborate THE PROBLEM 23 forms of so-called "scientific realism," is to leave the prob- lem of knowledge unattempted at one of its most important and even vital points. On the other hand, agreement in some sort and to some extent between the forms of human consciousness and the real beings and actual transactions of the world outlying the individual's immediate experience, is an assumption from which we can never set free the critique of reason itself. Uncritical faith and dogmatic agnosticism are both unphilo- sophical. The actual condition of thought and things in every process of knowing, and the indications which the critical study of the process offers respecting the real rela- tions of thought and things, become then a problem for further examination. The apparent contradictions which the epistemological problem contains cannot contentedly be left in the uncriticised and unsettled position in which naive consciousness finds them. To leave them thus would be to confess that knowledge is no knowledge, and that our most essential activities are self -stultifying. But further pursuit of such considerations as the foregoing must be left to the attempted solution of the problems which a philosophy of knowledge propounds. Enough has been said to show how it is that epistemology undertakes, as its important and difficult task, to discover, to expound criti- cally, and to defend both circumstantially and by harmoniz- ing them with each other, the implicates of every act of knowledge. This is also its chief theoretical interest. The method which must be pursued in any partially suc- cessful attempt to form a philosophical theory of knowledge has already been indicated. A few words are needed, how- ever, to make this indication clearer. In the study of the epistemological problem, as in the study of all philosophical problems, psychology stands in the relation of a propaedeutic. It is this science alone which, when appealed to in faithful and unprejudiced fashion, can put us into possession of 24 THE PROBLEM those concrete and indisputable facts of experience wherein the philosophical problem has its origin. The inquirer who is defective or slovenly in his analysis of psychological fact, of the concrete and feeling-full life of the human mind, will surely fail even to grasp the significance of the problem of knowledge. He certainly can never have in hand the data for helping to make more satisfactory the attempt at its answer. And the epistemology which despises or neglects the assistance of psychological science will either mistake the real nature of its mission, or else its entire view and attempted solution will be ghostly, — an unsubstantial image suspended in thin mid-air. The successful critic of human cognition must have penetrated and resided long within the theatre where the factors of the conscious and self-conscious life are enacting their varied drama upon the mind's stage. Nor will it suffice for this that he shall have merely studied the logic of the actor. For, as we shall see in de- tail subsequently, human knowledge is not merely a logical affair. His despite of psychology, as well as the forlorn condition of the science in his day, and his over-credulous acceptance of the logical schemata of Aristotle in the attempt to esti- mate the constitution, the presuppositions, and the limits of human cognition, had an evil influence upon even the "astounding Kant." It was chiefly the rigid maintenance of the purely conceptual points of view, the treatment of the categories, or forms of the functioning of judgment, as merely formal, which led irresistibly to the sceptical and agnostic outcome of the "Critique of Pure Reason." But Kant's abandonment of the merely formal points of view, in the other two Critiques, came too late to secure our re- spect and adherence for the class of objects with which these works attempt to deal. A more comprehensive and truer psychology would have shown the author that it is not a question of pure knowledge here and of pure faith over yon- THE PROBLEM 25 der ; of objective cognition free from doubtful postulates in the case of sensuous objects, and of practical trust without intuitive data in the case of so-called transcendent objects. It would possibly have guarded this great philosopher — above ail others acute as a reflective analyzer of the formal presuppositions of reason — from claiming, in the interests of a harmonious apriorism, to have "knowledge " in so many places where no knowledge is; as well as from denying knowledge in certain other places where its claim to ex- istence may well enough be maintained. For surely the Kantian "ideas of pure reason" have as good title to objective validity as have many of the "concepts of pure understanding. " The real unity of the soul is, at worst, as much known as is the objective verity of the principle of causation in physics, or — to take another instance — of the principle of reciprocity. Certain judgments to which Kant gives a priori and objective authority, as "making a pure science of physics " possible, are no more entitled to this distinction than are many of the theological judgments which he relegates to the limbo of dead metaphysical speculations. We have dwelt upon the example of Kant in order to show that metaphysical acumen and power in reflective analysis, however surpassing, will not serve one to the best advantage in the study of the problem of knowledge, unless these qualities be employed upon a sound and broad basis of psychological fact. But, on the other hand, the mere student of psychology (especially of the purely experimental type) cannot grasp, much less satisfactorily solve, the diffi- culties inherent in a philosophical theory of knowledge. For the method of stating and of handling the epistemo- logical problem must be something more than descriptive and experimental. The peculiar discursive analysis which philosophy habitually employs must unfold the presupposi- tions that lie implicate in the facts of cognition. It must 26 THE PKOBLEM also be persistently and systematically used in order to attain a consistent and harmonious theory. Upon one point affecting the method of epistemology a further word needs to be said. We have seen that the prob- lem of knowledge is in its very nature such as to involve metaphysical discussion in the narrower meaning of the word "metaphysics:" that is to say, it is impossible to discuss this problem without introducing the influence of one's posi- tions respecting the ultimate questions in ontology. Accord- ingly a dispute has for some time been rife over the inquiry, " Which of the two logically precedes the other in a philo- sophical system ? " The answer of Kant to this inquiry was not equivocal. He held that to attempt a system of meta- physics, or even to discuss any of the great metaphysical problems, previous to a critique of reason itself, was mis- chievous and absurd. On the other hand, not a few would agree with Paulsen 1 in recommending, or insisting upon, the opposite order. We have expressed our opinion as to the merits of the question of method elsewhere. 2 The his- torical order coincides with that which is advocated by those who oppose Kant upon this point. The logical order, on the contrary, is the one advocated so earnestly by Kant him- self. The two classes of problems, and the two branches of philosophical discipline which cultivate them, cannot be kept apart. When historically considered they will be, and when logically considered they cannot help being, cultivated in their relations of mutual dependence. But it does not follow, because the historical order favors the view of Paulsen, that the more logical order may not be entitled at some time in the development of reflective thinking to displace the historical. We can see no serious objec- tion to allowing any author to follow his own inclinations or convenience in arranging this point in the method of 1 Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 340 f. 2 See the author's Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 178 f. THE PROBLEM 27 treatment given to the connected epistemological and onto- logical problems. As concerns the purpose and the method of this treatise, therefore, all that it is now necessary to say may be sum- marized as follows. We propose a philosophical criticism of knowledge, with a view to point oat its origin and nature as implicating reality; to validate it by reducing to their sim- plest terms and arranging in a harmonious whole its necessary forms, its assumptions, and its postulates; and to mark out its limits by further criticism and especially by distinguishing the sources and kinds of error and of half-truth. This is the task belonging to epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. We shall go for our facts to psychology, to the descriptive and explanatory science of those mental processes which are called "knowledge," and of that mental development which is called "growth of knowledge." We shall subject these facts to a thorough reflective analysis; and we shall use what speculative skill we can command to set our results into relation with sound conclusions on the other great problems of philosophy. To any who question the importance or doubt the benefit of such a study as that here proposed, a few words will suffice. There can be no doubt about the existence in culti- vated and thoughtful circles of a vast amount of scepticism which has led many minds either to a self-confident dogmatic agnosticism or to a pathetic despair of knowledge. These mental attitudes are, of course, especially obvious toward the transcendent objects which have always commanded the assent of the great majority of thinkers upon ethics and religion. But the agnostic or despairing attitude toward the problem of knowledge itself lies, both logically and in fact, at the base of all other agnosticism and of manifold forms of despair. The history of mental development shows that, in order to set free the forces of thinking for positive and fruitful activity, there is nothing against which we need 28 THE PROBLEM to guard ourselves more carefully than the haste with which the most important and fundamental conceptions of the intellect are permitted to lose their absolute significance for the cognition of the being and the connections of the real world. Witness the cheap and easy-going fashion with which the sceptical and agnostic outcome of the Kantian critical system gets itself accepted on every side. And this oftenest comes about without serious effort to understand Kant aright; and with even less sympathy with the effort which led him to undertake the critique of reason, — the effort, namely, to save the ethical and religious postulates from the attacks of the speculative reason. For souls who take themselves seriously and who enter in earnest upon the exploration of reason, if they become tired, discouraged, or misled, there is no permanent cure but that which it lies in the hands of reason, with a pro- founder and richer understanding of her own self and her own resources, to accomplish. And they do not catch the true voice of the Zeitgeist who cannot hear and interpret it as a call. It is a call for a stronger and sweeter word of healing,' spoken in the name of reason to soothe the sufferings and re- move the scars which have been inflicted in her own name. Nor is this mental attitude and its accompanying tone of the emotional and practical life confined by any means to those who have reflected upon the criticism of the categories. There are thousands of plain men and women who do not so much as know whether there be any critical philosophy, and who have scarcely even heard the name of Kant, but who are profoundly influenced by the streams of think- ing of which that masterful mind is the principal modern philosophical source. They, too, are ready to join the complaint: — " There was the Door to which I found no key ; There was the Veil through which I could not see : Some little talk awhile of ME-and-THEE There was — and then no more of thee and me." THE PROBLEM 29 And the chances, as the history of humanity abundantly shows, are not altogether against their coming soon to add to complaint this teaching of experience : — " Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn I lean'd the Secret of my Life to learn : And lip to lip it murmur'd — ' While you live, Drink ! — for, once dead, you never shall return.' " Now we cannot believe that it is matter of small impor- tance whether or not any helpful word is spoken to those who are asking of reason a contribution to her own better self-understanding. And if, as has always happened, this word, when first spoken to more serious students, should filter downward and outward through the currents of popular opinion and popular impression, it might strengthen and sweeten the daily life of some of these "plain men and women." At any rate, here is a task worth trying. For the critical study of cognition is essentially an effort to make the total of our human life more dignified and better worth the living. It is an effort to heighten our rational estimate of the calling and the destiny of man. Scant respect is due that doctor in psychology who, when his patient comes to him heart-sick and brain-confused, either makes light of his ills or sends him to the nearest apothe- cary's shop, with orders to put himself to sleep by taking as much crude opium as some unskilled hand may choose to measure out for him. And, surely, that teacher of phi- losophy has either mistaken his mission, or else has no real mission to fulfil, who is not ready to welcome any honest and fairly competent attempt at so important a task. CHAPTER II HISTOEY OF OPINION r ~PO write a detailed history of the opinions of reflective -*• thinkers respecting the nature, origin, limits, and relations to reality, of human knowledge, would be to traverse the whole field of the more important philosophical litera- ture. But a far narrower and less arduous work is proposed for the sketch made in the two following chapters. The character of this sketch is to be understood and its value estimated only by keeping steadily in mind both the consid- erations which have chiefly influenced it. First, only those authors have been selected for brief review whose opinions have been found most suggestive and helpful in the histori- cal study of the epistemological problem. Second, among the opinions of these authors only such points of suggestion and helpfulness have been noted as, on the one hand, seem most distinctive of their particular authors, and, on the other hand, fit in best with our own method of study and with the conclusions to which it has led us. Selections and omissions alike must be regarded in the light of these considerations. " Antiquity, " says Windelband, 1 "did not attain a theory of investigation." This statement is true only if by "a theory of investigation " we mean to indicate such a concep- tion and treatment of the grounds of knowledge and of the method of attaining truth as prevail in their modern more 1 A History of Philosophy (English Translation by Professor Tufts), p. 198. HISTORY OF OPINION 31 precise and systematic form. But in Plato, and in many writers from Plato onward through antiquity, not a few nug- gets of most precious truth on the "elaboration of those cognitions which belong to the concern of reason " are found scattered. Kant was by no means the first to criticise acutely the " pretensions of reason to transcendent insights " ; neither was he the first who undertook to " make room for faith" by "removing knowledge." Even much more is true, for there are in ancient and mediaeval authors frequent suggestions of a correct theory, variously shaped and pro- pounded, which the modern student of the psychology and philosophy of cognition cannot wisely afford to overlook. Nor need one hesitate to affirm that in some cardinal par- ticulars the Church Fathers Origen and Augustine were nearer the final statement of facts, and showed more of verifiable speculative insight into the significance of the facts than Kant himself. Yet so distinctive was the con- ception which the latter held of the epistemological prob- lem, so relatively firm his grasp upon it in all its large roundness, and so unique the answer which he elaborated, that the entire history of human reflection upon this prob- lem fitly divides itself at the Kantian epoch. It is indispensable for the recognition and use of the sug- gestions which antiquity and even the Middle Ages afford, that the loose and figurative forms of expression employed by the writers of these periods should be pardoned and set aside. Modern thinking must gladly accept the truths they suggest, although the expression given to these truths may be much too fanciful to accord well with modern philo- sophical taste. Furthermore, the practical, the ethical, and the religious bearings of the problem and of the solution which happens to be suggested for it are seldom or never lost out of sight by these writers. A purely speculative interest in epistemology, or a rigidly technical presentation of its various possible answers must not be expected from them. 32 HISTORY OF OPINION But in this respect, too, it is far from being certain that the modern philosophy of knowledge has not something valu- able to learn from its earlier and vaguer forms. It is the Platonic Socrates and Plato — for we do not care to distinguish the two ■ — who first has something interesting to say to us respecting the origin, the nature, and the vali- dating of knowledge. In Socrates' rude midwifery and in the polished dialectic of Plato attempts are not wanting to criticise man's cognitive faculty and its product of so-called knowledge. Nor is the conception of a theory of knowledge, a science of science, unknown to Plato. There are hints at this conception in the distinction between the "what" of knowledge and the " that " of knowledge (between a olSev and ore olBev). The question as to the possibility of such a science is raised in the " Charmides " ; and again in the " Thesetetus, " under form of the inquiry, "What is knowl- edge ? " And although the notion of an absolutely self- determined knowledge is disputed by Socrates, it is concluded that, if a science of science can be found, it will also be "the science of the absence of science." 1 The critique of cognitive faculty., that is to say, will give us the absolute criteria of truth and of error in general. This science of science is not identical with self-knowledge ; for the former determines that, "of two things, one is, and the other is not, science or knowledge." Neither is it identical with wisdom; for such a science is not the cure of folly, although it is the cure of the scepticism and agnosticism which are the breeders of folly. 2 The problem of the origin of knowledge was a puzzling one to Plato, as it has always been to all who have made it the subject of reflection. For to give the descriptive history of how the different concrete and actual cognitions arise in consciousness did not seem to him a sufficient explanation of their arising at all, or of the universal forms under which i Charmides, 166. 2 Ibid. 172. HISTORY OF OPINION 33 they arose. Such history might explain what I know, why I know this rather than that ; but it could not explain, he thinks, that I know rather than have an opinion or a thought, and that this knowledge is an implied seizure of reality. Herein lies the mystery of knowledge. This recognized certainty of present reality appears to Plato as implying some sort of commerce with the invisible world of the ideal. How otherwise can that which is universal, necessary, and eternal be given to every man in the concrete, varied, and fleeting experiences of his earthly life ? In the "Meno," for example, the difficulty of defining virtue leads to the con- viction of the truth : " Nature is of one kindred ; and every soul has a seed or germ which may be developed into all knowledge." Even Meno's slaves recognize some elementary relations of all the geometrical figures. But though the simple sensations which reach the soul through the body are given by nature, at birth, to men and to animals, reflections on the being and use of the sensations are gained slowly and with difficulty, if they are ever gained at all, by educa- tion and by experience. But how can education and expe- rience account for all that is in every man's knowledge ? It must be that cognition, somehow, is prior to particular cognitions. As to the manner of this pre-existence of the universal and necessary element of cognition, Jowett, misled by Plato's figurative use of words, commits him to the modern evolutionary hypothesis that it "exists, not in the previous state of the individual, but of the race." The rather have we here, though only dimly apprehended, the thought that the origin of knowledge cannot be understood merely empirically, but must be found in the native consti- tution of the cognitive soul. 1 How did it get there? Here Plato's characteristic figurative ontology must account for the fallacy in his argument. Socrates is made to say: "But if he did not acquire the knowledge in this life, he 1 Compare Thesetetus, 186 ; Meno, 86; Phsedo, 73. 3 34 HISTORY OF OPINION must have had and learned it at some other time." And again, Cebes, referring to Socrates, remarks : " Your favorite doctrine that knowledge is recollection." Thus the pre- existence and immortality of the cognitive soul is made to stand or fall with the ontological doctrine of the ideal world. For "if the ideas of men are eternal, their souls are eternal ; and if not the ideas, then not the souls. " 1 The impossibility of giving a wholly empirical account of the origin of cognition, and the necessity of recognizing elements that for their explanation demand an appeal to the reality and eternal existence of the ideal, are tenets in the Platonic doctrine of knowledge. These same tenets are repeatedly affirmed in the treatment given to the essential nature of knowledge; for truth cannot be imparted by the best of the senses, not even by sight and hearing. The disparagement of sensuous cognition is common to Plato with most idealists ; and this mistaken view is connected with the failure — which he shares in common with modern solipsism — to recognize that both thought and the mental leap to reality are involved in all perception. And so he distinguishes knowledge from opinion, which is interme- diate hetween ignorance and knowledge, even asserting that the two have to do with different kinds of matter corre- sponding to different faculties, 2 and from belief, which may be false, while there can be no false knowledge; and he endeavors to refute the view that perception of things is knowledge at all. 3 Here the Hindu mysticism, which regarded the soul as addressing itself in every act of per- ception of a Thing with a " That-too-art-thou, " came far nearer the truth than did the Greek idealism. But with Plato it is thought by which existence must be revealed to the soul, if at all. 4 Dialectic is the true method of rational knowledge. Upon this point Plato comes nearest to the 1 Plifledo, 76. 2 Republic, 477. 8 Theoetetus, 152 f. 4 Phado, 65. HISTORY OF OPINION 35 truth in the statement that knowledge is true opinion accom- panied by a reason, or resting on a ground. 1 It is this over- estimate of dialectic as the deliverer of knowledge within the soul of man, which is the chief error of Plato and of all similar forms of idealism since Plato until the present hour. On one other phase of the problem of knowledge the Platonic writings are worthy to instruct the student of the epistemological problem to the end of time. Throughout does Plato emphasize the dependence of knowledge on desire, aspiration, virtue, and character. " In the ' Phsedrus, ' " says Jowett, "love and philosophy join hands." With the excep- tion of some of the writers of the Christian Church we have to wait until Fichte to have the inseparable and vital union of cognition with the life of feeling and action so emphati- cally affirmed. "The true knowledge of things in heaven and earth is based upon enthusiasm, or love of the ideas going before us and ever present to us in this world and in another." Only through the exercise of this love can that divine knowledge be attained which is "knowledge absolute in existence absolute. " Hence the firm connection between knowledge and the teleology of the idea of the good; 2 for, indeed, the idea of the good is the cause of science, and virtue is identical with knowledge. 3 In a word, it is the distinguishing feature of Plato's doctrine of cognition that he treats knowledge, not as "pure," but as the epistemolog- ical and metaphysical presupposition of ethics. It is the merit of Aristotle to have brought the early attempts at a science of knowledge into much more definite and systematic shape — especially in his works on Logic and Metaphysics. On the possibility of such a science we find with him no such expressions of doubt, approaching despair, as are found in Plato; also no such merely tentative and 1 Theaetetus, 206 f. 2 Compare Republic, 508. 3 To show which, is the aim of the " Protagoras." 36 HISTORY OF OPINION" mystical treatment of his problem. Aristotle distinctly recognizes the truth that, since there are certain principles common to all the particular sciences, and since, although these principles depend upon one another, the process of regressive dependence cannot go on forever, therefore there are premises which are themselves undemonstrable, but from which all demonstration begins. 1 His view of the criteria of cognition seems to have been in part derived from his criticism of the doctrine of Protagoras {irav to (^atvo^evov akrjdes). In spite of Grote's assertion that Aristotle dis- countenances altogether the doctrine which represents the mind, or intellect, as "a source of first or universal truths peculiar to itself, " the doctrine of the Greek thinker amounts to an espousal of a certain form of apriorism in respect of the sources and nature of human cognition. 2 Knowledge, according to Aristotle, has its origin both in dialectical induction and logical demonstration. The soul, in its thinking nature, possesses the possibility of all knowl- edge (all knowledge dynamically) ; but it actually attains to its knowledge only by degrees. 3 His doctrine of the syllo- gism leads him to conclude that there are two kinds of ulti- mate presuppositions : these are (1) the actual fact as known to us in perception without proof, and (2) general principles whose source is in reason (z>o0?), — the power of direct, intuitive, and therefore unerring knowledge of such prin- ciples. Here we have a hint at the different kinds of impli- cates which have already been discovered as given in the fact "I know." And although in his psychology Aristotle regards the mind as in some sort a tabula rasa, thought takes the main part in writing some definite object upon the 1 See Anal. Post. p. 100, b. 3. 2 This we should argue, not simply on the basis of an appeal to passages in which Aristotle appears as the champion of " common-sense " (such as Eth. Nikom. I., vii., 14, and Eth. Eud. V., vi. f.), but chiefly as having his general doc- trine of the nature and growth of knowledge in mind. a Anal. Post, p. 71, b. 33; Phys. i., p. 184, a. 16. HISTORY OF OPINION 37 tablet. 1 By " thought " is meant, not a merely sensuous per- ception, although in perception thought is always accom- panied by sensuous images {^avrda^ara)', but the intuition of that which is rational (the vonrd) is a necessary part of the knowledge even of things. For it is not in reason (1/0O9) as merely passive (waOnTi/co?), but also as creative {ttol^tlko^ that knowledge has its source. And there is an activity of the reason as such (" pure "), which consists in the imme- diate grasping of the highest truths. For knowledge becomes possible only as reason creates, into rational form, the object of knoivledge. Further as to Aristotle's view of the nature of knowledge we learn by following his description of the laws and manner of its growth. The mind rises, he thinks, by successive steps from individual observations to perception, from perception, by means of memory, to experience, and from such expe- rience to the truer knowledge. Aristotle defends the truth of sense-perception. And it is in the interests of this view ■ — as we should now say, " for the sake of knowledge " as such, and not, like Plato, for the sake of ethics — that he develops the theory of the syllogism. Complete science is realized only when that which needs to be proved is derived through all the intermediate members from its highest pre- suppositions. 2 In the Metaphysics he discusses the principle of non-contradiction and finds it the most cognizable of all principles ; and yet, for this very reason, quite undemon- strable. 3 The true object of knowledge he agrees with Plato in holding to be only the necessary and the unchanging. Cognition cannot be explained unless the universal and the particular are " looked at in implication of each other." But with him it is not the universal as extra to the concrete envisaged reality, but the universal as immanent in the in- 1 Compare De Anima, and for citations see Zeller's " Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy," p. 207, note. 2 See Anal. Prior, p. 24, b. 18. 3 Met. p. 1005, b. 20. 38 HISTORY OF OPINION dividual thing (universale in re, not universale extra rem). So, then, with Aristotle, as not with Plato, the important truth is emphasized that knowledge is a development resting upon a basis of sense-perception, and requiring rational faculty which proceeds according to laws of its own. In this regard, indeed, the pupil stands far nearer than his teacher to the modern psychology of knowledge. As has been well said, he displaces " the seat of reality " and trans- fers it from the abstract universal of mere thinking to the concrete particular of sense-perception. 1 Finally, with Aristotle, far more than with Plato, knowl- edge has its end in itself rather than in being a means, or requisite, of virtue. Philosophy is itself a greater good than any of the virtues. 2 Cognition is thus more clearly dis- tinguished from moral activity. Connected with this diver- gence of theory is another : for, in the view of the later thinker, the attainment of knowledge is much less dependent on emotional and voluntary attitudes ; and empirical data are made more important for establishing our cognitions. Desire, aspiration, love, and intuition, retreat into the background. The doctrine of the practical syllogism remains, however : "No creature moves or acts except with some end in view." 3 And the mission of philosophy also remains, as with Plato, " the knowledge of unchangeable Being and of the ultimate bases of things, of the universal and necessary." 4 Little that throws new light on the problem of knowledge is to be learned from the post-Aristotelian schools of phi- losophy. The Stoics, however, elaborated in a somewhat instructive way the view of Aristotle regarding the criteria of cognition; while it was a fundamental tenet with this whole group of thinkers to emphasize the importance, for right living, of scientific inquiry. Though the ontology of 1 Compare Grote, ii. pp. 257 f. 2 See A. Grant, the Ethics of Aristotle (3d ed.), i. pp. 226 f. 8 De Mot. An., vi. f. 4 Zeller, Outlines, etc., p. ISO. HISTORY OF OPINION 39 the Stoics undoubtedly has a quasi-materialistic outcome, the content of human consciousness is so sharply contrasted with real being as to give a painful emphasis to the epistemo- logical problem : " How are we to construe the relations by which this content refers to real being and agrees with it ?" As to the sources of knowledge, Zeno holds that it must all proceed from perception, as though the soul were a tabula rasa ; but Chrysippus defines knowledge as a change produced on the soul by an object. From the impression (tvttghtk;) arises the presentation of mental images (fyavraaia). Out of perceptions come recollections, and from these experience ; and by conclusions from what is immediately given in percep- tions we arrive at general images {icoival evvoiai). Science, however, depends on the regulated formation and demonstra- tion of concepts. When pressed to the last resort, the possibility of knowledge is made by the Stoics to rest upon the assertion that otherwise no action carrying with it a rational conviction is possible. And so perception and science are both made, in an unanalyzed and inexplicable mixture, the sources of cognition. As to the nature of knowledge, Zeno's illustration (sensa- tion is like the extended ringers ; conception like the fist ; and knowledge, or science, like one fist clasped by another) seems to resolve the differences in the different stages of cognition into those of degree only. But knowledge is defined by the Stoics as " a fixed and immovable conception, or system of such conceptions." In other words, cognition is a system of perceptions and of notions derived by applying logical processes to perceptions. Here, at once the psychological doctrine of the nature of cognition is merged in the epistemological doctrine of the criteria of cognition. How is truth to be attained, and how distinguished from the error with which, in experience, it is so closely intermingled ? Now part of our conceptions are of such a rature that they compel consent ; we are con- 40 HISTORY OF OPINION scious that they can only arise from something real, for they have direct evidence (ivepyeia). This kind of conceiving involves a mental " seizure " (KardXijyfr^') ; and so it differs from the passive having of mere notions, even when the conscious contents are the same, by having also the active consciousness of agreement with its object. Cognition, in the form of a " conceptual presentation " compelling conviction, becomes then the Criterion of Truth. 1 In all the Stoical doctrine the important psychological conclusions are recog- nized that (1) judgment, produced by the faculty of thought, is necessary to knowledge ; 2 and (2) knowledge which allows of certainty of conviction requires that perception and thought should be somehow brought into harmonious rela- tions. A true perception is one which represents the object as it really is ; but how shall we know when we have such a perception ? To answer this problem the appeal is some- times made to the strength of the impression and of the conviction which the impression carries ; sometimes to that distinction in the form of notions which laid the basis of the third part added to Logic by the Stoics, — namely, the Doctrine of the Standard of Truth or the Theory of Knowledge ; but, in the last resort, as has already been said, to the practical postulate that " unless the cognition of truth were possible, it would be impossible to act on fixed principles and rational convictions." 3 Here we return to the point on the circumference of the circle from which we set out : The search after a firm support for the life of conduct compels us to investigate the criteria of truth; but the investi- gation of the criteria of truth brings us to the conclusion that these criteria are chiefly to be found in the necessity felt by the soul for a firm support for the life of conduct. Let us not forget 1 This view must not be confounded with that of the innate ideas which was propagated on into the Middle Ages under the Stoic name. 2 Compare Sext. Adv. Math., viii. 70 f. ; Diog., vii. 63. 3 This is the position of Plutarch and Stobreus ; on the entire subject see Heinze, " Zur Erkenntnisslehre der Stoiker," Leipzig, 18S0. HISTORY OF OPINION 41 this gyratory motion of the Stoics in their quest for a defen- sible theory of cognition. It is somewhat of a return to Plato from Aristotle, who regarded knowledge rather more as an end in itself. It may suggest to the modern student of epistemology the truths that, in cognition, the soul is one, a unitary being incapable of divorcing feeling and willing from its thinking; and, also, that the action of so-called necessity and the action of reason is not two principles, but only one. Little additional to the lessons taught by the Stoics is to be gained by a study of the ancient Epicureans and Sceptics. The former held that, in theory, perception furnishes the criterion of truth and that what is most obvious (by its ive'pyeia) is always true; nor can such truth be doubted without destroying the foundations both of knowledge and of action. But, in practice, pleasure and pain furnish the criterion. Yet these teachers were, of course, pressed to the important admission that the knowledge requisite simply for wise conduct needs, besides, cognition of that which is not immediately perceptible ; it needs the cognition of the grounds of phenomena and also of the expectations for the future which may be inferred from these grounds. Thus both Epicureans and Stoics, as a sort of fundamental postu- late upon which alone the wise man can ground his maxims for the practical life, came to the recognition of the truth that there is agreement of the individual reason with the universal, with the World-Reason, — an implied mental seizure upon the heart of Reality. To something like the same opinion even certain of the Sceptics were finally driven. They did, indeed, theoretically hold that the essential nature of things is inaccessible to human knowledge ; nothing is immediately certain ; nothing, therefore, can be made mediately certain by processes of argu- ment. This scepticism they defended by calling attention to the conflict of opinions, to the endless regressus in proving, to 42 HISTORY OF OPINION the relativity of all perception, to the impossibility of other than hypothetical premises, and to the circle in the syllogism. It is most interesting, however, to notice how some of them — Arcesilaus, for example — brought forward the view that, in the practical life, the wise man must content himself with a certain kind of trust (irlans), according to which some ideas are the more probable, reasonable, and adaptable to the purposes of life. This impressive exhibition which Greek antiquity furnishes of the relations, both in fact and in theory, between our doctrine of cognition and our life of conduct, as well as its accompanying recognition of " confidence," " conviction," " trust," as an inseparable element of cognition itself, fitly prepare the way for a consideration of the views of two great thinkers among the Fathers of the Christian Church. In respect of their insight into the true state of the case, and as estimated by the important points which they make through their discursive treatment of the subject, Origen and' Augus- tine are entirely worthy to stand beside Plato and Aristotle. To understand their points of view we must remember that the very nature of the regnant philosophy, and the urgent needs of the age, turned the currents of thought from purely speculative into practical and religious channels. The great doctrine of a " Christian Gnosis " was now the form in which a theory of knowledge was found interesting and was actually discussed. Two important truths derived from non-Chris- tian Gnosticism became, from this time onward, very in- fluential. These were the exceedingly influential conception of self-consciousness (irapafcoXovOelv eavrw), — of intellect as thought active and in motion (1/0*70-19), having for its object itself, as a resting, objective thought (vo-qrov) ; and thus the identification of intellect as knowledge with intellect as being. 1 1 See Windelband, A History of Philosophy, p. 234 ; and Plotiuus, Eun. L 4, 10. HISTORY OF OPINION 43 In Origen's thought, as in the thought of Clement aud of the Alexandrine School generally, Christianity — its tenets being rationally understood and explained — is Knowledge. But to attain this knowledge, we must advance to it, from faith through philosophy ; and, indeed, he who would attain the true Gnosis without philosophy is to be compared to the man who would gather grapes without cultivating his vines. 1 The sources of such true and highest knowledge are both subjective and objective. Among the former are faith, hope, imagination, love ; these are the avenues through which cognition comes to the human soul. Love and mental grasp go hand in hand. Here, then, we meet again with the beauti- ful and stirring conception of Plato, that the craving for truth is divinely planted, as an honorable passion which may not honorably be denied. Gaining knowledge implies a progressive assimilation of the soul to God. The objective sources of knowledge, in the view of this Church Father, are Scripture and the- Church, which are assumed to be in har- mony. But the source of all true knowledge is undivided ; it is one, and only one ; it is divine revelation. God him- self, " an incomparable intellectual nature " (" in all parts Mom? and, so to speak, e Ez^a? ") is the Mind, and the Source, from which all intellectual nature or mind takes its begin- ning. 2 Origen's fundamental postulate, then, is this : The mind of the illumined and cultured man is akin to God, and has thus become capable of knowing the truth of God, the Absolute Mind. For how could rational beings exist unless the Word or Reason had previously existed ? How could men be wise, unless there were wisdom in the world of the really Existent ? Rational beings derive their rational nature from God through the Logos. " Now we are," he affirms, 3 " of opinion that every rational creature, without any distinction, receives a share of Him," — that is, of the 1 Compare Strom. II. vii. and ix. 2 De Frinc, I. i. 6. 3 De Princ. II. vii. 2. 44 HISTORY OF OPINION Holy Spirit, the revealer of Absolute Reason to the reason of man. Origen's view of the nature of knowledge follows from the foregoing description of the sources of knowledge. This thinker felt that, while much of the non-Christian philoso- phizing moved in the region of mere abstraction, the Christian Gnosis gave a living grasp upon realities, both persons and facts, which it was his aim to present in the form of a rational system as objective truth. Not by sense-perception alone can knowledge come. For " it is one thing to see, and another to know : to see and to be seen is a property of material bodies ; to know, and to be known, an attribute of intellectual being." 1 Knowledge is of the mind, intel- lectual. But the proposal to change faith into knowledge does not imply questioning, much less rejecting the entire content of faith ; it implies rather the attempt to give to the accepted content of faith a scientific form, such as shall commend it to philosophical or reflective minds. Neverthe- less, it has truly been said : " In all such doctrines the inter- est of science ultimately predominates over that of faith ; they are accommodations of philosophy to the need of reli- gious authority, felt at this time." The distinctive thing about Origen's answer to the inquiry into the sources and the nature of human cognition is that he makes it a commerce of minds. The secret of this episte- mological theory is given in the consideration that knoivledge is a transaction between rational beings. As to the source of knowledge, it is found in Absolute Personal Reason reveal- ing its true life within the human personal reason. As to the nature of knowledge, it is a certain complex attitude of human personal reason toward Absolute Personal Reason. In this complex attitude, the more practical and distinctively ethical " momenta " of admiring and aspiring love, of faith as a sort of opening of the soul to the truth, which is both 1 De Princ. I. i. 8. HISTORY OF OPINION 45 a reasonable acquiescence (\oyiK7] avyicdOea^) and a volun- tary grasp on the truth (irpdkq^rK e/covcno*;), are made promi- nent by this Church Father. However, since free-will — the capacity for virtue and its opposite, the power to become wise or to refuse to become wise — is the centre of per- sonality, it must co-operate with feeling and intellect, in order to attain the true Gnosis. For how can knowledge be divorced from free-will, since every judgment, which both accepts and declares the truth, is an act of free-will ? Origen is neither so happy nor so suggestive in his answer to the question, How shall the false and the true be distin- guished ? for, whether we emphasize faith, judgment, con- viction, opinion as to the content of revelation, or the decision of free-will, each one and all of these may be evoked in the interests of the false as well as of the true. This fact raises the problem of the criteria of knowledge. Origen takes it for granted that the contents of Christian faith, as given in Holy Scripture and declared by the voice of the Church, are true. The acceptance of what is authenti- cally taught is thus made, by his epistemological theory, the ultimate test of truth. Authority becomes the objective criterion of knowledge ; faith is the right attitude of soul for the attainment of this knowledge. We must not, how- ever, discredit this thinker — the most suggestive of all thinkers within the ancient Church — by understanding his principle of authority in the mediaeval or — worse still ! — in the post-Reformation sense. It is not the ipse-dixit, either of the Biblical writers or of the traditors of churchly tenets, which Origen would elevate into the place of the ulti- mate test of truth. His epistemological postulate, as bearing upon the criteria of knowledge, is the assumption of an essen- tial identity, in the ground of self -revealing Reason from which both spring, between authority and rational knowledge. The significance of Origen is so great for an historical study of the opinions of reflective thinkers upon the epistemological 46 HISTORY OF OPINION problem that we gather up his more impressive views into the following statements : — All knowledge is, by nature, a revelation from Absolute Reason, " a spiritual enlightenment " from the one Holy Spirit of God. Hence the ontological postulate of Origen's theory of knowledge is the reality of the idea of the Good, — a truly Platonic postulate. Our knowledge is the human equivalent of the Divine Idea. Thus insight is more empha- sized than ratiocination ; and the gaining of knowledge be- comes, for the soul of man, an epoch, an illumination, a surprise. Faith and reason co-operate, in the unity of the soul-life, in order to make possible the reception and the attainment of knowledge. Free-will, issuing in judgment of the truth, is essential to all knowledge ; it is, indeed, the very self-activity which becomes knowledge when it is directed rightly toward the absolute and self-revealing Reason. Diversity of will is the cause of the variety in human opinions and in the courses of conduct pursued by different men. Perversity of will is the cause, not only of all evil conduct, but also of all error in judgment. It is the function of the moral will, rooted and grounded in love, to lead on the acquirement of all knowledge and all wisdom to the final goal, which is the vision of all in God. 1 But this will must be motived, backed up, and spurred forward by rational love (Xoyi/cr) ope|t?). It was Augustine, however, who first grappled w 7 ith the problem of cognition in a thoroughly psychological and criti- cal way. Indeed, Augustine may be said to have been the first to place philosophy upon a psychological basis. It must be remembered, however, that we have two men expressing themselves in the later writings of this Church Father : and that these two minds move in opposite directions, and even come to contradictory conclusions. It is not Augustine the 1 Compare De Princ. I. v. 3 ; I. vi. 3 ; II. i. 2 ; II. iv. 3. HISTORY OF OPINION" 47 ecclesiastic, alarmed for the foundations of Christian faith and making an exoteric appeal to the authority of the Church as the criterion of knowledge, in behalf of the uninitiated and unenlightened, to whom we may hopefully look for epis- temological truth ; it is rather to Augustine the master of psychological analysis, and, in some sort, the founder of philosophy upon the indisputable data of consciousness for all places and all times. In Augustine's case the theologian and the philosopher are not, as in the case of Origen, of one and the same mind, equally sincere. The theologian, indeed, is ready at times to run perilously near the final sacrifice of all consistency, if not of all claim to sincerity. But the psychologist and philosopher expounds the principle of the immediate and absolute certainty of self-conscious- ness in a way to anticipate Descartes and even to excel him. In his treatment of this epistemological doctrine Aug- ustine is a modern man ; or, rather, he is a thinker for all times to venerate. It is with respect to the criteria of knowledge, the function of philosophical doubt, and the ultimate grounds of certainty, that Augustine rises superior to Aristotle and to all antiquity. Here we are charmed by his skill in psychological analysis and by the thoroughness of his reflective thinking. In these subjects he so far anticipates and even surpasses the so-called " father of modern philosophy " as to warrant what Fenelon said of him, that he would sooner trust Augustine than Des- cartes upon matters of pure philosophy ; indeed, the Arch- bishop of Cambrai even declared that a collection of this Church Father's utterances would be u much superior to the Meditations " of the French philosopher. And Nourisson 1 affirms : " It is beyond all question that this great man made use of the method, and put in practice the principles, which Descartes would one day employ in order to reconstruct philosophy." 1 Progres de la Pensee Humaine, p. 209. 48 HISTORY OF OPINION Augustine sought the way to certainty of truth through scepticism and criticism. He pointed out that all the various kinds of conscious states — memory, judgment, knowledge, and will — are involved in the very act of doubting. He sought also to demonstrate the existence of necessary ele- ments in all cognition in opposition to the Academicians, with whom he at one time agreed as to the practical end of happiness. 1 In the most primary and incontestable fashion, he thinks, does the certainty of self-consciousness affirm the reality of the conscious subject. 2 In order even to err, J, that err, must exist. Even the possibility of our being de- ceived implies the fact of our existence, and makes being, life, and thought co-ordinate. Every one who knows himself as a doubter knows the truth, and from this fact is certain that he knows. Let, then, the man who wishes to have knowledge attain the science of Self. But faith is necessary to knowledge of the existence of other men ; and we can only believe (not know) that material bodies exist, though the belief is practically necessary. With profound epistemologi- cal reflection Augustine finds the idea of God, as absolute Truth, involved in the certainty of self-consciousness. Eor how could we so much as question and doubt our sense- perceptions, if we had not derived criteria and standards of truth from other sources ? The very life of the human soul is such as to show that there is an unchanging norm of truth, — God, who includes all real being. Thus does this great thinker strive to place on a psychological basis the epistemological conclusion that the existence of truth cannot be doubted, and that all Reality is implicate in the being, knowing, and willing of the self-conscious subject? i See the De Vita beat , and compare Cont. Acad. III. xi. 26, where he finds the test of truth in disjunctive propositions, and remarks that perceptions are, at least, subjectively true. 2 De Vita beat., ii. 7 ; Solil. IT. i. 1 f. ; De Ver. Kel. xxxix. 72 f. ; De Trin. x. 14. 3 Confessions, VI. v. 7 ; De Fide Rerum, i. 2 ; De Ver. Rel. xxxix. 72 f. ; De Lib. Arb. II. ii. 6 ; De Civ. Dei, i. 6. HISTORY OF OPINION 49 Augustine's view of the sources and nature of human cog- nition is, of course, dependent upon his positions regarding the criteria of all cognitive faculty. Besides sensation Qsen- sus), he holds that man possesses the higher capacity of reason (intellectus and ratio) ; we thus have immediate per- ception of incorporeal truths, — the principles of all judging. Thus, too, all individual consciousness — and no less in its doubting than in every other form of its actual functioning — transcends itself as individual; it sees itself attached in its own exercise to something universal and universally valid. 1 It was, indeed, the influence of theological prejudice against the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls which led Augustine to abandon the Platonic reminiscence (avdfivtjcrLs), and in more nearly the modern way regard reason as the intuitive faculty for the incorporeal world. Yet he conceives of the existence of the ideas in neo-Platonic fashion. They are princip ales for mce vel rationes rerum stabiles atque incommutabiles, quce in divino intel- lects, continentur. All rational knowledge is, then, ultimately, knowledge of God ; all ideas are in God ; He is the eternal Ground of all form, — the Absolute Unity, the Supreme Beauty. The knowledge which Augustine seeks is, then, summed up as knowledge of Self and of God. 2 The sciences, which in early life he regarded as avenues to knowledge of God and to sal- vation, he later regarded as of little worth. Nor can there be any doubt that this disregard of scientific knowledge, born of theological prejudice, had, through the influence of Augus- tine, a decisive and baleful effect upon the subsequent history of Christendom. It is one of the most interesting specu- lations as to what might have been in the case of that " long-standing conflict " between science and religion, if the Descartes of Christian antiquity had not been overlain and submerged by the ecclesiastic anxious to defend the supreme and unquestioned authority of the Church. 1 De Trin. XII. ii. 2 ; Cont. Acad. III. xiii. 29 ; De Lib. Arb. II. in. 7. 2 Deura et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus 1 Nihil omnino. (Solil. I. 7.) 4 50 HISTORY OF OPINION With Augustine, even more than with Origen, the doctrine of free-will is dominant in connection with his entire view of the criteria, sources, nature, and limits of cognition. The primacy of the will is maintained in the entire process of thinking, ideating, and knowing. Only in relation to the highest truths, the rational cognitions, is the attitude of the mind more passive and receptive. Here revelation, as a divine illumination, has its truest sphere. Hence the doc- trine of Truth by Faith — a doctrine which Kant revived as the positive outcome of his critical protest against an unwarranted extension of the pretence of knowledge. How- ever, with Augustine, full rational insight remains first in dignity. But such insight is not for the weak nor for the average man ; not for the wise even, except imperfectly. Here again we are made witnesses to the disturbing influence of the ecclesiastic's fears lest the authority of the Church might suffer if knowledge of the transcendent should be too broadly affirmed as lying within the possible domain of the " plain man's " self-conscious life. On the whole, however, what student of the history of epistemological doctrine can deny the eminent distinction which Nourisson claims for Augustine as a reflective and critical thinker upon the problem of knowledge ? To him more than to any one else in antiquity (indeed, he has few rivals in modern times) we may ascribe the three following important merits : (1) The philosophic use of methodical doubt; (2) the doctrine of self-consciousness as a manifes- tation, absolutely certain, of the really existent ; and (3) the recognition of the evidence for making this particular cer- tainty the criterion of all ulterior certainty. During the Middle Ages the entire problem of Being and Knowing became absorbed in discussion over the nature and reality of so-called " universals." The significance of this discussion for all mediaeval philosophy, on account of its bearing upon the metaphysics of Christian doctrine, is HISTORY OF OPINION" 51 at once apparent. The general epistemological assumption of the regnant school was that the more universal substances are, the more real they are. Reality is thus regarded as a matter of degrees, or as measurable by a scale in which things and souls can have more or less of participation. This is the very opposite of the affirmation of Lotze, that the mean- est thing which exists is as truly real as is the most important and imposing universal. In the mediaeval thinking the iden- tity of Real Being with the thinnest or highest abstractions was thus maintained ; real dependence of things and events was also identified with logical dependence. A pyramid of concepts was erected, and to this conceptual structure was given an ontological significance, without further attempt at criticism or proof. From this doctrine a transition was inevi- table to the view which saw the universal in every concrete existence (universalia in re). But this doctrine, too, was taken abstractly. One and the same reality was held to be, in its differing status, animate being, man, Greek, Socrates. Formal and logical pantheism — essentially like that of the great Jewish thinker, Spinoza — was the inevitable outcome. The final ontological assertion, built upon the fundamental epistemological assumption, becomes the following: God = Being superlatively real Qens realissimum). Some wrong would be done to these mediaeval thinkers, however, if it were held that they contributed nothing what- ever to the statement or solution of the problem of knowl- edge. In the field of psychology they attained (by speculation, of coarse, rather than by experiment and induction) a few valuable results. The Platonists and the Mystics, who undertook to exhibit the development of inner life as the history of salvation for the individual soul, were promi- nent workers in this field. Especially important is their thought that, by virtue of the motive forces of will, faith furnishes conditions to knowledge. Thus Bernard is never weary of denouncing the heathenish nature of the pure 52 HISTORY OF OPINION impulse after knowledge for its own sake. "With the great Thomas the psychology of knowledge holds an important place. 1 The human soul is a substance, incorporeal, imper- ishable, and capable of apprehending universals. Yet he maintains the unity of the soul, 2 and informs us that such terms as "the vegetative soul," "sensitive soul," "rational soul," etc., are not to be understood as other than designat- ing functions of one and the same soul. By virtue of the same soul, Socrates is both man and animal. The essential form, both generic and specific, comes from the soul, which is the source of all life. With Hugo, cogitation, meditation, contemplation, are the three stages of mental activity which result in knowledge. Man has the eye of flesh to know the corporeal world, the eye of reason to know his own inner nature, and the eye of contemplation to know the spiritual world and God. But Duns Scotus rejects the hypothesis of soul as pure form and energy, possible apart from the body ; and between the body and the intelligent soul he introduces an inherent form a corporeitatis. In accordance with his doctrine of the nature of the soul, Thomas Aquinas places it on a sort of middle ground within the hierarchy of substances. As to the source of knowledge, it follows that the soul of man does not possess truth per se; it must acquire truth. This it does by experiencing certain elementary notions through the senses as its instru- ment. The whole problem of the origin and nature of knowledge must, of course, be attacked by the Schoolmen in some form to make intelligible the process by which universal ideas arise in the individual consciousness. Nomi- nalism, in the person of Abelard and John of Salisbury, attempted to show the psychological origin of knowledge. Sensation, as confused idea, gives content to imagination, 1 See liis Summa Theol., qnrest. 75-90 and 92, Part I. 2 See the section, De Anima, in the Qutestiones; especially, §§ 4-7, 11-13, and 20. HISTORY OF OPINION 53 which grasps and holds together the content; then under- standing, by discursive activity, elaborates it into judgments and concepts; and after all these conditions are fulfilled, somehow or other, opinion, faith, and knowledge arise, in which the intellect ultimately knows its object as a single collective perception or intuition. These writers hold to the modern theory that in sensation, perception, and imagi- nation, an act of judgment is performed. Thomas Aquinas and the Realists generally, however, held that all true knowledge — all science — is of the intel- lect; the psychological inquiry as to the nature, results, and certainty of its functioning is thus made the most important of all epistemological inquiries. The puzzling problem becomes, then, to reconcile the individuality of intelligence with the universality of the ideas. 1 The answer of Thomas to this problem is an evasion of it : the power of apprehending the universal is assigned by him to an " intel- lective soul." This results in a division of the faculties of the soul, which is wholly inconsistent with his maintenance elsewhere of the true view that the soul is one, but gifted with diverse energies. For while some of the faculties, as senses and imagination, are in both body and soul, others, he thinks, like will and intellect, participate in no respect in the body. 2 With such views of the origin of knowledge as the fore- going, the validating of knowledge becomes a hopeless puzzle. And, indeed, the epistemological and the ontologi- cal problems are scarcely conceived of apart. Thomas Aquinas approaches the former of the two problems from 1 See Met. i., prooem., cap. 1 ; Phys. i., cap. 1 ; and comp. Haureau, Philosophie Scholastique, ii., pp. 110 and 116. 2 Windelband (ibid. p. 325) holds that Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus alike followed the old Greek idea that, in the process of cognition, by means of the co- operation of soul and external object, a copy of the latter arises, to be appre- hended by the soul. This doctrine Occam rejected and held a view more akin to that of Locke and his followers. With him an idea is indeed, as such, a state or act of the soul, but it forms in the soul a sign for the external thing. 54 HISTORY OF OPINION the point of view taken by Aristotle in his doctrine of form and matter. The doctrine of universals as entities, and the attempt to explain and to validate knowledge, realistically, by the assumption of these entities, are abandoned by him. Such ideas he regards as mere fictions, wrongly posited in the interests of an attempt to explain the knowledge of things. But God knows all things in themselves, and has no need of the intervention of ideas. In Occam's writings the fundamental separation between the world of sense and the supersensible world bears fruit in the beginnings of a psychological and epistemological Idealism. The world of consciousness becomes another world from the world of things ; and sensuous knowledge loses for him its character of being a copy as compared with its real object. Between the psychological, the inner, reality and the ontological, or outer, reality there is a relation, but it is not that of resemblance. Perhaps the most important and distinguishing feature of the doctrine of the Middle Ages is its extension of that schism between faith and knowledge which appeared in the later writings of Augustine. Albertus holds that philosophy (as of knowledge) and theology (as of faith) can no longer be identified. All that is really known in philosophy by the light of nature holds good also in theology; but the soul of man can completely know only that the principles of which it carries within itself. Thomas seems to reverse the relation between faith and knowledge which Origen and Augustine (in his earlier writings) maintained. The rela- tion then becomes one of different degrees of development; but philosophical knowledge is given in man's natural endowment, which is brought to full realization only by the grace active in revelation. Duns Scotus goes further and maintains that theology is a practical discipline, while phi- losophy is pure theory. Philosophy is thus made a secular science set over against theology as a divine science. Here HISTORY OF OPINION 55 the relation becomes one of separation; and a contradic- tion is ready to emerge between knowledge and faith. This separation became, as the rights of reason were more vigor- ously maintained, a charter of liberty for philosophy, but a condemnation of theology to the prison-house of external authority. More especially as to faith and knowledge, Scotus maintains that belief in the Bible and in the infal- libility of the Apostles rests upon the authority of the Church. At one point, however, does this thinker keep alive the warm and vital thought of Plato, of Origen, and of Augustine. As an opponent of determinism, Scotus emphasizes the self- activity of will — as everywhere else, so also in knowing. He maintains, in opposition to Thomas, that thinking often depends on willing. The beginning of all knowledge can be called an act of receiving, inasmuch as every perception has sensation for its basis et seminarium, which is possible only as the result of an impression or image of the object. Even this, however, is not mere passivity. In all percep- tion, the external object and the perceiving subject co- operate. 1 The calling up of the phantasmata and their transformation in memory also implies activity of will ; still more does the active intellect, the power of the soul, which is related to the sensible images as light to colors. But especially where the thing is not certain, and the con- sent of will is compelled, belief (fides), as an act of will, is necessary. 2 Hence it follows that a great deal of our knowl- edge is based upon faith ; indeed, the greater part of knowl- edge is but a completion of belief. 3 These few thoughts concerning the philosophy of knowl- edge are discovered, only after winnowing them out of much chaff, in the thinking of the Middle Ages. The number of 1 Op. Oxon. I. D. 3 quaest. 4, 7, 8. 2 De Anima, quaest. 17 ; and Report. Par. IV. D. 45, 9. 3 Report. Par., Prol., quaest. 2. 56 HISTORY OF OPINION thoughts which has any essential value would scarcely be at all increased even if this very brief sketch were indefinitely extended. But they show how the continuity of human reflection upon the epistemological problem was maintained, and what are the matters in respect of its statement and solution which it was considered necessary to keep before the mind for its critical consideration. CHAPTER III HISTORY OF OPINION {continued) IT is a statement common among historians of philosophy that the foundations of the modern view regarding the sources, the nature, and the criteria of knowledge were laid by the reflective thinking of Descartes. And there is a cer- tain warrant in the facts themselves for such a statement. For it has been shown how that side of the philosophizing of Augustine over the epistemological problem which, in spirit and with respect to the significance of its conclusions, was opposed to the trustful attitude of Origen toward the illu- mined reason of the individual, and which upheld the au- thority of the Church against free critical inquiry, dominated the doctrine of the Middle Ages. Descartes, indeed, took the appeal away from this tribunal of ecclesiastical authority, to that which holds its court of judgment within the inmost recesses of every man's self-consciousness. In doing so, however, he only returned to the other and better side of the philosophizing of Augustine himself. Neither in acuteness of analysis, nor in clearness and beauty of statement, nor especially in his manner of finding the reality of the soul, of the world, and of God, implicate in the primary act of cog- nition, was the founder of modern philosophy the equal of the Church Father. Indeed, we fear it must be confessed that, with the exception of Kant and Hume, down to very recent years, modern philosophy has not been much superior to ancient philosophy in its handling of the most important points in the problem of knowledge. Logic and 58 HISTORY OF OPINION psychology have greatly flourished ; but a satisfying episte- mology has been less promoted thereby than it would seem reasonable to expect. The greater freshness and naivete of those earlier times, and the more ardent and unconcealed interest in the bearings of sceptical and agnostic conclusions upon the concerns of ethics and religion, make the thought of antiquity all the more profitable for studious consideration. The most distinguished exception to this disparaging view of modern efforts is, of course, Immanuel Kant. He was the first of all the world's thinkers to give to the problem of knowledge a formulated construction ; to attempt the follow- ing of this problem through many winding ways, down to its lowest depths and out to its farthest limits, in elaborate monographs ; and so to set his answer before mankind that thenceforth its immense significance and portentous claim could never fail of recognition. Few — even among the ancient and mediaeval teachers of the Christian Church — had more upon their heart and conscience the practical out- come of the attempt at a settlement of the problem. Out- side of what leads up to, and of what has flowed from, the Kantian critique of knowledge, there is little to add to ancient and mediaeval thinking, by way of profit derived from an historical sketch. Most of the philosophical works of Descartes bear upon his attempt to construct a theory of knowledge. His "Rules for the Direction of the Mind " is perhaps of first importance here ; while the " Discourse on Method " is more obviously directed to the same end. Some of the more impressive "Meditations" concern "Things that may be doubted," etc. The posthumous " Recherches de la Ve'rite* " deals, as its title signifies, with similar themes. In the First Part of the " Principles of Philosophy " Descartes discusses the founda- tions of human knowledge. Both his "Treatise on the Passions" and his "Treatise on Man" occupy themselves with safeguarding the mind against error and assisting it HISTORY OF OPINION 59 in the ascertainment of truth ; while even in his " Treatise on the World," his "Happy Life and Summum Bonum," and in many of his "Letters," such topics as truth, error, knowledge, and the validity of our ideas, are continually brought to the front. That there is a philosophical problem which demands inquiry into the inmost nature and the neces- sary limits of knowledge, Descartes expressly affirms. No subject of investigation, he thinks, can be more important; indeed, in one of his Rules (No. VIII.) he affirms, "There is here a question which a man must examine, at least once in his life, if he love the truth. " But his more distinctive merit lay in the proposal to make a methodical search after a science of man's cognitive faculty ; and to build upon the truth revealed by this search, when conducted to its utmost possible limits, a superstructure of truths which might with- stand all the assaults of scepticism. For so important did Descartes consider method in inquiry that he even goes to the extreme and absurd length of declaring it better never to discover the truth than not to use method in its discovery. It is quite unnecessary for our purpose to rehearse the well- known Cartesian tenets which have a bearing upon episte- mological inquiry. The return from trust in the principle of external authority to confidence in the witness whose light shines within the soul of every man, is the important contri- bution which Descartes made to the theory of knowledge in its more modern form. This inner light is to be disclosed, however, by the use of methodical doubt. In the primary fact of knowledge — the cogito, even if it be in the special form of a dubito — the self -known reality of the subject of cognition, and the implied existence, as not-me, of the object of cognition, are both to be discerned. For the cogito, in barbarous Latin, = cogitans sum : thinking is self-conscious being; and there are certain forms of this cogito which, when their nature as mental transactions is fully discerned, can- not be accounted for otherwise than on the assumption that 60 HISTORY OF OPINION somewhat other than the thinking subject has being too. Among those ideas which demand by their very nature an extra-mental correlate, the idea of God stands eminent and supreme. It appears, as of its own evidence, the idea of that which makes irresistible claim to be really existent. It thus becomes the bridge of Reality between the indubitably self-cognizing existence of the soul and the existence of the world of actual things. The several gaps in that Cartesian argument which sets the limits and establishes the validity of human cognitive faculty have often enough been pointed out. Of it all, only two things remain, forever sure and unchanging so long as the fundamental construction of man's intellect remains sure and unchanged : these are, first, the rights of methodical doubt, or (to use a more modern term) of a critical self-examination on the part of the knower; and, second, the necessity for acknowledging, theoretically as well as practically, the ultimate limits of this doubt when, by the critical process itself, we stand face to face with the implicates of every act of knowing. It was a hindrance to the development of epistemology that Descartes' elaborate doctrine of method, with the unwarrantable hopes and perverse trials which it excited, became so influential with his successors. For this he is himself largely to blame. He was always a dry light, with a mind better adapted for mathematics and speculative physics than for critical philosophy. His most admired type of investigation was the mathematical method, as involving "the analysis of the ancients," the "algebra of the moderns," and the application of both to geometry. The scope of this method he considered unlimited;, and for it he claimed a decided superiority over all other methods, as being the origin and source of all truths. In fact, however, the entire Cartesian method, as employed by its founder, is, in the last resort, an appeal to the self-conscious subject HISTORY OF OPINION 61 of all the states of knowledge. The final test of all truth is "the self -evidencing conception of a sound, attentive mind." Windelband 1 is, then, justified in affirming that the disciples of Descartes confounded "the relatively free creative activity " which Descartes himself had in mind (the analytical method as he pursued it) with "the rigidly de- monstrative system of exposition which they found in Euclid's text-book of geometry." In "all the change of epistemological investigations until far into the eighteenth century, this conception of mathematics was a firmly estab- lished axiom of all parties." It reached its culmination in the pantheism of Spinoza, where, without previous critical examination of the underlying assumptions of the mind, a logical systemization of the most abstract conceptions more mathematico is identified throughout with the essential truths respecting the really Existent. But even in Spinoza's case, the purely speculative interests were not left wholly without suggestion and control on the part of the practical and the religious. And at the last, the glow of that love which is the attitude of the philosophical mind toward the Absolute One warms and illumines the theorems of his barren and frozen theological geometry. In the total system, side by side with the beginning "Definition," "By substance I un- derstand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself," stands the closing axiomatic "Proposition": "He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his affects loves God, and better loves him the better he under- stands his affects. " Thus the way of mathematical demon- stration, on the unverified and uncritical assumption that conceptual gymnastics by seizing the rope let down by Euclid can climb alone to the heights of insight into Ab- solute Being, has become the way of salvation. It was in more simple and effective, if less elaborate fashion, that Jacob Boehme, and the Mystics generally, controverted and 1 A History of Philosophy, p. 395. 62 HISTORY OF OPINION abandoned the Cartesian theory of knowledge. With them, as with Spinoza at the last, the affectional and emotional interests prevailed — through help of the stimulus given to claims of knowing by means of faith, intuition, and the unreasoned leap to the seizure, as truth, of what the soul ardently desires. It was the Englishman John Locke who first pursued in more elaborate researches the psychological path to the prob- lem of epistemology. But alas ! like so many of his avowed or unconscious followers, he was guilty of the fallacy which lies in the supposition — even now so widely current — that a survey of the superficial content of our individual cogni- tions, and of their more obvious associations and logical relations, is a sufficient answer to the quest for a phi- losophy of knowledge. Thus having led us face to face with the problem, he leaves both us and it hanging in mid-air. It is indeed difficult to classify Locke with respect to the position which he assumes toward truly epistemological questions. It is, therefore, easy to deny that it is either the position of sensualism or the position of idealistic empiri- cism, or that of unqualified empiricism. 1 The epistemology of Locke is, doubtless, an espousal of some sort of empiri- cism ; but then of what sort ? To this the most obvious answer seems to be that he never clearly comprehended the inquiry into the nature of knowledge as a speculative prob- lem, which requires an analysis that goes beyond the analysis of descriptive psychology and results in disclosing and test- ing the ultimate metaphysical assumptions implicate in all exercise of cognitive function. To be sure, there is a recog- nized problem of knowledge in pursuit of some answer to which his whole course of investigation conducts him. He is induced to recognize this problem by following out his first and purely psychological inquiry, — namely, as to the 1 Thus Grimm denies that any of the current descriptions is satisfactory as applied to Locke. See " Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems," p. 340. HISTORY OF OPINION 63 rise of the ideas in grounds of inner experience. Even here, a soul, as a real being with an inherent capacity or sus- ceptibility to special forms of excitement, is assumed by Locke from the first. Certainly the founder of English psy- chology was very far from intending to teach a science of "psychology without a soul." But from the very first, too, as Locke himself assures us in his own account of what led to his investigations " Con- cerning Human Understanding, " and of what he hoped to accomplish by these investigations (namely, first, to " inquire into the original of the ideas ; " secondly, " to show what knowledge the understanding hath by those ideas, and the certainty, evidence, and extent of it;" thirdly, "to make some inquiry into the nature and grounds of faith, or opinion "), a there is a goal held up to view which the plain, historical method he pursues can never reach. " Knowledge of our capacity a cure of scepticism " is the heading of one of the earlier articles of his book. But when we are informed that, besides the presentations of sense, there are in con- sciousness certain other ideas, "originally begotten," which proceed from the operations of the thinking activity itself, and which become apprehended by reflection upon them, the need that criticism should be applied to these ideas is ob- vious enough. But if either of these classes of ideas, when — to use the Lockean expression — we "become conscious of them," are held to constitute cognition in the special sense, then the problem of epistemology is upon us with its full force. For the " original " of the cognitions is drawn from experience; but the cognitions contain what appears to transcend experience ; and thus what Locke defines as " the apprehension of the agreement or non-agreement of our ideas " is, as yet, not cognition at all. To explain its being transmuted into cognition, Locke has only the assumptions of a naive, common-sense realism. His account of "the 1 Book I., chap, i., 3. 64 HISTORY OF OPINION origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge " comes to an unsatisfactory end within the field of a descriptive psychology. It never becomes a truly epistemological affair; for it never bases itself upon a thorough sceptical inquiry and critical analysis of the processes and postulates of all knowledge. And the same shirking of the real problem of cognition, under cover of a descriptive psychology or a formal logic, has characterized the work of English writers almost down to the present hour. Perhaps the most important contribution which Locke made to a future theory of knowledge lay in the emphasis he placed upon a distinction between the primary and the secondary qualities of things. Berkeley, while pushing sceptical inquiry into the field of qualities of the primary order, the cognition of which was with Locke a kind of copy- ing-off process, still confined his critical philosophy to the nature and validity of sense-perception. He raised, how- ever, one forceful question in such a way as henceforth to allow of only one intelligent answer. How shall aught, not in reality mentally represented or mentally representable, be similar to that which is mentally represented ? What cannot in any manner or degree be mentally represented, that cannot in any manner or degree be cognized as really existent. It is here that the epistemological problem comes into closest contact with psychology. In the " Siris " Berkeley takes the position that phenomena — apprehended each for itself, as it were — cannot yield cognition. Their combination through rules or laws is necessary to make the actual world intelligible; and the corresponding combination of our mental representations is necessary to make cognition possible. To be perceived is still held really to be; but now we are informed that God is the ground of all reality, and that to be a mode of his law- abiding spiritual activity is, for things, really to be. Thus those things which formerly seemed to constitute collective HISTORY OF OPINION 65 reality are known to be only fleeting phantoms ; God is the one true principle of unity, of identity, and of existence. Knowledge is, then, the work of intellect or reason. Sense and experience make us acquainted with the course and analogies of phenomena (natural events); thinking, reason, intellect, brings us to the cognition of them and of their causes. It was, however, the acutely critical activity of Hume which began to give to the problem of the philosophy of knowledge its more nearly modern and final shape. This critical activity was, indeed, most effectively directed toward entangling the fundamental concepts of human cog- nition in seemingly hopeless contradictions. Nor can we agree at all with Riehl 1 in attributing to the Scottish phi- losopher the same motif as that which stimulated Kant, — namely, to lay the foundations of cognition for practical purposes more securely in rational faith. From the nega- tive and destructive effort of Hume, however, came a most important positive result. It was made clearer that cer- tainty, and true knowledge as always implying certainty, is not attainable through mere thinking, or concepts. From the psychological point of view Hume inquires, much more acutely and fundamentally than did Locke, into the "cer- tainty " as well as the " origin " of human knowledge. It is perhaps not incorrect, then, to speak of Hume as the first to develop a critical theory of knowledge out of the Lockean psychology of ideas. His supreme effort was to show how, admitting that criticism of the content of consciousness must lead us to scepticism concerning the reality of our knowl- edge, nevertheless the appearance, the conviction, of real knowledge arises as a matter of fact. Thus he aims at a complete psychological account of the origin of cognition, as comprising those beliefs and ontological postulates which practically defy the assaults of a theoretical criticism. 1 Der Philosophische Kriticismus, I., pp. 66 f. ; but compare p. 69. 5 66 HISTORY OF OPINION In Hume's account of the nature and process of knowledge, however, nearly everything is superficial and merely descrip- tive ; while the shifty and loose use which he makes of the conception of "experience" tends to constant confusion. All cognition, he holds, arises from one of two sources, and so may be divided into two kinds — cognition arising immediately from ideas, and cognition arising from experi- ence. 1 In working up — so to speak — the material which originates in these sources, Hume emphasizes the imagina- tion. According to three points of view, this faculty is wont to bind together the passively received ideas. These points of view not only form the rules according to which imagination actively combines the ideas ; they also give the relations which the mind recognizes as existing between things. They enter, at least partially, into the constitution of that object which rests upon experience, and which can, therefore, never attain an unconditioned certainty. These three points of view give (1) resemblance, (2) contiguity in space and time, and (3) causality, as the relations under which this combining activity of imagination makes the objects of cognition to appear in the guise of realities. Two of these three classes of relations — identity and the rela- tions of space and time — consist essentially in a passive reception of impressions through the organs of sense. But the relation of cause and effect carries us beyond the im- mediate perception of the senses, and presupposes a cer- tain further process which perfects itself within the mind. Here the distinctive part of Hume's theory of knowledge comes to the front. This process, which gives objects to experience as real and causally related, is a process of feeling and imagination, and not a process of reason. It is an act of the sensitive part of our nature rather than an act of thinking. Imagination, then, as the lively potency of ideas in combination, is the faculty in which Hume lays 1 Treatise, I., iii., section 1 f. HISTORY OF OPINION 67 the foundation of cognition. Memory, sense, intellect, all have their basis in imagination, which imparts lifelikeness to the ideas, and so constitutes the bridge between mere subjectivity and what we consider a real world of things. 1 This potency itself has its root in a sort of blind emotion on which our intellect can throw some light, but which it is powerless either to beget or to destroy. Feeling, therefore, is shown to be the ultimate foundation of all cognition. 2 As to limits, it follows that, in the strict meaning of the word, our knowledge cannot reach beyond that of numbers and magnitudes, and a knowledge of facts. The latter, how- ever, may be either knowledge of particular facts or knowl- edge of general facts, — that is, such as have to do with the properties, causes, and effects of an entire species of objects. In one class we may place the results of our investigations into history, chronology, geography, astronomy; in another class, such studies as politics, and the philosophy of nature, consisting of chemistry, physics, etc. Ethics and aesthetics are matters of feeling or taste. 3 In the attempt to validate our knowledge we see at once, Hume thinks, that one kind — namely, knowledge immediately from ideas — has a perfect certainty; since the relations of the ideas admit of face-to-face inspection, or envisagement, as it were. Its type is the knowledge of algebra, arithmetic, and geometry. But cognition from experience, or a knowledge of general facts by means of the principle of causality, has only a "moral" certainty. In the last analysis, then, as we see again, certainty does not repose at all on rational grounds, but on grounds of imagination and feeling. We are com- pelled "according to nature" to apprehend, or rather to be impressed with certain ideas, rather than others, in a peculiarly strong and vivid manner. If we surrender our- 1 Treatise, L, iii., section 8 f. ; Inquiry, section 5 ; Treatise, I., iv., section 2 f. 2 Treatise, L, iv., section 7. 3 Inquiry, section 12. 68 HISTORY OF OPINION selves to a complete trust in intellect, and try to reason ourselves into knowledge, we have no other device than the choice between false reason, utter scepticism, and a return to unreasoning faith. It thus becomes a necessity of practical life to cherish certain cognitions. Few thinkers have had, more than Hume, the fate of influ- encing the reflections of their successors, by way of suggesting and stimulating new endeavors and new resulting views, while at the same time themselves meeting with almost universal and even scornful and vituperative rejection. Hume cannot, indeed, be regarded as a serious, though sceptical and critical, inquirer after a doctrine of cognition, in the fashion of a Descartes or a Kant, or even of his own more immediate predecessor, Locke. At the same time it is doubtful whether any one in modern times, with the single exception of Kant, whom he stimulated and to whom he handed over his central problem, has made more important positive contributions to a theory of knowledge than those which may be gathered from the writings of this philosopher. A modern writer 1 on the his- tory of this theory has declared that Hume ends by doing away with all important distinctions between human reason and brute instinct ; and, indeed, that thus he does away with knowledge altogether. The critical part of our investigation, however, will make it apparent that knowledge is impossible for man without admitting the validating force of those men- tal attitudes, or activities, which are closely akin to wdiat we so vaguely call " instinct " in the lower animals. And they who make knowledge purely a matter of intelle dualizing, and who disregard what is contributed by imagination, feeling, and will, do away with real knowledge, as men actually have it in the concrete, warm, practical life of work-a-day experi- ence, quite as completely as does the sceptical theory of Hume. Moreover, in concentrating attention upon the syn- thetic force of blind imagination, in emphasizing the value 1 Grimm, Zur Geschichte des Erkeuutuissproblems, p. 557. HISTORY OF OPINION 69 and necessity of unreasoning beliefs, in holding that the intellectual use of the causal principle can never of itself serve as a bridge between the subjective world and things- in-themselves, and in concluding that our choice of certain practical postulates will be necessary in the last resort to validate our cognitions, what did Hume do but anticipate much which Kant subsequently elaborated in detail ? And as to manner of saying it, we are obliged not infrequently to ascribe the greater merit to the Scottish rather than to the German thinker. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Hume's more prominent opponents in his own country, the Scottish Realists, had not the insight to see what advantages were offered to them in their advocacy of ethical and religious truths, if, while pointing out the insufficiency of his sceptical analysis of the data of consciousness, they made good use of its several positive conclusions. And so, the rather, they abandoned investigation into a really critical theory of knowledge, and made a bid for popular favor in the form of a naive and uncritical return to the position of Realism. "With Leibnitz the epistemological problem is never pri- mary ; the nature of substance is his primary and all-impor- tant problem. It is not until about 1684 that we find in his writings any clear recognition of the existence of such a problem. Both before and after this date, what with Des- cartes was a criterion of truth becomes with Leibnitz an ontological predicate. Leibnitz was at first one of the most consistent supporters of the prevalent view which made mathematics the type of all genuine cognition. He was jesting, indeed, in his " Specimen Demonstrationum ; " but he was seriously of the opinion that philosophical controversies ought to end in a philosophy which could state its conclusions in as clear and certain a form as that employed by mathe- matical calculation. 1 Hence arose his thought of writing out the results of reflective thinking in general formulas, 1 See "De Scientia Universali seu Calculo Philosophico," 1684. 70 HISTORY OF OPINION more geometrico. Hence also his idea of the distinction between eternal truths and truths of fact (yerites eternelles and verites de fait). The former need no proof, are in- tuited as true in themselves, as " first truths " or " prime possibilities." As to the nature of knowledge, Leibnitz's position is largely determined by the leading motive in all his philosophical thinking, which is the reconciliation of the mechanical and the teleological views of the world, so as to unite the scien- tific and the religious interests of his age. To this end the important principle was announced and expounded : " Sub- stance is a being capable of action." This principle, although ontological in its character, could not fail to have a most important bearing upon the epistemological problem. By it the Cartesian co-ordination of the two attributes of sub- tance (extensio and cogitatid) was again abolished : the world of consciousness becomes the truly actual ; the world of ex- tension is phenomenon. Thus Leibnitz " sets the intelligible world of substances over against the phenomena of the senses, or material world, in a completely Platonic fashion." x Sub- stance becomes a unity in plurality, after the pattern of the self-cognizing unitary being of mind ; and space and time both belong to mental being. Even the deeper sense and justification of the ambiguity into which his doctrine of the monads, each one " representing " the world of reality, be- trays him, as Windelband declares, has its truth " in the fact that we cannot form any clear and distinct idea whatever of the unifying of the manifold, except after the pattern of that kind of connection which we experience within ourselves in the function of consciousness." It was mainly the criticism of Locke which compelled Leib- nitz to develop a theory of knowledge. Concerning the source of knowledge, he attempts a middle way between the positions of sensualism and the high-and-dry a priori theory. 1 Compare Nouveaux Essais, iv., 3, §§ 20 f. HISTORY OF OPINION 71 It is here that his conception of unconscious representations, or petites perceptions, arises. 1 The further important dis- tinction is made between states in which the mind merely has ideas, and those in which it is conscious of having them ; that is, between " perception " and " apperception." By the latter he understands " the process by which the unconscious, confused and obscure representations are raised into clear and distinct consciousness, and are thereby recognized by the soul as its own, and thus are appropriated by self-con- sciousness." The distinguishing activity of the mind as cog- nitive, the genetic process which conditions the unfolding of the psychical life, is the taking up of perceptions into apper- ceptions. 2 The " innate ideas," which with Leibnitz are, like the categories of Kant, forms of the functioning of in- tellect in its unification of knowledge, are implicit in the petites 'perceptions, as the involuntary forms of relating activity. As to the validating of knowledge, Leibnitz would have us distinguish two kinds of intuitive cognitions. Here he fol- lows a distinction as old as Aristotle ; but both kinds of intuition must possess the Cartesian marks of clearness and distinctness. Then in the case of one form, intuitive certainty reposes upon the principle of contradiction ; in the other form, the possibility guaranteed by perception of the actual fact needs still an explanation in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason. This distinction has reference, however, only to the human understanding. For the divine understanding, empirical truths, too, are so grounded that the opposite is impossible, although it remains thinkable for us. More and more, nevertheless, did this antithesis between necessary and contingent truths gain with Leibnitz an onto- logical significance. God's being is an eternal truth ; finite things are contingent and exist only in dependence upon the principle of sufficient reason. 1 Monadology, sections 14 and 21. 2 Principes de la Nature et de la Grace, 4 ; Nouv. Ess. II., ix. 4. 72 HISTORY OF OPINION In spite of the unsystematic thinking of Leibnitz, and of the fact that an elaborate and self-conscious theory of cog- nition never was wrought out by him, 1 he strengthened one or two truths of immense epistemological importance. With him, sensibility and intellect are not separate powers or dis- tinct sources of knowledge ; they are at most different stages of one and the same living activity with which the monad soul represents, and comprehends as it represents, the uni- verse within itself. Nor are the world of soul and the world of the really existent conceived of as having a " great gulf fixed " between them, over which some bridge other than the perfect, living activity of the soul itself mast be thrown in order to make possible a meeting of these two disparate worlds. The monad knows the world because its own self- known life mirrors the world ; its activity is the law of the world ; its mirroring is no passive reflection of dead and inert forms of existence, but an active and voluntary ideating. We are not left where Hume left us, to conclude by force of a doubtful use of a principle which itself defies the powers of reason to comprehend or to justify it ; in its own life the soul envisages force ; and the very principle of all concluding is itself the ontological law of the life of the really existent. The claim has been made that the " Nouveaux Essais " of Leibnitz stimulated Kant to build up its doctrine into a sys- tem of epistemology. Whether this claim be historically true or not, there can be no doubt that the lines which had been followed by the problems and answers belonging to the philosophy of knowledge, through both Leibnitz and Hume, united in Kant. To the lonely thinker of Koenigsberg it was given, first among men, to plan and to attempt the critique of human cognition in a manner which left the impress of his thinking upon both problem and its answer to the end of time. 1 He has himself meditated concerning the foundations of knowledge. " None are more important," he says in his " First Reflections on Locke's Essay." HISTORY OF OPINION 73 The space which can be given in this historical sketch to the Kantian doctrine of the nature, origin, limits, and criteria of knowledge bears no proportion to the importance of this doctrine in its influence upon the reflective thinking of mod- ern times. Certain points will be briefly stated ; for the common proof of which only the painstaking and thorough study of Kant can be, in this connection, adduced. For, con- trary to the somewhat widely prevalent view, there are few great philosophical writings in whose case single citations, if not taken in connection with prolonged study of the entire circle of the same author's writings, carry so little weight as do citations from the three Critiques of Kant. First of all, in respect of several most important points Kant cannot be reconciled with himself. How so thoroughly sincere, patient, and penetrating a thinker could involve him- self in such patent inconsistencies, we have probably lost the historical clues which might possibly enable us to tell in detail. Although the " Critique of Pure Reason " was so long and thoroughly excogitated and so quickly written, and although all three of the critical masterpieces were written at so late a period in the life of their author as to secure for them his maturer powers, they bear manifold marks that he had not thought himself all the way clearly and thoroughly through. Nor is this deficiency surprising in view of the magnitude of the task undertaken, of its essentially pioneer character (at least in the Kantian form), and of the splendor of the work actually accomplished. Nevertheless, the ambiguities and in- consistencies of Kant are too numerous and too important ever successfully to be denied. But, second, the deeper purpose of Kant remained from the beginning to the end of his critical era one and the same ; and this purpose was, by reconciling the two great schools as to the sources of knowledge, and thus by offering an explana- tion of the nature of knowledge which should have " sun- clear " truth for every one who once really understood it, to 74 HISTORY OF OPINION set irremovable limits to the pretence of knowledge and to clear the ground from it, in order to make room for the practical postulates of the life of conduct and of religion. The " Critique of Practical Reason," with its discovery of the lost truths of Freedom, God, and Immortality, was no after- thought with Kant. On the contrary, it was from the begin- ning his chief concern. Two or three pervasive causes of defect and of inconclusive- ness should also be borne in mind in all study of Kant's treatment of the epistemological problem. He, as is well known, constantly depreciates the influence of psychology (or the physiology of mind) upon a satisfactory epistemologi- cal doctrine. He wishes to keep his critique independent of all doubtful opinion regarding the descriptive and explana- tory science of cognitions. It must be constructed of a purity, of a universally and necessarily convincing character, which shall correspond to the purity and the necessary character of the elements criticised. But such an attempt to divorce the theory of knowledge from a critical opinion upon mooted questions in the psychology of knowledge is impossible of execution. The defective psychological basis of Kant is the cause of many important fallacies in his critical system. Certain na'ive assumptions of Kant — for example, as to the satisfactory character of the Aristotelian logic ; as to the nature of the so-called a priori concepts in general, and of mathematical concepts in particular ; as to a " pure science " of physics ; and as to the possibility of setting forth in demon- strative form the results of a critical estimate of cognitive faculty — are themselves in need of being subjected to the severest criticism. To do this, as has often been remarked, is to follow our leader in the spirit, if not in the letter of his system of thinking. Especially must inquiry be pressed into the sources and validity of those ontological postulates which are so grudgingly admitted in the " Critique of Pure Reason," and so generously but unwarrantably introduced into the HISTORY OF OPINION 75 " Critique of Practical Reason." But about all such dissent from Kant we refrain from anticipating further the course of our own epistemological discussion. Enough has been said to indicate his claims to precedence beyond all predecessors or successors in this field. They are : (1) the clear and comprehensive way in which he conceives of his problem ; (2) the thoroughness with which he employs the critical method as a matter of fundamental principle ; (3) the defin- itively ethical purpose which, although often for a time ob- scured, is really present and dominant from beginning to end of the critical inquiry. It has often been pointed out that Kant, by his critique of human cognitive faculty, intended to mediate between the extremes of dogmatism aud scepticism. 1 The position of the dogmatist, who regards transcendental truth as attainable only by some sort of copying-off process, he overthrows with the denial that the universal and necessary quality which such truth possesses could in this way be given to it at all. But he likewise intends to destroy that kind of scepticism which persistently overlooks such universal and necessary quality; and this he will do by showing how it is just this quality which makes any cognition possible. Thus the Kantian theory of knowledge appears before us as a living and inner combination of the two opposed theories held, respectively, by Wolff and by Hume. Sense and intellect, intuition and concept, are both necessary to knowledge. Without intuition concepts are empty, without conception sense is blind. The real thought safeguarded here is illumi- nating, and widely extends our view of the nature and limits of human knowledge. But, alas, the truth of the postulates which secure the central positions of dogmatic and rational realism is nowhere treated by Kant to a thorough criticism ; in 1 See, especially, his expressed intention " to steer reason safely between these two rocks," — the dogmatism of Locke and the scepticism of Hume. (K. d. R. V. (2d ed.) Analytic, chap, ii., sec. i. § 14.) 76 HISTORY OF OPINION the " Critique of Pure Reason," it is scarcely even brought to mind. Then, too, those suggestions with regard to the entire nature and full import of knowledge, with which the scepti- cism of Hume is so rich, are not made use of, so as to set the author of the three critiques himself free from the limi- tations of his own dogmatic rationalizing. For Kant's world of reality is cold and formal ; as a world of work-a-day things, it lacks heart and will ; and even as a world of conduct in pursuit of ideals, its postulates consist rather of a system of impersonal laws than of a social community, striving and counter-striving with reference to some far-off and dimly descried end of attainable good. Instructive as it would be, we cannot here follow the scat- tered indications which show how the critical philosophy of Kant probably took shape in his own mind. The Disserta- tion of 1770 is still dogmatic with regard to the problem of knowledge ; it assumes uncritically a correspondence between the world of concepts and the world of objective real things. It was to account for this correspondence, as growing out of the inmost nature of cognitive faculty, that the critical phi- losophy was undertaken. As we learn from his letters writ- ten to Herz in 1772, the "Transcendental Logic" is the thing on which Kant worked for ten years or more. The answer which comes forth as the product of so much travail of intellect is, in brief, this: The judging faculty, with its twelve forms of functioning (the a priori concepts of under- standing, the categories) produces the world of objective real things in the unity of consciousness. This doctrine of the absolute dependence of all objects of experience upon the constitutional forms of the functioning of intellect, in the unit}^ of consciousness, is the Kantian discovery. It was upon the basis of this discovery that he himself claimed to be the Copernicus of epistemological science. But we shall soon be made to see that the way in which its author states his great discovery, together with the unwarrantable infer- HISTORY OF OPINION 77 ence which he draws from it, lands us inextricably in a posi- tion of sceptical and agnostic idealism. In the development of his great epistemological thesis, especially in the " Critique of Pare Reason," Kant states the problem in several different and somewhat confusing ways. Among these, as the most definite proposal for a science of science, he affirms that he is aiming at a critique of all knowl- edge a priori, — that is, of all those universal and necessary factors of knowledge for which definite and concrete experi- ences, as such, do not account. " Philosophy requires a science to determine a 'priori the possibility, the principles, and the extent of all knowledge." 1 Surely the world needs to see that " there can be a special science serving as a cri- tique of pure reason ; " and that there should precede all attempts at metaphysics a " critique of pure reason, its sources, and limits, as a kind of preparation for a complete system of pure reason." But again, the broader question is proposed as the topic for critical investigation : How is expe- rience at all possible ? Yet again, the great problem is stated in form more deferential to the students of mathematics and physics : How is pure science possible, — (a) mathematics, and (b) physics ? And why do men so persistently follow the attempt at a science of metaphysics, in spite of the un- doubted fact that the issue of all such attempt is only ther unverifiable appearance of such a science ? Yet once more the problem is proposed in that form, nearer to the logician's heart, in which Kant so early began to reflect upon it : How is it possible that we should frame synthetic judgments which have universal and necessary validity ? In all the various ways which Kant adopts for stating the epistemological problem, there is something common ; and this common part comprises the essential puzzle of a critical epistemology. For whether I know things immediately by sense-perception (or intuition, to use the Kantian term), or 1 New headings in the introduction to the second edition, No. III. 78 HISTORY OF OPINION know about them by processes of reasoning that rest back upon observation through the senses, I am alike persuaded that my consciousness is somehow put in possession of the truth of things. For knowledge that does not carry convic- tion of putting us into possession of the truth of things, men decline to call knowledge at all. Experience is attained ; science is cultivated and increased ; knowledge grows by rising through higher and higher forms of synthesis toward an ideal unity ; but all this, from the psychologist's point of view, is subjective, is only a succession of more and yet more complex and contentful states of consciousness. And yet the moment we consider this as knowledge, it is something more ; it is the progressively perfect and comprehensive seizure by the human mind of the objective universe, the increasingly exact and detailed correspondence of the flowing stream of man's consciousness with the being and the movement of the world of things. How can this be ? Only, Kant answers, because this world of objective reality is the construct of the cognitive intellect itself, functioning in all its different con- stitutional forms, but always in the unity of the one unfolding conscious life. We shall not attempt to follow Kant into the details with which he laboriously furnishes us thoughout the first two Parts of the " Critique of Pure Reason." Our positions both of consent and of dissent will be taken in the subsequent chapters, for the most part without reference to him. Two or three main points of agreement and also of divergence may, however, be noted in this historical sketch. In his attempt at reconciling the claims of the exclusively sensational and the exclusively intellectual theories of knowledge, Kant set forth more fully than had any one else the complicated and combined uses of faculty in all our cognition of external things. Such cognition implies, (1) the arousement of the sensitive side of mind in response to stimulation from with- out (receptivity of sensibility) ; (2) the combining activity of HISTORY OF OPINION 79 image-making faculty (synthesis of imagination — a much truer statement of the actual facts of consciousness than all talk of mere passive " aggregation" and "agglomeration," or even of " association " of sensations and ideas) ; and (3) the exercise of judgment in one or more of its various forms of functioning. Without justifying the abstract and separatist fashion in which this schematizing is wrought out, we, too, believe that cognition of things is impossible without the so-called faculties of sense, imagination, and intellect, all being called forth and developed in their living unity. And it is not so much the complicated nature of the Kantian intellectual " machine-shop " with which we find fault as it is the fact that Kant has left out of his analysis of cognition two thirds of the complete whole. With Kant's main conclusion, that no analysis of knowl- edge is complete which does not recognize the universal, the necessary, and the eternal as seated within it, and that no reason for all this can be given which fails to reckon with the unchanging constitution of the mind, we also find ourselves in substantial agreement. Certainl}-, many of the details of his doctrine of the a priori nature of cognition can- not be maintained. Moreover, his entire conception of this element, at least as he sometimes presents it, may fitly enough be criticised. But, however particular and concrete our experience of this or that act of knowing may be made, and however contingent and fleeting the mental phenom- enon called knowledge (the " relativity " of knowledge) may appear, every " plain man's " consciousness envelops and cherishes the seeds of that which is absolute and unchang- ing. That this is so, a thorough analysis of all which is involved in the most primary cognitions indubitably reveals ; and how it can be so, can only be explained if, sooner or later in the course of our analysis, we invoke with Kant the hypothesis of constitutional forms of functioning for that living and developing existence we call the Self, or 80 HISTORY OF OPINION Mind. As the author of the " Critique of Pure Reason " himself repeatedly states his conclusion, the accredited objective reality of the world of finite physical phenomena can be maintained only in connection with the equally accredited transcendental ideality of the same world. It is the work of mind which makes the world to appear as a system of legally related beings. The subjective gives laws to the objective. The forms of cognizing faculty set terms to our cognition of things. But from this positive and relatively indisputable conclu- sion of a critical study of knowledge Kant leaps at once, and often without a show even of laying the stepping-stones of an argument, to a wholly negative and agnostic position. Space and time are, without further critical examination, declared to be " mere form of our intuition " (blosse Form eurer Anschauung) ; " they can never tell us the least thing " about that eatfra-mental reality which, however, — as Kant himself asserts, either naively or perforce, driven by the uni- versal conviction, — lies at the foundation of, and is the ultimate explaining cause of the phenomena. 1 Now it is plain that unless time has some kind of transcendental reality, change cannot be a characteristic of the real world ; and if we are not able to affirm or to postulate the reality of change, knowledge itself — both as respects its subjective content and its trans-subjective reference — becomes impos- sible. One way of recovery, however, consists in showing that throughout Kant's discussion of both space and time, the question as to the psychological origin and nature of human mental representations corresponding to these words, and the question as to the possibility and the nature of the ontological correlates of these forms of mental representa- tions, are constantly confused. In this confusion the true epistemological problem, as to the nature, extent, and proof 1 See the " General Remarks on the Transcendental ^Esthetic " in the second edition. HISTORY OF OPINION 81 of the truth of our mental representations is almost wholly lost out of sight. So, too, it is declared by Kant concerning all the consti- tutional forms of the functioning of intellect in the knowl- edge of things, that they are mere forms of our minding, and can never tell us anything about the transcendental reality of things. The categories, indeed, seem " to be capable of an application beyond the sphere of sensuous objects. But this is not the case. They are nothing but mere forms of thought." 1 Matter itself is substantia phenomenon. It is never known as anything but the intellectualized "phe- nomena of the external sense." And as to "the transcen- dental object, which is the ground of this phenomenon that we call matter," it is a "mere somewhat" (ein Mosses Utwas, a nescio quid) of which " we should not at all understand what it is, even if some one could tell us. " 2 Such nescience, dogmatically asserted and boldly declared forever irremov- able, is the negative conclusion of the Kantian critique of knowledge; and that, as to the assumed entities which lie within the comparatively narrow limits of what is admitted to belong to the sphere of knowledge. But when the case comes forward for adjudication upon the merits of the claims put forth to know the Self, and God, or any invis- ible non-sensuous realities, it goes much harder against the plaintiff. For in all this realm, according to Kant, intellect is lured on by an irresistible dialectic of self-deceit (eine Logik des Scheins). And by this he will not allow us to suppose that there is meant such an estimate of probabili- ties, or balancing of postulates, as often we must accept in the "room" of surer cognition, and must make use of as man's best substitute for demonstrated truth. But he would have us understand that all our choicest structures of rea- 1 On the " Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena." 2 " Of the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection." 6 82 HISTORY OF OPINION soning on such subjects are full of the dry rot of innumer- able paralogisms and antinomies. Therefore they vanish in dust and ashes of this same illusory dialectic, as often as the finger of critical inquiry touches them. As to the truth of the charge that human reason is involved in hopeless "paralogisms" and "antinomies," we shall inquire more particularly in a later chapter. And the inquiry will show that most, if not all, of these alleged paralogisms and antinomies exist in rational consciousness only as they are put there by the critic of reason himself. Such of them, however, as cannot be quite so summarily dealt with will be seen to be premises, or starting-points, or incitements, to the outreach after those higher truths in the full apprehension of which the very appearance of paralogism or antinomy passes away. But what we wish now to cry out against involves two quite unwarrantable assumptions in the critical philosophy of Kant. The first of these is his proposal to limit the extent and the claims of experience, with its ripening into full fruitage of assured knowledge, to the domain of sensuous cognition. Episte- mological criticism itself shows that neither scepticism nor agnosticism can maintain any right to dig a ditch between the domains of the things of sense and the things of the spirit. Or, at any rate, if scepticism digs such a ditch, and agnosticism consigns to it the alleged entities of the soul and of God, it is quite impossible to keep the choicest curios and even the most substantial furniture of the physical sciences from being flung unceremoniously into the same ditch. The things of science need salvation both by faith and by works quite as much as does the soul of man or the soul of the World-All. But, second, we object to the off-hand assumption that — to employ the Kantian terminology — the transcendental ideality of things is identical with the transcendental non- reality of things. A protest to this crucial estimate of the HISTORY OF OPINION 83 use made of the critical method by the author of reason's Critique has already been entered. But the protest needs at this point some further explanation and enforcement. Let it be granted that all cognition is, as described by psychology and handed over to the philosophy of knowledge for its profounder analysis, a subjective or ideal affair. Let it also be granted that all cognition, regarded as giving us a world of objects which are set in fixed and legal relations to each other, can only be accounted for by referring it to fixed laws, or constitutional modes of the functioning, of the cognizing subject, — the human Self or Mind. Let it also be granted that no means can ever be discovered, not only of knowing but even of imagining in the most shadowy way, what are the nature and modes of behavior of so-called " things-in-themselves, " — meaning by this realities regarded as out of all relation to the cognitive human mind. Still the assumption which Kant impliedly finds fault with Aristotle and with all his own predecessors for making — namely, that the fundamental forms of cognition also some- how correspond to the forms of the being of things given in cognition — cannot be curtly dismissed. At any rate the denial that this correspondence is actual, or that it may be actual, cannot be dogmatically made by the critical investi- gator of cognitive faculty, who remains faithful to his task of analyzing and explaining the entire structure of human knowledge. In fact, we shall show that some such assump- tion is of the very essence of cognition itself. To put the same protest in yet more familiar terms, let us suppose that I am told: "All this fair and orderly world of so-called material things is but phenomenon of your consciousness. Sun, moon, and star, as well as the clod beneath the foot and the rose on the bush, and even the child or the wife by your side, is, and ever must be, for you, this only — your idea." What response is possible but this? — "Yes, truly, no object of knowledge exists for me, except 84 HISTORY OF OPINION as I know it to exist ; and for me, there is nothing known, without my cognitive activity. " But suppose I am further assured that the case is worse than this. All the perma- nent and necessary forms of the things you know — what they appear to you to be and to do — depend upon the char- acter of the tissue, as it were, upon the warp and woof, of your cognitive faculty. This knowing of yours is your knowing ; it is your finite, relative, and merely human way of sensing, imagining, and thinking things. Yes, still truly, although, perhaps, not quite so obviously. For I know no way of knowing but that which I suppose I share in common with my fellow-men. I also suppose, if I should ever come into possession of quite other and now wholly in- conceivable ways of knowing, that these, too, would still be my ways of knowing. And if 1 could not recognize them as " my " ways, then this new form of mentality would not be what I now call "knowing;" nor could I communicate its content to other minds, or even know of the existence of such minds, unless I then, as now, supposed that these other minds were of like constitution with myself. At this point we come upon the fundamental fallacy of the Kantian critical philosophy in its effort to accomplish the end which it deliberately chose as the highest of its entire endeavor. This end is the placing of the life of conduct upon sure foundations. "I had, therefore," says Kant, 1 "to remove knowledge in order to make room for faith. " " All speculative knowledge of reason is limited to objects of experience (the world of things regarded as merely phe- nomena) ; but it should be carefully borne in mind that this leaves it perfectly open to us to think the same objects as things by themselves, though we cannot know them. " Thus, in the "Critique of Practical Reason," the transcendental realities, and the actuality of our non-sensuous relations to them, are brought back to our possession, but only as postu- 1 Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. HISTORY OF OPIXION 85 lates needed for the life of conduct. We may act — nay, we are bound to act — as though a world of ethical personalities constituted like ourselves were in existence, and as though our thoughts about God, freedom, and immortality were true; we must not, however, affirm that such realities are in any way, or degree, given to us as objects of knowledge. Now the inadequate and false psychology which teaches the doctrine of a " thought " justifiable about things, which neither starts from nor leads to safer foundations of knowl- edge, and which separates cognition and belief as though they referred to totally different spheres of objects, will be exposed in the proper place. What is here necessary to emphasize with regard to the outcome of the Kantian critical philosophy is this : Human nature cannot be divided into mutilated halves, one of which is valid for the cognition of sensuous things regarded as mere phenomena, and the other of which is valid for the rational apprehension (''thinking about," "having faith in," or seizure in anyway — call it what you will) of transcendental realities. Human nature, as cognitive faculty, is one thing throughout ; its functioning, in all spheres, is as a living unity ; its growth, in all stages and degrees of development, falls under the principle of continuity. The man of science is also the man of good or bad moral character and the man of religion or irreligion. When knowledge has been, whether rudely or ceremoniously, banished by the front door of the temple of reason, it cannot afterward, whether pompously or surreptitiously, be intro- duced again by the back door concealed beneath covers labelled "faith," or "practical postulate." Religion itself is an attitude of the whole man, — intellect, feeling, will. Knowledge is also an attitude of the whole man, — intellect, feeling, will. Mere thinking, or pure faith, is as impotent in ethics or religion as it is in science. But there is no science that is not of faith, and does not include thinking. To return to our critical estimate of Kant, one is forced 86 HISTORY OF OPINION by every interest of logical consistency, however strongly adverse other interests may be, either to refuse, almost in toto, the conclusions of the " Critique of Practical Reason " or thoroughly to revise the conclusions of the "Critique of Pure Reason. " Accepting the negative and agnostic outcome of the earlier treatise one cannot follow Kant in accepting the positive gift to a rational faith that is offered by the later treatise. Here is the case of a clear-cut and inescapable " either-or. " Believe something and know something, and so perchance be saved for this world and for the world to come; or else doubt and deny consistently, and manfully face your fate in both worlds. The indubitable law which Kant finds implicate in moral consciousness, in the form of a categorical imperative, he states as follows : a " Act so that the maxim of the will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation." There is something painful about the effort which the great critic of all cognitive faculty makes to expound the " purity " of this law, its perfect freedom from all doubtful and empirical data. The argument by which he supports this favoritism shown to the practical reason (as though, indeed, it were a separate faculty or store-house of faculties), and proves its " primacy " " in its union with the speculative reason," fails completely. Unless the life of conduct is known to be regulated in accordance with actual relations of a self-cognizing Self to a system of cognized realities, — selves and things, — it is absurd to speak of it as "practical" or as having any "fundamental law." But if the forms of our cognition are supposed to be merely sub- jective, and to give objectivity to their own functioning without implicating corresponding forms in the actual rela- tions of the, for us, extra-mentally existent, no meaning can be given to this fundamental law of the practical reason. "The Kantian theory of knowledge, then, of necessity 1 Critique of Practical Reason, Book I., chap, i., § 7. HISTORY OF OPINION 87 breaks down when it virtually tries to vindicate for the metaphysics of ethics and the practical reason what it had denied as forever impossible in the functioning of the pure speculative reason. We say 'virtually,' for its author obviously foresaw that both scepticism and dogmatism would, from their respective points of view, attack his transcendental ethical system; and he strove hard to defend it against the charge of inconsistency. Kant will not at first call the practical reason ' pure, ' because he wishes not to assume a pure practical reason, in order rather to show that it exists. But its existence being shown, he considers that it stands in no need of a critique to hinder it from trans- cending its limits; for it proves its own reality and the reality of its conceptions by an argument of fact. We may know the fundamental law of the practical reason ; it bears the form of a command, — a categorical imperative. What- ever principles are, as necessary convictions, attached to this principle are postulates of the pure practical reason. Hence we find Freedom, Immortality, and God restored from the spaces swept empty by the critique of speculative reason. " But Kant's categorical imperative is itself only an imper- fect and faulty generalization from empirical data of ethical feeling, judgments, and conduct. It is not even an exact summary of the testimony, in reality, of human moral con- sciousness. Were it a true generalization, however, and therefore worthy to be itself called a knowledge, it could be shown to be dependent for its validity upon many subordi- nate conceptions and convictions which must also have the validity of known truths. Otherwise, the categorical im- perative itself is condemned as the vague and illusory dream of the individual consciousness. Metaphysical postulates, other than the three acknowledged postulates of the pure practical reason, with that inseparably adhering conviction which makes them principles of all knowledge as well as principles of all thought, enter into the very substance of 88 HISTORY OF OPINION this categorical imperative. Beings, with powers called ' wills, ' rationally answering to ends that involve other beings- not-themselves but like constituted, and who may be expected to act as bound with their fellows in a system of moral order — all this, and much more, is involved in the main principle of the practical reason. But what an infinity of knowledge, made knowledge by the suffusion of rational thinking with rational conviction, and in some sort placing the mind of the individual face to face with a world of reality, is here ! Some of these are the very things of which we have been told, as the result of the critical process applied to speculative reason, that they may not be spoken of as ' known, ' but may only be permitted to thought, with- out hope of finding content for the empty form, no matter how much we extend the bounds of experience. If these postulated entities and relations are not real, then the cate- gorical imperative and all it implicates is but a dream — nay, it is only the dream of a dream. Must we not then, in consistency, either include all — and especially the categor- ical imperative with its accessory postulates — under the condemnation uttered by consistent scepticism, or else retrace the steps passed over in the criticism of speculative reason, and discover grounds for a larger ' knowledge, ' with its eternal accompaniment of rational faith ? " The same fate must await all those theories of knowledge which end in scepticism as the result of critical processes. Nor is the fate much better of those theories which endeavor to save from scepticism certain portions of human knowl- edge, while denying in general the possibility of validating knowledge as such. The principle of self-consistency is of the last importance to reason. It is in fact only one form of stating the undying self-confidence of reason. The prac- tical exhortation of experience in noetical philosophy is, then : Let us by all means maintain a rational consistency." l 1 Quoted from the author's " Introduction to Philosophy," pp. 186 f. HISTORY OF OPINION 89 It would seem as though one lesson in the philosophy of knowledge should be thoroughly learned for all time from the example of Kant. Between the outfit of man for a scien- tific knowledge of the world of sensuous facts and of their connections, on the one hand, and his outfit for the life of conduct and religious belief on the other hand, no great gulf can be fixed in the name of a consistent epistemology. We cannot " make room for faith " by " removing knowledge " ; we cannot posit knowledge in spheres where faith has no province. We cannot virtually discredit the cognitive faculty of man throughout, and then save to knowledge, or to faith, or to practical postulates, some specially favored kind of cogni- tion. Neither can we undermine the foundations of the plain man's consciousness and trust the superstructure of philoso- phy's more ponderous and towering speculative thought. 1 In closing this historical sketch we only mention three attempts subsequent to Kant that supply elements to the philosophical account of knowledge which his criticism had either neglected or relatively depressed. Fichte emphasizes feeling — especially moral feeling; Hegel emphasizes the dialectical process, or thinking; Schopenhauer emphasizes the intuitive attitude of will. But neither of these at all approaches Kant, either in the critical spirit or in the patient, detailed investigation which the latter brought to bear upon the problem of knowledge. Fichte based the validity as well as the constitution of knowledge upon feeling, as yearning and as certitude. The criterion of cognition he makes, not insight, as Reinhold had done, but rather an intellectual feeling of certainty which cannot be explained. This emotional attitude is in- separable from every content of thought, and from all activity 1 In Mansel's " Limits of Religious Thought " we have an example of the futility of trying to secure to faith what has been made impossible or absurd to knowledge. In Bradley's " Appearance and Reality " we have an example of the futility of trying to secure by speculative thinking what has been made both impossible to faith and absurd to knowledge. 90 HISTORY OF OPINION of thinking. It is, however, only immediate and probable, not demonstrable; it is to be assumed as necessarily be- longing to every Ego. But the highest form of cognition is that which arises out of the ethical feeling of responsibil- ity, which issues out of a recognized fiat, "Thou shalt." 1 Hegel takes many important exceptions to the conclusions of Kant respecting the possibility, the criteria, and the limits of knowledge. To the latter's agnostic outcome he opposes the claim by logic (now no longer a "logic of illu- sion") to unfold the very nature of Absolute Being, read- ing in the inner movement of reason's dialectic, as Kepler did in the movements of the planets, the very thoughts of God, after Him. "Thoughts, according to Kant," says he, "although universal and necessary categories, are only our thoughts, — separated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from oar knowledge. But a truly objec- tive thought, far from being merely ours, must at the same time be what we have to discover in things, and in every object of perception." These two elements, Being and Thought, which Kant had separated, after " denuding them " of what they have in their united existence, Hegel would bring together again. The conceptions which are analyzed out of the process of thinking are the categories of reality ; they must be understood as "moments" in a living develop- ment. Our knowledge is not merely of the phenomenon. The rather "is the phenomenon the arising and passing- away of that which itself does not arise and pass away, but is in itself, and constitutes the reality and the movement of the life of truth." But this notable and praiseworthy attempt to overcome the agnostic outcome of the Kantian critique, which Hegel elaborated, itself issues in positions that are theoretically one-sided and practically faulty. Our entire epistemological theory cannot safely be resolved into an assumption that 1 See especially his " Essay on the Grounds of Certainty in Religion." HISTORY OF OPINION 91 when we have discovered the categories, and arranged them systematically so as to construct a circle or globus of such pure concepts, we have justified our faculty of cognition against all the assaults of scepticism and agnosticism, or have even succeeded in understanding it. Moreover, the ontological postulate, or view of reality which conceives of Spirit as possibly having being-in-itself that is not also being-for-itself, is full of internal contradictions. Nor are the Hegelian antinomies much less dangerous to the validity for reality of our thoughts than are the antinomies of Kant. Indeed, they may be understood so as to prove more danger- ous. For Kant's antinomies, if admitted, only affect a limit to human efforts in applying our sensuous imagination to subjects with which it cannot rightly claim the ability to deal. But the antinomies of the Hegelian dialectic, con- ceived of as an essentially true representation of the nature of all reality, have their seat in more vital parts of the organism of knowledge. And, practically, the history of human experience has since shown that Hegel's philosophy extols theory too much, and makes it a substitute for insight, for instinct and feeling, for morality as conduct, and for religion as life. There are few passages in any of our modern books on philosophy which, when read in the light of the day of their writing, seem more timely and suggestive than the latter two thirds of the first Book of Schopenhauer's " World as Will and Idea." In these pages the author, with much ill- concealed scorn of Fichte and Hegel, and with considerable invective against their views, propounds his own theory of knowledge. His earlier work on the " Four-fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason " presents some of the most technical parts of his theory in a more systematic form. His "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy" develops his views further, though chiefly in a polemical and negative way. The positive merit of Schopenhauer's utterances con- 92 HISTORY OF OPINION sists in their bringing forward — if we may venture upon such a term — the " biological view " of the origin, nature, and criteria of human cognition. Over against knowledge by concepts — that knowledge which Hegel identified with the very life of reality — Schopenhauer maintains the claims of perceptual knowledge, of the immediate seizure, as a matter of warm feeling and energetic volition, of the really existent relations of things and of events. The Kennen of the artist, or the discoverer, or the true saint, is surer knowledge, he thinks, and less fraught with erroneous fragments of so-called " reason's " manufacture, than is the Wissen of the man of science. For intellect, impelled by the will to live, and guided by the feeling for what is seemingly good to live by and upon, brings us more immediately and surely to the heart of reality. And intellect, in Schopenhauer's vocabu- lary, is not a reasoning faculty; it is the unreasoned envis- agement of the presence and significance of the principle of sufficient reason as constitutive of the world of things. We need not delay to criticise the extremes to which Schopenhauer carries his view of the superior value of per- ceptive as compared with conceptual knowledge. It is enough at present to say that the marked separation which he makes between perception and conception is psychologi- cally false. Knowledge is not, indeed, mere thinking; but, then, there is no knowledge to be had without, at least, the primary activities of thinking faculty. And there is surely no structure of knowledge, no growth and systematization of cognitions which we can take, even on faith, as representa- tive of the world of real beings and real events, without elaborate activity of thought. We turn now to face for ourselves the different, though not distinct problems which enter into the one great problem of knowledge. This brief survey of the history of opinion, if it does not start us on our way with handfuls of coin which will pass current in the markets of the present world HISTORY OF OPINION 93 of thought, may serve to warn us in what direction our journey lies, through what thickets and swamps we must find a path, and over what mountains we must pass ; as well as — surely a no less important lesson — what short cuts we must avoid taking with the vain hope thus more easily to reach the desired end. But when we have reached this end, and look back to find the views we have taken by the way, all confirmed by the more profound insights and permanent impressions of those who have travelled before us, we shall the more confidently believe that the truth of cognition has been found as it is justified in the truth of things. CHAPTER IV THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW THE necessity for steadfastly maintaining the proper psy- chological noint of view in all reflective consideration of the philosophical problem of knowledge has already been v sufficiently emphasized. A sketch of the history of opinion has shown how light broke in (for example, through Augus- tine, Descartes, Hume) upon this problem whenever an improved acquaintance with the nature of concrete mental phenomena was gained. It has also shown how, even in the case of the greatest of all critics of the human faculty of cognition, a certain despite of "mental physiology," or of the natural history of psychical life, and an excessive credulity toward the accepted forms of logic, was productive of important errors. Indeed, throughout the historical development of epistemological philosophy, defective and one-sided views of the psychology of cognition have been the chief sources of the fatal extremes of dogmatism and of agnosticism. We propose, then, to begin our discussion of the epistemological problem by taking the psychological point of view. What has psychology, as the descriptive and explanatory science of mental phenomena, to tell about the origin, the nature, and the growth of human cognitive faculty ? Whence comes knowledge ? What is knowledge ? and What is the course of its development ? These are the inquiries for which an answer is now sought from experience ; and for the kind of answer now sought, there is no proper recourse but to the THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 95 concrete, plain, work-a-day facts of human consciousness. It is not what the master of the subtleties of scholastic logic, or the student of psycho-physics by laboratory methods, or the philosophizer already committed to some metaphysical dogma thinks about knowledge, — which we now wish to know. It is rather just what every one actually experiences who affirms, "I know;" and just what they experience most fully who have made most advancement in genuine knowl- edge. But, of course, it turns out here, as everywhere when search is made for the truth of things, that the content of life is much richer, and its complexity of method and of products much greater than human science is easily able to depict or to comprehend. The plain man's work-a-day con- sciousness perpetually achieves the end of cognition ; but it is too deep for the logician, the psychologist, or the philosopher of any school to fathom. And the danger of error from fail- ure to include important elements in one's catalogue of the "facta," or "momenta," implicate in every "I know" is far greater than the risk of putting more into this catalogue than life has itself put there. Indeed, the descriptive and explanatory history of cognition comprises no less than the whole of psychology. As to the Origin of Knowledge it is possible to speak clearly only after the meaning given to the term has been strictly defined. That psychological fact which induces the search after its own begetting and birthright becomes an actual matter of experience only when the records of the exact history of its sources have been lost beyond the possi- bility of complete recovery. Men find themselves already well advanced in the growth of cognitive faculty before they begin to ask whence this faculty with its resulting products has arrived. And after a critical inquiry into origins is undertaken, both the inquiry and the summing up of its re- sults in recorded experience must take shape either as knowl- edge or as the pretence of knowledge. Unless I already know, 96 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW with faculties developed far beyond the point when the first datum fit to be called " knowledge " arose in consciousness, I cannot intelligently raise the question, Whence comes knowl- edge to me and to other men ? If examination is made of the inferior cognitive faculty of the lower animals, or of the earlier forth-puttings, the budding cognitions of the human infant's mind, the examination and its conclusions can assume only those points of view which belong to an adept in the use of cognitive faculty. Now, while this fact does not by any means debar us from forming justifiable impressions as to the manner in which we ourselves, and all other men, begin the life of cognition, it does limit the nature and restrict the proof which is accessible to us by immediate observation of all the actual processes of cognition. There is one meaning to the word "origin" which is cer- tainly unwarrantable and useless in the effort to throw light upon the epistemological problem. Yet, alas, this meaning has been in the past most frequently, and is now in certain quarters most persistently, employed. The fallacy involved in the figures of speech which are commonly employed by those who undertake the research into the origins of things physical condemns, for their utter inadequacy, all the so- called " sensational " theories of knowledge. These theories find their explanation of the beginning of knowledge in the assembling somehow of sensations and of the revived images of past sensations, called ideas, under the well-known laws of association. It is assumed by them all that when mental states, or forms of the functioning of mind — even including those elaborations called cognitions — are described " content- wise," they are adequately described. It is also assumed that the particular content called a " sensation, " either in its original or transformed character as an "idea," exhausts the entire catalogue of mental contents — the whole life of mind, even when described "content-wise." Now the peculiar fal- lacy of which all sensational theories are guilty in this con- THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 97 nection is shared by them with the greater part of the modern science of origins, as this science is taught by the current biology. This is the fallacy of so working the principle of continuity as to do away with essential differ- ences by substituting for their honest and frank recognition and explanation a connection between them, often conjec- tural, under the forms of time or of causal influence. A similar fallacy afflicts sorely all the psychological sciences, — the sciences of man both as an individual and in all the various forms of his relations and development as a race. It is the very bone and flesh of the hypothesis customarily applied to these sciences. In biology one at least knows what real transactions are referred to, if one hears of the " origin " of the individual animal from an impregnated egg, or of the " origin " of the fully developed plant from a germ or seed. In the case of the animal an actually existent cell from the male parent has fused with a cell from the female ; and out of the product of this fusion — though in most marvellous and mysterious fashion — has followed a growth which results in the full complement of organs possessed by the adult animal, as united anew in the offspring. In the case of the plant the process is markedly similar. So, too, one knows what is meant when the chemist affirms that water has its origin in the union of oxygen and hydrogen gases ; or, conversely, that these gases may have their origin in the chemical analysis of water. But only a most shallow student of biological science considers that a complete account has been given of the origin of the adult by describing the physi- cal and chemical properties of the egg. For, besides such more obvious factors in the scientific account of the genesis and development of animal organisms, there are many others which must come into the complete account. These may be roughly divided into two classes: such as take the individual animal out into what is known of the beings, forces, and 98 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW laws of the "cosmos " at large; and such as end in the unex- plained mystery of the " nature " of the individual animal. In the case of the drop of water, too, there is something vastly more in the compound than can be accounted for by rehearsing the marriage service over oxygen and hydrogen gases as a merely numerical formula of 1000 to 2002. But the case of the student of psychological origins is nota- bly different from that of the student of biology or of chem- istry. For the psychologist there exist no real factors, or actual antecedents, which he may observe in their isolation, or understand previous to their combination or while they are in actual process of combining. Strictly speaking, there are no sensations, simple or complex, and either actually existent or representatively existent in the imagination and thought of the observer. So-called sensations are themselves the product of the analytical activity of self-cognition, — quite impotent, therefore, to establish any claim to be or to act of themselves, as though separable from the cognitive process it- self. To speak of the origin of knowledge from a combination of sensations is, then, to deceive one's self with a misapplied figure of speech. Sensations are not entities, even of the psychological order; and if they were entities, they are not the kind of entities to offer, by any combination, in however large quantities and high degrees of value, an adequate ex- planation for the origin of knowledge. What has just been said of sensational theories of knowl- edge is also true of all strictly ideational theories. The psychological doctrine of Herbart, .especially as it came to its ripest fruitage in the later work of his distinguished pupil, Volkmann von Volkmar, has been of great value to modern psychological science. Its value lias been increased rather than diminished by its frank avowal of the need of metaphys- ical standpoints and by its tenacious defence of the propo- sition that mental phenomena are all to be considered as " forthputtings " of the unfolding life of mind. But in its THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 99 doctrine of judgment, and of feeling, and of will, — and so of all these as constituting two thirds or three fourths of cognition, — its weakness is most manifest. Cognition can- not, either for its origin, or for its nature, or for its growth, be considered as completely explained by any theory of ideas. It is true that the later developments of the Herbartian doctrine, especially as set forth by Yolkmann, include under the term " idea " various complex forms of mental functioning ; true also that they emphasize, in a commendable way, the active rather than the passive aspect of ideation-processes (Vbrstellen rather than Vorstellung or Das Vorgestellt). They thus succeed both in getting a richer content into their description of mental phenomena, and in regarding these phenomena " function-wise " as well as u content- wise " much more faithfully than do the advocates of the sensational school. But we must not be deceived by increased subtlety of analysis and more generous use of terminology. As will be made clear by the detailed and critical examination of the nature of cognition, every mental positing corresponding to the words " I know" implies something far more than can be explained by combination of ideation-processes. As to the possibility of a purely biological or physiological explanation of the origin of knowledge, the case is so hope- less that it is scarcely worth while to argue it. For those, however, who incline to confuse such an explanatory theory with another contention quite different, we have presented the subject in another place. 1 Thus far negatively. In some sort, however, appeal may successfully be made to modern psychology to render an account of the origin of knowledge. Such an appeal may rightfully expect an answer in both of two ways. Psycho- logical analysis can exhibit those manifold factors which may be discerned by the self-cognizing mind as characterizing its activities on the way to, or after it is regarded as already hav- 1 See the author's " Philosophy of Mind," pp. 98 f., 115 f., 229 f. 100 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW ing reached, the mental attitude called cognition. Of course, by the term " factors," in all such connection, one must not understand separable entities, or even actual separable ele- ments or momenta of the complex mental state. But the trained self-consciousness of every man enables him to ob- serve with concentrated attention now one and now another of the so-called faculties of mind, or forms of psychical function ing, as they are concerned in the living unity of an act of knowing. This analysis of self-consciousness may be made, by exercise and study of mental phenomena, by growth in depth and in quickness of insights, more rich in its response to the call for a true picture of actuality. The actuality of cognition belongs to every human consciousness as an incon- testable fact ; but the analytic discovery and portrayal of this actuality is a matter of combined science and tact, as is every other matter of psychic life. And like all matters of psycho- logical science, this study may be enriched by observation of others and by the experimental method. Not only the so-called psychic factors, but also the prin- ciples according to which these factors combine, may be made the subject of inquiry. In the actual process of cog- nition the different forms of mental functioning (which are the realities corresponding to the word " factors ") rise and fall in extensity and intensity ; they come forward and take the lead, so to speak, or retreat into the background of a relative obscurity and insignificance. In knowing anything, for example, I am at one instant more obviously sensing it through this, and at another instant through that, avenue of sense. In other words, the particular " Thing " is now to me a thing chiefly of sight ; now of touch and the muscular sense ; now, perchance, of taste or of hearing. But again, the same thing, in the same complex process of cognition, is rather known by being judged to belong to this or that class of things, or by being thought about as standing in this or that relation to me and to other things. And yet, THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 101 anon, the same thing is more felt and cognized as opposed to my will, — a forceful thing, that will not what I will, and that reveals itself as a resistance to the forthputtings of my embodied Self. In all this living flux of my conscious life, this stream of consciousness I call my cognizing Ego, with the rise and fall of the varying shades of sense, judgment, feeling, and will, the object there, the " real Thing," becomes known to me. In the meaning, then, of giving a descriptive history (accompanied by certain meagre and tentative explanatory remarks) of the different factors discovered in what is called a cognition, and of the way these factors behave with refer- ence to each other and to the Self, the origin of knowledge may be said to be explained. But by the word " knowledge " (" yours " or " mine," or u his," or that of the race) men generally intend to designate something more than a. single process of cognition. It is, indeed, only this single process, and usually only a part even of any single process, which can be made the subject of intro- spective or experimental study. But in some sort, the mental doing and achieving which ends in the judgment " I know " does take place under the mind's immediate gaze ; it may be self-consciously known to be going on. Yet even if this analysis were far more certain and comprehensive than it is, no one would think of claiming that it alone could result in a science of the origin of knowledge. The origin of knowledge may, then, in a certain way be understood by adding to our descriptive history and tentative explanation of the single pro- cesses of cognition a somewhat similar history and explanation of the enlargement of the content of knowledge and the growth of the faculty of knowing, in the individual and in the race. Here memory must be summoned to the front ; for it is de- signed to study our own processes of cognition in their rela- tions to each other, as they have actually occurred in time. But memory of our own past states will take us only a little 102 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW way here. Hence the value of comparative psychology for a mastery of the descriptive history of cognition. On the gen- eral assumption (which is sufficiently well verified) that our own earliest mental states, the forerunners and preparers of the fuller activities of adult cognition, corresponded in kind to such of our present mental states as appear to have least of the more prominent cognitive factors, we may employ in- trospection still further in studying the origin of knowledge. For example, I may give an attentive study to my own states of reverie and dreaming (when I am more exclusively bound under the laws of the association of ideas), or of absorption in sense or in pleasurable or painful feelings (when I am eating with a good relish, or suffering from toothache, or enjoying music), or of abstraction (when I am more " purely " thinking.) It appears, then, that the stages through which the growth of cognitive faculty passes in the life of the individual and of the race, may be made the subject of more or less successful investigation ; and something may also be confidently asserted as to the laws which control this growth. In some sort all this may properly be called a study of the " origin of knowl- edge." But here again one must not be deceived by the charms of any particular evolutionary hypothesis, whether as applied to the development of the individual or of the race, into supposing that cognition can be wholly accounted for, as respects its sources, by giving the detailed account of that which is not cognition. So often as this is done, the mystery of the actual achievement of cognitive faculty is explained (sic) by being overlooked or buried beneath a heap of rubbishy figures of speech. The only answer, then, which can be given to the inquiry after the psychological " origin " of knowledge falls most fitly under the titles, the " nature " and the " growth " of knowledge. In other words, when that has been told which can be told in response to the questions : What is cognitive faculty, regarded as activity and as resultant ? and, What are THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 103 the successive stages in which it unfolds itself? — nothing more is to be said about the psychological genesis of this faculty. At no step in these inquiries should it be supposed that anything is added to the science of cognition by identi- fying in thought things which are not actually the same ; and a merely genetic and psychological study of the phenomena will never suffice for the solution of the epistemological prob- lem upon this point. Several most important corollaries follow from what has just been said ; and these concern both the method of psy- chological study which is fitted to present the epistemological problem, and also the character and extent of that which our study can hope to accomplish. A certain prejudice, not altogether wrong and unnatural, exists in these days against the refinements and subtleties of analysis. But a theory of knowledge, from its very nature, requires, chiefly and almost exclusively, refinement and subtlety in analysis. The entire science and philosophy of cognition, the complete mastery of the secrets of cognitive faculty, is necessarily a matter of thorough analysis and of sound discursive reasoning upon a basis of such analysis. Who will tell us all that can be told about the mystery of the conscious processes of every human being when he reaches the mental attitude expressed by the words " I know " ? Who will furnish the theoretical justifica- tion for that trust in the human mind which it belongs to human nature, however often and sorely baffled, continually to cherish ? Who will set the theoretical limits to scepti- cism, and administer the convincing theoretical rebuke to agnosticism, for the rational comfort of doubting and despair- ing souls ? Only he who can most fully and convincingly expound the length and breadth, the heighth and depth, of man's power to know, and the extent and strength of the grasp of this power upon reality. But this end can be reached only by analysis. Certain partially successful prac- tical refuges may indeed be offered for extreme scepticism 104 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW and agnosticism. But the only refuge which can serve the persistent inquirer must be found in a better understanding of what it is to know, and of all that every act of knowledge implicates. The path to this refuge is an analytical and dis- cursive exploration of cognitive faculty itself. From the same statement of the facts in the case we derive a certain set of limitations to our expectations concerning what we may reasonably hope. This consideration of limits is important, both in a theoretical and in a practical way. For depressing scepticism and despairing agnosticism are most often reactions from the breaking-down of unwarrantable expectations or unreasonable hopes. It cannot be too con- stantly borne in mind, then, that no standpoint outside of reason itself is attainable for the more secure criticism of reason. The self-limiting nature of sceptical inquiry into the validity of knowledge, and the self-destructive nature of the agnostic conclusion to terminate this inquiry, will be shown in due time. But it is well at the outset to remind ourselves that we, as critics of cognitive faculty, cannot claim any point of vantage which towers above the cognitive faculty itself. The philosopher may, perchance, tell the plain man more than he can himself discover of the content and the meaning and the implicates of the plain man's mind ; but what the analyst sees, and even what he imagines he sees, is all contained within the known or the imagined horizon of their common consciousness. Special gifts at dialectic, claims of intellectual intuition, visions of the Platonic ideas, lofty or profound insights into the mysteries of the transcendental realm, are all of account here only as they can justify them- selves and their deliverances at the bar of that reason in which all men have a share. The critique of cognitive fac- ulty neither has, nor can attain, a point of view outside of the domain ruled over by that faculty. Flights sunward are limited by the sustaining power of that very atmosphere above whose dust and smoke-begrimed regions they rise. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 105 Again, no certification of knowledge is possible that is not somehow found actually existent within the process of cogni- tion itself. If scepticism is self-limiting, and the extreme of agnosticism self-destructive, it is equally true that the positive and dogmatic resultant of analysis is self-limiting also. The process of certifying stops somewhere ; it cannot, of course, go on forever. And where this " process " stops as a process, what other kind of certification can be either expected or actually found ? Plainly, the answer to this question leaves us with some total attitude of mind, or in face-to-face recog- nition of certain implicates of all cognitive processes, which do not admit of any certification lying outside of that which they themselves possess. In other words, critical analysis of the nature of cognition, with a view to certify it, ends in the discovery of aspects, or factors, or implicates, of every exer- cise of cognitive faculty, which are self-certifying. The in- quirer after certitude observes or infers his way up to this point, and then finds certitude in reposing there. The de- tailed exposition of this truth is the most important and difficult part of every philosophical theory of knowledge. But at the outset it promises a saving of time and strength, which will otherwise be wastefully and even foolishly em- ployed, to recognize the absolutely inevitable character of this truth. If by analysis, a fundamental and universal position of certitude belonging to every act of genuine cognition is discovered^ we cannot be asked to certify this feeling of cer- titude by discovering another position of a similar kind. If by analysis we find that judgment in cognition is of its very nature, a positing in reality of the object of cognition, we cannot be required to justify this judgment by a process of reasoning that could itself only repose on judgments of like character. Dispute and argument cannot serve as grounds for that which is assumed in all proposal to dispute and to argue, invariably and with an absolute necessity. They who will not be satisfied until they have certified, in infinitum, all 106 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW certitude would found the world of human reason as the East- Indian myth founded the world of matter. But the world of human reason is a self-supporting and self-sufficient cosmos, rather than a flat and level expanse, resting on the back of an elephant, supported by a tortoise, — and so on. Or, to bring somewhat the same truth before us in a state- ment even more naively adapted to make it self-evident, no other kind of knowledge is possible, or even conceivable for us men but human knowledge, — or just such knowledge as all men know themselves to have. This is a primary and invin- cible epistemological postulate. The picture of a divine in- tuition that should have no thought in it, as Kant attempts repeatedly to sketch the picture, is as purely imaginary as the conceit of a dialectical unfolding of concepts that never come to a resting-place in any intuitive knowledge. But both are alike due to the unwarrantable hypostasizing of a one-sided recognition of the work actually done by all human cognitive faculty. The effort to exalt cognition by stripping it of some of the fundamental qualifications which belong to it in a living human experience, and then to set it over against its actual self as a something worthy of envy by itself, if only it could be attained, always ends in the very opposite of what is in- tended. If our human knowledge cannot be shown to include some sure envisagement, so to speak, or trustworthy mental representation of the being and doings of the Really Existent, then no other knowledge more inclusive can ever be the object of our striving or even the subject of our inquiry. Let us, then, from the beginning, renounce all vague long- ings and vain efforts after the absurd and the impossible. It is not to dehumanize ourselves by a self-apotheosis that we are called. But, on the other hand, it is not to annualize ourselves by reducing man's birthright to the limitations of a merely sensational and ideating consciousness. Epistemology does not propose to enter upon the manufacture of knowledge, by putting inferior raw stuffs into an empty receptacle and taking THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 107 out the finished product as the resultant of their combination, before a bewildered crowd of spectators. The mystery of cog- nition will certainly not be diminished, it will very likely be not a little increased, by what the most accurate and thorough analysis can accomplish. Nor can the seeker after a critical theory of knowledge secure or maintain any standpoint supe- rior to that of the multitude of rational souls, from which to view the nature, or to discover the certification, of cognitive faculty. What he finds of the supernatural must be imma- nent in, or implicate within, the nature of all mankind ; what of the divine must still be clothed in recognizable human garb. Or, to drop all figures of speech, the thorough analysis and reflective discussion of the cognitive faculty of man — how it behaves, how it grows, what is implied in it by way of feeling, faith, envisagement, postulate, or other form of implicate — is all that the psychology and philosophy of knowledge can rightly aim to accomplish. The details of the first introspective and experimental an- alysis, and the resulting descriptive history of human cogni- tion belong to psychology. 1 As to the Nature of Knowledge, psychologically considered, it will then be necessary here only to call attention to the following series of propositions, which form the basis of further reflective thinking upon the epistemological problem. All cognition is consciousness. The reverse proposition, that all consciousness is cognition, by no means follows. What consciousness is in general, or what is any particular form or modification of consciousness, cannot, of course, be known without assuming the activity of self-cognizing faculty. This amounts to saying that without self-consciousness there can be no science of knowledge ; and that the systematic study of the nature, growth, and implicates of knowledge demands highly developed activities of the self-conscious order. There 1 For these details see the author's " Psychology, Descriptive and Explana- tory," especially chapters xiv., xv., xvi., xx., xxii. 108 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW is abundant indirect evidence, however, that all the very earli- est, most of the earlier, and many of the later modifications of the " stream of consciousness," neither of themselves amount to cognition, nor do they terminate in a mental atti- tude which can properly be called an act, or fact of cognition. But, on the other hand, a continuous stream of cerebrations, a psychic act or factor, or an inference that is not in and of consciousness, certainly cannot have the epithet cognitive attached to itself. The extremest form of a mind-stuff the- ory, the older or newer forms of the Leibnitzian hypothesis, which assume an unbroken series of consciousnesses, varying from zero to the unity of developed apperceptive self-con- sciousness whether correlated or not with physical and neural aggregates, have no bearing on the problem of epistemology. The conception of " unconscious knowledge " remains not only untenable, but even impossible to frame. One may be par- doned, perhaps, for saying " I must have felt (or imagined or inferred) it to be so without being fully conscious at the time ; " but one cannot say " I knew it, and yet I was unconscious when I knew. ,, Whatever may be held as to the possibility of certain lower forms of psychic manifestation being correlated with the functioning of the sporadic ganglia and spinal cord of the lower animals, or with the different parts of those worms which allow of subdivision without loss of animation, or with the different micro-organisms, or even with the life of the plants, cognition appears to require a highly elaborate nervous organism crowned by a cerebral development. In Schopenhauer's careless language, knowledge of under- standing is only the phenomenon of the self-objectifica- tion of Will in the brain. It is not necessary to occupy ourselves with the crudities of this, or of any other material- istic hypothesis on this subject. But the biological connec- tion of that most elaborate physical organism, the brain, with the life of conscious cognition is full of meaning. The white THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 109 blood-corpuscles can do certain wonderful and purposeful things ; and so can the cilia on a bit of skin from the throat of the frog. So can microbes, and harmful germs, and helpful germicides, innumerable. How much of such doing, which seems full of a sort of knowing (a Kennen, if not a Wisseri), is really dependent on or is, at least, correlated with " momenta " of consciousness, even if they are not organized into a stream of consciousness, one cannot very confidently affirm. But when we approach an act of cognition, properly so-called, we have long since passed beyond the border-land of the uncon- scious. To speak of unconscious knowledge would be no less absurd than to speak of " wooden iron." Just as the physi- cal basis of all psychic life reaches its culmination, puts forth its supremely noble blossom in the convoluted hemispheres of the human brain, so does the life of consciousness reach its supreme manifestation, its crowning achievement in those forms of consciousness, called acts of knowledge, which depend upon the employment in their integrity of these hemispheres. All cognition is a conscious process, a process in con- sciousness. But not only has each act of cognition a con- scious character; it has also a becoming of its own character; it is a coming to a peculiar kind of consciousness. The experimental demonstration of this truth, too, is complete. Reaction-time is prolonged in some sort of proportion to the extent, the certainty, and the clearness of the cognitive process which it measures. If mere sensation is called for, and signalled as arising in consciousness, then the reaction- time is relatively short. If sensation, more accurately discriminated as to quantity or quality by comparison with a memory-image is demanded, then reaction-time is more prolonged. But if the full-orbed and perfected act of cogni- tion, resulting in judgment that posits a relation between self and its object, with the essential accompanying seizure of will and feeling of certitude, is demanded, then still more 110 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW time must be allowed for the achievement of so elaborate a conscious process. Moreover, each act of cognition, so far as its time-rate, its order of the succession in fusion of different psychic factors, and its richness, clearness, and distinctive characteristics of content are concerned, is an individual affair. No two human beings are alike in these particular features of their cognitive faculty. Habits and "types," in multiform combi- nations of the different kinds of sensation, and of intellec- tive, affective, and voluntary activity, characterize the individuality of every person. They also impart individual- ity to each exercise of the complex faculty of cognition. To know this or that thing, even by the most immediate and rapid of observations, is a different affair for different minds ; a different affair also for the same mind at different moments of its experience. The unceasing and infinite variation of that species of mental states which we call cognitions shows that they are all, properly speaking, not mere states or statical conditions of consciousness, but con- scious processes or changing modes of the conscious pro- cedures of psychic life. Special experiment and ordinary experience alike prove that, within limits, the introduction of new elements, whether arising through external stim- ulus or from internal sources, and with or without con- scious volition, changes the character of the cognitive issue; this it does by affecting the "stream of consciousness." After it gets started, so to speak, we can disturb, divert, modify the exercise of cognitive faculty so as to alter more or less profoundly the concluding judgment which marks the attainment of knowledge. Cognition regarded as result- ant depends upon the influences which determine the cogni- tion regarded as a process ; but it is also a matter of sure proof that cognition is itself a process having a certain termination, appropriate or perhaps peculiar to itself. This truth regarding the psychological nature of every gen- THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 111 uine act of knowledge can be brought clearly before self- consciousness in cases where the conscious process is at the same time slowly evolved, yet vivid and picturesque, and is watched and remembered with interest and accuracy of intro- spection. For example : I am standing at the street's corner, waiting for a car and looking straight before me, but ab- sorbed in thought about a lecture to be given later in the day in a neighboring city. Suddenly the stream of reflective consciousness is interrupted. All at once I become con- scious of an obscurely perceived (but, by no means, clearly apperceived) human figure which seems struggling toward the focus of attention in the field of consciousness, of a feel- ing which is a mixture of pleasure in recognition and of perplexity as to the propriety of recognition, and of a dis- tinct motor tendency to bow and to raise my hat. This complex mental "state" (which is not itself, however, a status, a stationary experience) almost immediately fuses with another state in which the perception-content has more clearly defined itself — sensation-wise and memory-wise ; now the feeling has become a mixture of disappointed expec- tation and of lingering though fast failing doubt ; and the motor consciousness is chiefly that of a strongly inhibited tendency to move the arm upward and to stare at the ap- proaching form with inquiring eyes. And, finally, the psychic process that started off on the way to an act of cognition which would have been recognition of a friend, with its ap- propriate affective and motor accompaniments or commingled factors, has become a completed cognition of an object clearly differentiated from the object expected, a self-recognition of the just previous mistaken attitude of the mind toward its object, with the appropriate changes in the affective and motor accompaniments. To use the language of every-day life : At first I saw the approaching person very dimly, but half-unconsciously fancied it was my friend, felt pleased, and was about to raise my hat and extend my hand. Then I 112 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW saw more clearly, though not with perfect distinctness, doubted my just rising judgment, experienced a reversal of feeling and a check to the motor activities which I had begun. Finally, I clearly and indubitably saw that the per- son was not the one I had at first imagined, then judged with- out further hesitation, U I do not know you," and deliberately suppressed the rising tide of friendly feeling and the actions which were to give it expression. All this, however, occu- pied not more than a second and a half. The total expe- rience was not three successive and separate states, or statical conditions, of consciousness; it was one living process, terminating in knowledge. Physiologically described, what probably happened was this. The cerebral hemispheres, in which the physical basis of cognitive consciousness is laid, were preoccupied with those molecular changes which are the conjectural correlate of the process of thinking rather than of sense -perception. The lower ganglia and centres of the brain responded promptly and effectively — accord- ing to the power which in them lies — to the sensory impulses thrown in upon them along the nerve-tracts of vision. Certain ideation and motor responses habitually connected with similar impulses were awakened in these lower centres; and the impulses were started down the motor-tracts. But as these sensory impulses, in the succes- sive fractions of the second and a half rose, spread over, and mastered the higher centres of the brain, the character of the ideation and motor responses became changed. The new form now given to the latter overtook the earlier motor impulses and inhibited them before they could get the muscles well under way. Psychologically described and explained, however, we have here a cognitive process, going on to its completion in that mental attitude which is called judgment, with its consciously recognized content, its feel- ing of certitude and other affective moods, its support and outcome in volition as engaged in attention or otherwise, — THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 113 all under the mind's eye. In one word, we have the birth of cognition, self-consciously known as a conscious process. All cognition, moreover, is objective consciousness, or awareness of an object. As to the ultimate nature and sig- nificance for man's intellectual, moral, and religious life, of the object given to consciousness in cognition, it is the busi- ness of the appropriate philosophical disciplines to inquire. But at present it is simply the objective nature of cognition as displayed in indisputable psychological facts, upon which emphasis is laid. Unless the process of consciousness be- comes objective, unless the stream of consciousness termi- nates in a "position" taken and regarded by the conscious subject, as corresponding to the nature and behavior of the known object, we have no right to speak of it as knowledge. Mere sensation, mere belief, mere association of ideas, mere thinking, may perhaps be conceived of, if not actually experienced, as merely subjective; but knowledge cannot even be so conceived of, or thought about. By its very nature it is always objective. Conversely, whatever state, condition, activity, or process, in consciousness is capable of being considered as merely subjective, such state, condition, activity or process is never to be called "knowledge." Sensation, belief, association of ideas, thinking, may all be considered as constituents of cognition; without them all, no cognition were possible. But merely as such, whether single or in combination, without acquiring by the combination something more than their inherent subjective quality, they cannot be identified with cognition. Indeed, it is this pecu- liar characteristic of objectivity which, as was seen when we were extricating and defining the epistemological problem (Chap. I. passim), starts the critical philosophy of knowledge upon the basis of the full and accurate psychological descrip- tion of the nature of knowledge. Of all the profitless fallacies of psychology, old or new, that is perhaps supreme which explains the act of cognition 8 114 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW by explaining away its peculiar matter-of-fact characteris- tics. In combating these fallacies at their initial position, fortunately or unfortunately nothing can be done which is more effective than to insist upon the actual facts of the case. These facts are given, in spite of any contradictory or disputatious doctrine of so-called psychological science, in every plain man's consciousness. "Fortunately or unfor- tunately," it has just been said. "Unfortunately" so, if those students of psychological science who wish to accept the concrete and content-full actuality of mental life must be compelled to refute by arguments those who would rule out of their account much more than half of this actuality. " Fortunately " so because, when the very nature of science and of its proofs is understood, it is found that the postu- lated objectivity of knowledge lies at the base of all scien- tific research and scientific discovery. Indeed, without it, the very word " science " has no meaning in such connection. There are several current and yet specious ways of speak- ing, which may or may not amount to a denial of the real objectivity of all cognition. We are often told, for example, that knowledge can only be "of phenomena." By this it is ordinarily intended to carry some such concealed syllogism as the following: Knowledge is merely subjective; its object is necessarily no thing but what appears to conscious- ness. Its object is subjective, mere appearance to the sub- ject. Therefore it is illusory; and cognition must not be supposed to afford a correct picture or other mental repre- sentation of Reality. All knowledge is only "of phenom- ena. " Now some of this and of all similar talk is undoubtedly true, is merely correct statement of incontestable psycho- logical fact. But most of it is just as undoubtedly false from the start, and contradictory of incontestable fact. It is true, as has just been admitted, that knowledge is always essentially of consciousness, a conscious process; therefore subjective. It is also true that the object given to the grasp THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 115 of consciousness, whenever an act of cognition is completed, is my object, is the thing as known to me. It may then — borrowing a figure of speech derived from certain acts of vision which is helpful, but, like all other figures of speech, needs careful interpretation — be called "a phenomenon," or appearance to me in my consciousness. But it is the very reverse of the truth to say that knowledge is merely subjective; for until the stream of consciousness, the state or activity of the knowing subject, has become also objec- tive, cognition has not taken place. The very problem in epistemology, which excites the greatest interest and calls out the supreme critical effort, is just this : How shall we account for the undoubted and indubitable fact that my subjective experience can be objectively determined, can become knowledge of an object ? "In vain is the snare spread in the sight of any bird." And this proverb ought to prove true, no matter how foolish the bird or how skilful the fowler. For suppose that one is again reminded : " Yes, undoubtedly the phenomenon you know appears to you as an object, in the fullest meaning of that word, even as a really and entfnz-mentally existent Thing; but so it only appears, so you think it to be, and so it is as phenomenon merely." The answer of escape is ready as soon as the meshes of this net are made visible. It may be made in this way: Thus stated, the conclusion totally perverts and squarely contradicts the facts of experience. For the very nature of every object of my cognition is such that, as object, it refuses to be identified with my subjective condition; it will not be described as my sensation, or my thought, merely; or as mere appearance to me, as only a phenomenon. So that the problem remains, deeply and inextricably woven into every portion of my most funda- mental experience : How shall I account for the undoubted fact that when I know, the object of my knowledge is not mere phenomenon ? Surely, to tell one that cognition is 116 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW only of phenomena is to ask one to accept an explanation which begins by explaining away the very facts which consti- tute the problem. " Nor is it true " — to quote from Stumpf 1 — " that natural science deals only with phenomena. There is not a single natural law which admits of being expressed as a law of mere phenomena. " Not more happy and profound, though more convincing to a large number, is the declaration that man can know only his own states of consciousness. Here, too, there is truth of fact mixed up with error in fact and falsehood in inference. That all knowledge is a state of some one's consciousness, or rather, a conscious process belonging to the life-history of some mind, is a fact that cannot be doubted. And how absurd it is to ask for some other knowledge that takes its standpoints outside of or above the laws of human conscious- ness, or for a cognition that is other than human cognition, has surely been affirmed quite often enough. But to say that I can know only "states," and among conceivable "states," only such as I am obliged to refer to my Self as " my own " states is to contradict twice over the plainest and most universal facts of knowledge. Indeed, it would be truer to the actual, concrete experience of mankind to remark that one can never know any mere "states of consciousness," much less one's own states simply. For knowledge is not more truly to be described as " of states " than it is to be described as " of phenomena. " Properly speaking, such ex- treme solipsistic psychology is a meagre and yet false way of identifying cognition with self-consciousness. To be con- sistent, it must end with the denial of cognition altogether ; and it must couch this denial in terms so absurd as really to be unstatable. It may be granted, as an assumption implied in a construc- tive theory of psychology, that having states of consciousness does not necessarily imply cognizing them as one's own. In 1 Psychologie uud Erkeiintnisstheorie, p. 316. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 117 other words, being conscious and being self-conscious, even if a trace of the latter be involved in every known case of the former, are not identical processes. But it must be, not simply granted as an assumption, but also recognized as a fact, that to speak of a knowledge " of states only " is to misrepresent all our cognitive experience. That which is given to the cognizing subject as its object in every act of cognition, is something more than "states," whether of his own or of another being. Indeed, the very word, whether used as applied to the self or to things as known by the self, is a relative term ; and this word no more fitly represents a real object of cognition than do phrases such as " pure " substance (or substance unqualified) or "pure " quality (qualification, that is, which qualifies nothing, and is — so to speak — auf der Luft). What is meant by "states," and by all terms which can be substituted for this term, is the more or less continuous condition of some being, its mode of existence or of behavior regarded as filling an interval of time. If, then, we mean to limit the cognitive faculty of man by identifying the object of cognition with his own states simply, and thus to deny its power to apprehend or comprehend real beings as in those states, we make the mistake of identifying an ab- straction with an actuality. This mistake is the more fatal because it happens at the very beginning of an analysis of the genuine act of knowledge. Phenomenalism and the ex- tremes of individual idealism are forever, professedly, fight- ing shy of abstractions. They exhibit an anxiety, usually earnest but often excessive, to get at the concrete facts and to tell a plain, unvarnished tale about them. Hence the customary amount of polemic in the treatises on mental life produced by them, and which is directed against hypostasiz- ing the results of the thinking faculty. But what, taken at its literal worth, is this conclusion which they themselves support ? It is an hypostasis of the abstract and purely imaginary statical condition of a being, which is made to 118 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW take the place of the living and acting reality. The ab- straction ends in a denial of the possibility of knowledge, because the essential and unique characteristic of the act of knowledge, as determined by its objectivity, is removed from the primary fact of experience. This characteristic assures us that the object of cognition never is, and never can be defined as "states only;" it ever is, and ever must be, "existences in states," — real beings that are suffering or acting in certain ways. Suppose, however, that the primary psychological datum as regards the object of knowledge is somewhat more gener- ously treated, while stated in terms of essentially the same theory. We are now invited to consider the declaration that the only possible object of cognition is the being I call myself, as known to myself in its various successive states. "I can know only my own states of consciousness" now T be- comes equivalent to this : The only way of certified knowing is, after all, self -consciousness, and the only kind of imme- diate knowledge is the knowledge of the Self — my Self (a word which may be identified, according to the psychologist's humor toward the prospect of ethical and theological conse- quences, either with the so-called " empirical Ego " or with a Ding-an-sich Ego which forever calls forth but deludes and eludes its own cognitive powers). The false positions and mistakes in philosophy which follow upon setting such a limitation to the objectivity of knowledge, will continually appear more clearly as our epistemological analysis moves forward. It is sufficient at present to notice that the con- clusion at which this theory of knowledge arrives, and usually without any sufficient show of examination or argu- ment, is all involved in its starting with a denial of the plainest facts of the conscious cognitive process. That pro- cess is, in its very essence, as experienced by every man, objective with reference to, and with implicates of, a wof-sclf, — this, just as certainly and truly as of a self-conscious Self. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 119 Perception by the senses, when it reaches full-orbed apper- ceptive cognition, is just as undoubtedly an act involving the reality of its object, as is the clearest, compietest conscious- ness of one's own states. What philosophy has to say of the more ultimate natures, and of the relations in reality, of these two classes of objects, does not concern the present argument. Be the outcome of further reflective thinking some form of dualism or of monism, of realism or of idealism, the nature of the primary act of cognition remains unchanged. And it is this from which all epistemological theory takes its point of starting. It is this to which it returns for the testing of its validity as conformable to the facts of experience. It is this to which fidelity must be maintained at any cost to the smoothness and consistency of the theory. For if this is lost, all is lost. The denial of the full import of the primary acts of cognition is the denial of the possibility of knowledge of any kind ; it is the abandonment of all attempt at a critical epistemology. Much more than a numerical half of our earlier cognitions, and these the more impressive and important for the safety and development of our entire spiritual life, have for their objects the states and relations of things. About these objects the "plain man's" consciousness affirms, and not without a strong show of reason, a more immediate and certain knowledge than about its own states. Psychological investigation demonstrates, indeed, that the affirmation is not altogether well chosen; for no objects can excel, in the immediacy of their presentation and the strength of accompanying conviction, those that are presented in self- consciousness. However, our scientifically assured position on this point must not lead us to disparage or overlook the character of the testimony which every-day experience gives to the immediacy and certainty of the knowledge of things. So far as obvious and recognizable independence and per- manency of existence are concerned, things appear to have 120 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW the advantage over Self. It is perhaps only when we intro- duce certain ideas of value, and so consider whether the Self should desire to be independent and permanent pre- cisely in the way in which things are, that the former regains its position of superior advantage. On what ground, then, does epistemological theory deny the affirmation of the universal consciousness that, in a large proportion of those cases where the fullest activity of cognitive func- tion is employed and the fullest certitude of cognition achieved, the object of knowledge is decidedly not my state of consciousness, nor any state of any man's conscious- ness ? The nature of the primary act of cognition by sense-perception refuses to adjust itself to such a denial. But at this point, in the effort to escape the full force of the testimony derived from every act of cognition to the truth that all cognition is objective consciousness, resort may be had to a deceptive ambiguity in the meaning of the word " object. " Kant's critique of knowledge is full of perplexities due to this ambiguity. Because any adequate account of the possibility of objective knowledge requires that the constitutional forms of the knowing subject should be recognized, it does not follow that this recognition fur- nishes the entire account of all our objective knowledge. For example, I take my stand in receptive or more active apperceptive attitude before some natural object. I am using my senses to get a knowledge of this bit of mineral I have just picked up in the field. Looking, feeling, smell- ing, tasting, recalling what I have seen and been told before, filling out the picture with imaginings as to how it would behave should I subject it to certain physical and chemical tests, and reflectively thinking over the whole case, I judge it to be " a piece of feldspar. " If the grounds of the final judgment, on reviewing them, seem satisfactory, I say: "I know it is a piece of feldspar." I have, in arriving at knowledge of this sort, reached an elaborate objective con- THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 121 sciousness of this thing. Now suppose, however, that in order to explain such objectivity of consciousness, epistemo- logical criticism points out how, in addition to " receptivity of sensibility" and "synthesis of imagination," there must have been "activity of intellect," functioning according to one or more of the constitutional forms of intellectual func- tion (the so-called " categories "). This it is, I am now informed, in the name of a critique of pure reason, which makes the consciousness ohjective ; all external objects are made to be, and to be what they are, by the intellect itself. In a word, to know things, you must mind them ; or — as is so significantly said in popular speech — "put your mind into them. " If I follow the path of criticism myself, I may be ready to. admit all this as necessary to account for any " objective " consciousness whatever. But when I am bidden to accept this as the complete and final account of knowl- edge, when I am exhorted to believe that this is all I am sure of with regard to the existence and nature of the ex- ternal object of knowledge, and that this it is which makes it an object, set over against the subject, as a non-self over against the Self, in the very act of cognition, then I answer, " I will not, because I cannot. " Nor did Kant himself con- sistently maintain this position; because, in fact, he could not. But to prove our statement on this point belongs to the criticism of the Kantian Critique rather than to the criticism of the faculty of knowledge. The characteristic of objectivity, in a meaning more full than either of the three foregoing forms of limitation admit, must be recognized as belonging to the essential nature of all cognition. To deny this characteristic altogether is to commit the absurdity of beginning a criticism of knowing faculty by overlooking the most essential facts which need criticism. It is virtually to assert the theoretical impossi- bility of knowledge. To define this objectivity in accordance with the phrases, " Knowledge is only of phenomena ; " or, 122 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW " We can never -know anything but our own states of con- sciousness," is to be scarcely less absurd; while we must not be deceived into accepting off-hand the sceptical or agnostic attitude toward the persuasion that in knowledge we somehow come into valid relations with extra-mental reality, by an ambiguous use of the words "object" and "objective." Further details on this characteristic of cog- nition belong, of course, to the main body of epistemology. Once more, the psychological nature of cognition is such as to involve all the factors and forms of psychic life and of psychic activity. If we are to speak of " cognitive faculty " — as has already been done repeatedly — then this faculty calls forth and summarizes, by absorption into itself, as it were, all other faculties. Whichever of the current psycho- logical divisions into faculties be adopted, there is no one of them whose employment is not, either as actually dis- cernible or as theoretically necessary, contained in the full account of human cognition. Take away any of these facul- ties and knowledge would become either much less than it actually is or else actually impossible. But none of them, drawn off from and considered apart from the others, is capa- ble of achieving an act of cognition. Without content of sensation there can be no cognition of external objects. But almost equally obvious is the psychological truth that with- out this same content, no vital and warm consciousness of Self could arise ; certainly, no development of the knowledge which comes through self-consciousness is possible with- out the delimitation and opposition of Self and Things as dependent upon changes in the nature of this sensuous content. Without memory, knowledge of the past would be a meaningless phrase ; without knowledge of the past, through memory, present knowledge both of Things and of Self would be impossible ; and growth of knowledge for the individual or the race could not take place. But only as the form of psychic life called imagination is at work, THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 123 can there be constructed in consciousness that series of mental representations which forms a picture for thought to modify, and for faith to attach itself to, as a true picture of the transcendent Reality. Even in all our more solid and scientific knowledge of natural and physical objects, psycho- logical analysis shows the presence of a sort of substitu- tionary and analogical activity of phantasy. For all such knowledge requires interpretation based upon the sympa- thetic projection of the Self into the situation of the other. What is called "knowledge of human nature " is confessedly dependent upon this sort of faculty. But with the most exact of the sciences, with mathematics and mathematical physics, the words and symbols employed cannot serve either as the vehicles or as the excitants of cognitive pro- cesses, unless this activity can be supplied by the cognitive subject. " Molecular " and " atomic " motions, " stored " and "kinetic" energies, — these and similar terms have no life, no warmth, no real meaning for the mind of man, unless they are filled with the blood which such an interpretative imagination supplies. 1 Knowledge, however, is not a passive happening, a copying- off of reality upon an impressionable psychic substance, or a solidarity of ideation-processes empirically produced. Neither is it such a merely reproductive activity that the subject in which the activity is induced goes through a series of processes precisely similar to those gone through with by the reality, regarded as stimulating it to the re- productive activity. Thinking, as an active rational form of functioning, must take in hand the trains of associated ideas, in order that genuine cognition may take place. Thinking becomes cognition, or rather leads the conscious processes up to the completed cognitive act, when judgment 1 Die Phantctsie ist diejenige Function des DenJcens, die in ihrer Bedeutungjur die Wissenschaft, fur die Weltmiffassung und fur die Daseingestaltung am meisten ver- kannt wird. — Duehring, Cursus der Philosophie, p. 44. 124 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW on recognized grounds is consciously made. All the more purely intellectual "momenta" become fused in that total attitude of mind toward objective reality, which is most properly called knowledge, only when such judgment is attained. But how necessary to every act of cognition are other than the strictly intellectual "momenta," how truly knowledge is an affair of feeling and will and involves all the affective and voluntary mind, must be made clear with some detail, unless our epistemology is willing quite to mistake the nature of knowledge. The feeling aspects of our psychic life are in themselves just as really varied and variously colored, just as constantly present, as are the intellectual momenta. Were it not for this ever present and vital experience of feeling, our sensations, ideas, and thoughts would all be thinner and paler than the trooping shadows of the vaguest dream, — without interest, without value, with- out reality of any kind. Nor would our trains of ideas result in judgments apprehending and comprehending the changing qualifications and relations of the really existent; truth would not be seized upon and appropriated with warm conviction as to its certitude and its worth. Peculiar forms of conscious experience there are which we seem compelled to recognize as the feelings belonging uniquely to cognition. Reference has repeatedly been made to the perfectly invincible conviction that in knowledge we, the subjective, come into some sort of relations with an object that is not-us, that is trans-subjective. Experience by way of cognition implicates the transcendent, — of this, at least a naive and vague confidence seems to be an essential part of every completed cognitive process. But what shall be said of this conviction ? The completer answer to this inquiry takes us well into the heart of the epistemological problem. It is, indeed, upon this feeling of conviction that in the last analysis our doctrine of knowledge has largely to THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 125 rely for the defence of its theoretical conclusion : the facts of consciousness are not themselves intelligible without the assumption of an extra-mental Reality on which conscious- ness is dependent. That the will of the knower is ever present and taking a part, so to speak, in every act of knowledge, is a psycho- logical truism ; it follows from the very conception of knowl- edge itself as a complex form of mental activity. The psychological doctrine of the influence of attention upon perception, upon self-consciousness, and upon all the grow- ing body of knowledge in which science consists, is an expression of this truth. But below this familiar line of thinking reposes the psycho-physical structure of facts which shows us that cognition itself is never a purely sensory, but always also a sensory-motor affair. In that living commerce with things which requires action, and which consists in doing something to them, with a will and a purpose in it, and in letting them do something to us which restricts or thwarts, or executes our will and purpose, does all human knowledge of things grow. This truth also demands further interpretation. In this connection the practical value of a comprehensive view has a bearing upon theoretical truth. There are real dangers to the life of conduct and of religion which come from saying: "Intellect is all;" or "Feeling is all;" or "Will is all." The theoretical truth on which the practical rests is this: Knowledge is of neither one alone; knowledge is of intellect, feeling, and will. The final witness, to which we are forced to make appeal for the attainment of truth, and for escape from error, is a sort of complex mental attitude. This attitude involves feeling and will as well as intellect. Emphasizing the aspect of feeling, we may call it a kind of conviction of the truth of the cognitive judgment ; in matters of contested evidence, or of practical importance, or of grave intellectual interest, the conviction may become 126 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW of a highly emotional character. Emphasizing the aspect of will, we may refer to it as a mental positing of the reality of the object, which may become a seizure of, and a holding on to, this object in the presence of sceptical temp- tations ; and which may then appear as a quasi-ethical activ- ity. It is just these emotional and voluntary aspects of the total cognitive process that have led men in all ages to regard their cognitions as answers to voices which called to them from out of the depths of Reality, or as intuitions and insights which brought them into the most interior construction and processes of Reality (Eirileuchtungen and Anschauungen as well as Vorstellungen and Begriffe). Rec- ognizing and submitting one's judgment to the voice, to the light, thus gives a moral significance to scientific and philo- sophical investigation in general. Hence the picture drawn by Augustine of God originally speaking with men as with angels (ipsa ineommutabili veritate, illustrans mentes eormn). As said Bonaventura, "Thou hast per se the capacity to behold truth, if concupiscences and phantasms do not hinder thee, and like clouds interpose between thee and truth's ray. " A psychological view of the Development of Knowledge reveals still more clearly the nature of the problem which epistemological philosophy has to examine. In the indi- vidual and in the race the growth of cognition does not, indeed, result from the introduction of new powers, or from the sudden appearance of distinctly different faculties, in an epoch-making way. The kingdom of knowledge, like the kingdom of heaven, grows as does a grain of mustard seed. Indeed, if we could only use the word comprehensively enough we might be tempted to declare that it resembles a "biological" development. It is not given to the observer, by a microscopic examination of the mustard seed, to predict the character of the developed plant. Nor can one say that all of the latter is given potentially, or even that its con- THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 127 ditions are present, in the seed. Neither, again, can one discern the separate functional growths, and the correlation of the organic processes, in the very earliest growth. Yet the forces and principles at work, and with which the inves- tigator must reckon, are the same throughout. In no other realm of inquiry is the principle of continuity more strictly applicable, more obviously potent, than in the growth of human knowledge. The detailed descriptive history of this growth it belongs to psychology to give. The interpretation of some of the more important aspects and portions of this history is, indeed, of supreme interest to epistemology ; it will constantly excite our effort in the subsequent chapters of this book. At present a few words in addition to what has already been brought to notice will suffice. Psychology can describe many of the conditions under which that great "diremptive process" takes place, whose accomplishment is crowned by knowledge as a consciousness of relation between subject and object, and as an objective consciousness of both subject and object existing in this relation. It can show how, as the entire sensory-motor mechanism runs more smoothly in the channels which have become marked out, certain groups of resulting experiences form themselves into a Self, envisaged or conceived of, and certain others into Things, either immediately known or only inferred. And now the 'whole world of experienced objects has organized itself into two great classes of cognized and cognizable realities ; but this world of opposed and yet intercommunicating entities had its growth, psychologically, from a common root! Now, too, the world of science begins to reveal itself as under tuition purchased at the expense of the persistent and rationally ordered experience of the race. A strange world this, of which we are told in terms of highly preferred knowledge ! Yet this knowledge claims to be based upon observation by the senses, — of somewhat more than ordinary pretensions to accuracy and painstaking 128 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW care. It results from much looking, hearing, feeling, smell- ing, tasting, and especially from much muscular intercourse with things; and it is called the "world of sense," in which every sensible man implicitly believes, and to doubt which is to discredit " common-sense " and science alike. But further acquaintance with this body of knowledge, so precious in the eyes of those who cultivate it, and in the sight of us all, reveals its true character in a different way. It is rather a world of ideas and of thoughts. It makes the most enormous demands upon thinking faculty to carry the mind through tortuous and complicated processes of ratioci- nation, where symbols and words that surely have no real correlates are the necessary scaffolding for every step. It challenges phantasy far more severely and peremptorily than any poet or artist has ever done. Without doubt, imagina- tion breaks quite down in its effort to conceive of forces that are stored and do not act (or energies of position), of atoms that have no color or shape, of ether that is limitless in tenacity and infinitely tenuous and without weight, etc. The whole structure of this world is underlain and inter- penetrated with hypothetical entities, causes, transactions, etc., which are introduced in the interest of observed facts, but which can never themselves become actual objects of observation. Yet if we reject it as merely hypothetical and imaginary, or as the product of purely abstract thinking — a system of mental images and conceptions of most extraordi- nary and non-sensible kind — we confine human knowledge within undesirably narrow limitations. And, indeed, these activities of imagination and thought, with their underlying postulates, and their inciting and supporting play of the feeling that it is so, and of the will to have it so, are essen- tially the same as those employed in all the knowledge of our daily life. If science cannot correct common-sense by denying to it the exercise of all its dearest and most impor- tant rights, common-sense cannot distrust science without THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW 129 surrendering the rationality of all that is of practical inter- est to itself. For cognition, by the very principles of its growth, tends more and more to the solidarity and yet per- petual flux of a system of living organisms. Nor can science and common -sense safely or correctly draw the line that shall shut philosophy out of this growing body of human knowledge. CHAPTER V THINKING AND KNOWING THAT knowledge cannot be gained without more or less of correct and prolonged thinking is a practical maxim which no one would be found to dispute. But that there is much knowledge which does not come by mere thinking is a maxim scarcely more to be held in doubt. Thinking is, then, universally recognized as an important and even neces- sary part of knowing; but it is not the whole of knowing. Or, in other words, one must make use of one's faculties of thought as an indispensable means to cognition; but there are other means which must also be employed, since it is not by thought alone that the human mind attains cognition. This manner of speech is indicative of that trustworthy psychological instinct and its resulting body of opinion which characterizes human nature. And thus, in the elabo- ration of a philosophical theory of knowledge which shall be true to the facts of life, it is matter of the first importance to compare thought and cognition, and to recognize both their points of resemblance and their points of difference. A sound epistemological doctrine must make clear how much and what of the cognitive process consists in that movement of the intellect which we call thinking ; and how it is that truth, with its assured grasp upon the existence and relations of the real — the trans-subjective — world, is thus made the possession of the subject, in the form of states of his own consciousness. If now the popular opinion, as well as that of the majority of writers on logic, be taken in answer to the question, THINKING AND KNOWING 131 What besides clear, patient, and correct thinking is neces- sary to a knowledge of truth ? there is discoverable an almost complete agreement. It is observation — patient, exact, and intelligent — that lays the basis, so to speak, for the struc- ture of truth which thinking rears. And, moreover, since every thinker is liable to have his thoughts wander, or become too much mixed up with imaginings, and since there is danger from too " pure " or " abstract " thoughts, the results of thinking must be constantly compared with renewed and improved observations of fact. It is thus by using observation to start the trains of thinking, which now — once started — carry us into a wider and more airy domain, where, however, our conceptions of things must be tested with ever open eyes and freshened memories of our actual visions, that we gain more and more of assured knowledge. Indeed, under the influence of a natural reaction against former magnificent attempts to handle the truths of the real world as problems for thought only, modern science has often no little contempt to throw upon " abstractions " as compared with that cognition of facts which is gained by observation. Some of its devotees are even tempted to forget that mere observation, if such a thing indeed were possible, would no more create science than mere thinking. The more carefully analytic studies of modern psychology prove that, in fact, thinking and cognition are, so to speak, per se inseparable. They show that without thinking no cognition whatever is possible. This is a truth of which no one has ever been more firmly persuaded than was Kant; and it is to be hoped that no one will ever attempt to elabo- rate it more fully than he did. But what is chiefly needed at the present time is to learn from modern psychology, and to expand and teach in an improved epistemology, the fuller doctrine of the relations between the two. In previous works on logic, and even in not a few of the most important philo- sophical treatises, the distinction between knowledge by ob- 132 THINKING AND KNOWING servation and knowledge by thinking has been defectively made or grossly exaggerated. Not infrequently, the former is called "intuitive" or "immediate" knowledge, and the latter "rational" or "mediate" or "abstract" knowledge. And now the logician thinks it right to hold that when he has given an account of the forms which characterize the mental life of thought, he has discharged his entire duty as a student of mental life. For is not logic & formal affair, — a presentation (usually most dry and lifeless), with dread- ful array of strange symbols, of the mere forms of thinking faculty as it conceives, judges, and reasons from grounds to consequences ? To the psychologist belongs, in sooth ! the explication and the vindication of so-called intuitive or immediate knowledge. How, and on what terms of self- conscious estimate of my own cognitive faculty, and in the exercise of what dark and mysterious rights, do I stand before any natural object — a tree, a stone, a human face — and affirm : " I know you, for sure ; that you are, that you really are ; and what you are in your actual structure and modes of behavior " ? This is a complex and most vexing question which logic is glad enough to turn over to psy- chology. And yet, it is not a question which can be answered, or even have its import faithfully recognized, without taking into account the application of the laws of thought in all so-called immediate cognition of reality. There is little reason for wonder, then, when psychology — especially of that "new" type which is prone to abjure metaphysics and epistemology as unworthy members of its own family, and to consort rather with biology and physi- ology as with persons of its nearer kinship — refuses to take this question off the hands of its ancient partner in intel- lectual concerns, the stately "scientist" (of the high-and- dry a priori order) called logic. For does not psychology aim to become the exact science of mental phenomena, of " states of consciousness, as such " ? But at this point other THINKING AND KNOWING 133 questions arise. Is not my cognition of that thing over there — that tree, or stone, or human face — a mental phe- nomenon, a state of my consciousness ? And if it is to be described and explained at all by any form of human science, does not the duty of description and explanation fall upon that science which defines itself as having a right to the sphere of mental phenomena in general, of all con- scious states ? If, further, cognition is to be described and explained by psychology at all, should it not be scientifically handled in its entirety, without mutilation or suppression of anything which rightly belongs to its mental constitution ? Further, is it not clear that objective reference, warmed with the unchanging conviction of the trans-subjective and the extra-mental, is something inseparable from the very psychic being of cognition ? How, then, can psychology shirk the task of an analytic that goes to the very core of cognitive consciousness ? But in vain is a piteous pleading for response to these questions set up before the bar of the current scien- tific psycholog} 7 . Such questions are by her chief doctors of laws nowadays handed over to epistemology. Meantime they are themselves spending their "labor for that which satisfieth not." At this point, then, we are again thrown back upon Kant and upon his followers in the same line of critical inquiry. We find this master of analytic constantly insisting upon the truth that knowledge is impossible without thought; mere sensation-content, held up in consciousness as a picture by constructive imagination, does not as yet amount to knowl- edge. For if " thoughts without contents are empty, intui- tions without concepts are blind." Bat Kant, in the working out of his theory of the relations between " empty thoughts" and "blind intuitions," often so sets intuitions and thoughts in contrast as to seem to make them functions and products of diverse powers of the soul. And — a much more serious deficiency which finally becomes a source of 134 THINKING AND KNOWING disastrous error — he devotes his theory of knowledge wholly to its a priori, formal side. Such a restriction of our critique might, indeed, be allowed in the interests of nar- rowing the problem, which is, as Kant attempts to isolate and discuss it, sufficiently comprehensive and profound. But the analysis of form, while it may for a time seem to expose and to account for the peculiar nature of thought, does not for one single moment even seem to do the same thing for cognition. For when, in the evolution of mental life, we come to knowledge, it is the origin, nature, and validating of the matter-of-fact content which interests and concerns us most. How does sensibility originally come to be impressed at all ? and how does it come to be impressed as it actually is impressed, beyond the ability of phantasy and will and thought wholly to control the impression ? Whence comes, and what is the value of, that belief in an envisaged reality which is essential to the very existence of every act of intuitive knowledge ? In answer to these and other similar inquiries, Kant can only repeat his doc- trine of the a priori forms of the two distinct kinds of cognition, — intuitions and concepts ; except as he every- where, at times, by sundry hints and nods and dumb but meaningful gesticulations, indicates the presence in the dark background of a mysterious X, a Ding-an-sich indeed. The creation of a fixed gulf between kinds of knowledge, and the relegation, for its sources and its validity, of one kind to an unanalyzable mystery, and of the other to a system of merely formal rules, with the accompanying sepa- ration of the faculties involved in all cognitive activity, and a total disregard of the necessary implicates of every cogni- tion, have been the irpoyrov i/reOSo? and the chief mischief- maker in epistemological theories since Kant. Fichte's science of knowledge aimed to attain a systematic cognition of the really existent by a series of states of self -envisage - mcnt. The processes of self-consciousness were here thought THINKING AXD KXOWIXG 135 out into the form of a system of concepts, and then identified off-hand with the sum-total of Reality. With Schelling " the true direction " of cognition is not a movement along the line of self-consciousness alone. "We can go." says he, "from nature to ourselves, or from ourselves to nature, but the true direction for him to whom knowledge is of more account than all else, is that which nature herself adopts. " 1 Moving in this direction he would give to the place which thought reaches the characteristics of a stand- point for intuition. "For there dwells in us all a secret, wonderful faculty, by virtue of which we can withdraw from the mutations of time into our innermost disrobed selves, and there behold the eternal under the form of immutability ; such vision is our innermost and peculiar experience, on which alone depends all that we know and believe of a supra-sensible world." Thus from Schelling's faculty of "intellectual intuition" are both intuition and thought really dropped out; and with them the subject and the object vanish together from the field of the really existent as necessary "moments" in the operation of cognitive faculty. Knowledge is once more explained by being destroyed. Hegel showed a saner mind in his appreciation of the relations between thinking and knowing, and between know- ing and being. His philosophy has been called "a critical transformation and development of Schelling's System of Identity." His aim, as defined by himself, was (1) "to ele- vate consciousness to the standpoint of absolute knowledge;" and (2) "to develop systematically the entire contents of this knowledge by the dialectical method." In accomplish- ing this aim, an overestimate is placed upon the syste- matic arrangement of the mere forms of thinking; absolute knowledge becomes so elevated above the standpoint of the 1 From the close of an article by Schelling himself in the first volume of the " Zeitschrift fur speculative Physik." 136 THINKING AND KNOWING ordinary consciousness that it cannot be attained or even descried by those who maintain this standpoint; and the critical examination of the import and value of the funda- mental assumption, that the forms of thought are the forms of reality, is stopped short almost before it is fairly begun. Hence, in part, it is that men devoted to the enlargement of the field of knowledge as covered by the concrete sciences of nature have, often in extreme ignorance of his real position, treated Hegel so contemptuously. Nor is it very strange that such investigators feel more sympathy with the position of the most contemptuous of Hegel's critics in the common field of philosophy, — namely, Schopenhauer. "Perception," says the latter, " is not only the source of all knowledge, but is itself knowledge /car e^oxqv, is the only unconditionally true, genuine knowledge worthy of the name. For it alone imparts insight properly so-called, it alone is actually assimi- lated by man, passes into his nature, and can with fall reason be called his; while the conceptions merely cling to him." They "thus afford the real content of all our thought, and whenever they are wanting we have not had conceptions bat mere words in our heads." Thought, consisting in com- paring conceptions, gives us no really new knowledge. "On the other hand, to perceive, to allow the things themselves to speak to us, to apprehend new relations of them, and then to take up and deposit all this in conceptions, in order to possess it with certainty, — that gives new knowledge. " To all such one-sided views of the nature of knowledge, its growth, and the way, through it, that we come at reality, so to speak, it is the completer understanding of the primary facts of knowledge, especially as they evince the similarities and differences between thinking and knowing, which affords the only satisfactory critical standpoint. Cognition is one living process throughout; and valuable as a distinction of its stages and kinds and points of departure may be, there is one essential body of characteristics to be recognized as THINKING AND KNOWING 137 everywhere present. Intuitive knowledge does not come at first, or grow, without thinking; nor is thinking that is not in some sort intuitive, if such a thing were at all pos- sible, the avenue to more of mediate and indirect knowledge. The first act of cognition achieved by the infant mind is a triumph of thinking faculty. The last and highest achieve- ment of knowledge gained by the highly trained and richly stored reflective mind is also a feeling-full and voluntary envisagement of reality. Cognition purified of thought is deprived of a factor essential to cognition. Pure thinking is never so abstracted from successive steps of intuitive commerce with the real as to be purely thinking; and if it could be thus abstracted, it could not become the beginning, the means, or the end of a cognitive process. The very prevalence, however, of this principle of continuity, as applied to all the growth of knowledge in and through thought, makes it the more necessary that we should under- stand the resemblances and the differences of these two atti- tudes of Mind toward Reality. Let us, then, compare that mental movement or form of psychic life which is called "thought" with our previous description of the nature and growth of knowledge. What is it to think ? To answer with Mr. Spencer and others as though thinking were mere generalizing under the principle of comparison is to fail of fully describing what men ordi- narily experience when they think, and think concretely, and to some definite purpose. With us all, when we make earnest with our thoughts, the stream of consciousness becomes an active conscious relating of otherwise separate items of cognition. It is subjective and conscious, a pro- cess ; but a process in consciousness which is better described as distinctively not a passive suffering of something, but a doing of something with our own ideas. Thinking is will- ing; jedes DenJcen ein Wollen, as Wundt admirably says. 1 1 System der Philosophie, p. 42. 138 THINKING AND KNOWING Thought is experienced as a transaction produced by ourselves. So that, although it is not to be described as willing per se, and can neither be always identified with the higher forms of self-conscious choice nor — which is yet more certain — usually relegated to the lower forms of so-called unimotived volition, it appears as a quasi-voluntary response to a demand. Often one's thinking is a highly developed and singularly pronounced and self-conscious form of willing. When I am thinking, — always about this or that, — and in proportion as I am not dreaming or letting my ideas run away with me, I am " making up my mind. " i, the mind, am making up myself, — although in accordance, as further investigation shows me, with internal necessities called "laws of the mind," and more obviously in attempted accordance with the actual relations and forms of the behavior of things. Thus men tell each other what J think, about this or that; and they ask each other: "What do you think ? " — you, as a self-active, self-directing subject of the conscious process called your thoughts. Yet again, all cognition, which comes by thinking, involves some seeking, striving after, actual pursuing of the truth ; and this necessarily implies willing as a " moment " in the thinking process. No man is likely to know the truth who does not will to know it, who actively restrains, or pas- sively refrains himself from willing. As we think, we pur- pose to apprehend and comprehend, to seize hold of and grasp around the object about which we are thinking. And although, of course, language here is pregnant with figures of speech, there are few matters of common experience where figures of speech are more pregnant with truth than are those here employed. Thinking, too, is a more complex form of psychic move- ment or activity than is mental representation, — meaning by the latter the merely passive flow of unchecked and relatively purposeless trains of associated ideas. It is upon the basis THINKING AND KNOWING 139 of this lower form of mental representation that thinking, properly so-called, reposes. In saying this, we are probably separating in thought what never occurs wholly separate in the actual life of the mind. In few, indeed, of one's states of reverie and of fancy-play, even in dreams, does one seem to one's self wholly to refrain from taking any part in the character and succession of the ideas which appear in con- sciousness. Rarely is the Ego a mere passive spectator of the drama enacted by the faculty of ideation. Even when the ideas get away from me, as it were, and disport them- selves as becomes the ideas of an animal or of a madman, I am still right there, ready to prompt or to repress them, and not wholly theirs instead of their being at least partly mine. Thus, too, in accordance with the active character- istic of all thinking do we distinguish it as a more complex process than mere association of ideas, — endowed, as it were, with a higher style of mentality. Ideation appears as a process given to consciousness ; thinking is more fully self-conscious and self -induced, selective and preferential. From this point of view it has even been argued 2 that only free wills can truly t7iink, not to say think truly. For the thinking subject must have the power to grasp and hold the thought-element (the " moment " which may be used to enter into the judgment) against the destructive influence of the flux of images mechanically determined ; must choose a com- panion for comparison or contrast with it, and so judge what is true in reality as distinguished from what is passively determined in the mental train. In connection with such experiences as illustrate the dis- tinctions already made, we become aware of the peculiar strain and tone of attention which accompanies the thinking process. When one is not thinking somewhat intently, or not definitively and determinately thinking at all, one is 1 Compare Kaulich, " Ueber die Moglichkeit, das Ziel, und die Grenzen des Wissens," pp. 29 f. 140 THINKING AND KNOWING like a spectator of a light drama, or it may be of a comedy. One attends with interest, indeed, but with the interest rather of those who will have others do the work or conduct the play, while they amuse themselves by looking on. But let any of the actors (the ideas) challenge and secure another kind of interest; and then the whole strain and tone of attention changes, as one begins to think more reflectively and to conclude about what is going on. For thinking is somewhat of business, is no mere play, for the mind; and business demands attention, directed to the accomplishment of a clearly conceived end. Hence the teleology of thinking as it enters into the final purposes of cognition, and brings the man of thought and the man of action into the unity of one life. With this change in the character of the attention, demanded and given, there goes a change in the feelings, both such as have reference to self and such as have refer- ence to things. For the total affective accompaniment of thinking as a necessary process to the completed act of cog- nition is of a peculiar, complex kind. I am more self- conscious in thinking, more keenly alive and sensitive to every subjective change as a possible clue to the knowledge I seek, or as a possible temptation or solicitation into some path of error. I care more about myself when I, as subject, make me, as object, the terminal of my train of thought. But if I, as subject, make some thing or relation between things, the object of my thinking, the same characteristic wakefulness and feeling-full attention belongs to the conscious processes evoked. Let all this be considered, as illustrated in men's daily experiences, — remembering that the thinking of which we are discoursing is not that pale and ghostly process of linking together so-called concepts by highly abstract symbols which is scholastically held to represent the formal laws of thought. The rather must the philosophical theory of knowledge primarily deal with the blood-red and sinewy thought of the THINKING AND KNOWING 141 street, the mart, the ordinary waking life of the multitude of men. Actual thinking, as distinguished from the linking of symbols and concepts together in books on logic, seldom for a moment relaxes its firm clutch upon reality, and its invincible conviction that the self-conscious thinker is adjusting his own mental attitudes, with a prompt sequence in adjustment of the appropriate actions, to the real proper- ties and actual relations of selves and of things. But this is the kind of thinking that enters into every primary act of knowledge, of every cognition which, for certitude and so- called immediacy or " intuitive " characteristics, belongs to the first rank. The most special characterization of thinking as a factor of all cognition is reached, however, only when it is affirmed that all thinking is relating activity. From one standpoint, from which it is always proper to regard consciousness, thought is a recognition of relations determined by the action of objects as they appear to the thinking mind. This is the so-called common-sense, realistic way of stating the facts. What is the metaphysical truth in such expressions ? It is a fact of experience which may not be questioned, that one " feels at liberty " to imagine various sorts of relations, between things and their qualities, between things and minds, and between things and things, as one wills and without regard to the actuality of these relations. But if one intends to think, — meaning by this something more than mere play of imagination, — one is under compulsion to follow, either in actual observation or in intent, the courses marked out by reality. In recognition of this pas- sive and objectively determined aspect of the relating func- tion in thought, the pious enthusiast may exclaim: "I think thy thoughts after Thee, God ! " when he has adjusted his own mental representations to the relations of the external world. So also the " scientist " holds himself obligated to think natural objects as they actually are related to each 142 THINKING AND KNOWING other in Nature herself. And the plain man considers his fellow to have lost the most trustworthy possession of his common-sense, if he habitually mistakes imagination for thought as to the qualities and the transactions of things. But the other and opposite point of view must not be lost out of sight. For if to think is active consciousness, and its peculiar characteristic is a sort of "getting-at " relations, then it is right to declare that thinking is relating activity. And, indeed, this goes to the very heart of the question. We cannot, indeed, accept the often repeated dictum of Lotze — " To be is to be related " — as a satisfactory metaphysical principle. But that no thing is known, or can be known, as out of relation, or without being in relation, is an un- doubted epistemological fact. For the declaration that "to know is to relate " is a valid, if only a partial, description of knowledge. But that activity of the mind which per- forms the act of relating is precisely what is meant by thinking, in respect of its most fundamental and universal characteristic. The details implied in affirming that all thinking is relat- ing activity, must be referred back to descriptive psychology to tell. From it we learn that relating is not merely com- parison, not merely assimilation, or differentiation. It serves our purpose — which, it must not be forgotten, is to show how thinking enters into all cognition without being the whole of any complete cognitive act — simply to notice that thinking, as relating activity or the conscious and pur- poseful bringing of our ideas into relations which are believed to be conformable to the actual relations of the extra-mentally existent world, culminates in judgment. Thinking involves discrimination; indeed, the primary phase of the so-called faculty of thought may best be spoken of as "discriminating consciousness." 1 So, too, in its higher forms of manifestation thinking is analyzing activity; 1 See Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory, chap. xiv. THINKING AND KNOWING 143 and without such analyzing activity, true judgment (at least, in the form in which judgment enters into a finished act of apperceptive consciousness) cannot be formed. For every true judgment implies a consciously recognized duality — albeit as existent, combined in the unity of the judgment itself. But it is judgment as synthetic, essentially so, in which all thinking processes culminate, and which becomes an essential factor in every primary act of cognition. Only, then, as we understand the actual, concrete judgments of men, what they consciously are and what they signify, can we understand the relations of thinking and knowing ; and thus, so far forth, frame a theory of knowledge consistent with the facts of experience. Now the actual concrete act of judging is. itself a process in consciousness. Strictly speak- ing, it is not so much a mental seizure and permanent hold- ing of some island in the flowing stream of conscious life as it is a determinate direction in the flow of the stream itself. "When, therefore, judgment is spoken of as a " synthesis," it is well not to be deceived by the figure of speech. In no judg- ment, not even in affirming the simplest identity of a mathe- matical or logical sort (X= Y; or, All A is B), does the mind stand still while it places the ideas, one upon top of the other, or contemplates them lying side by side. In affirm- ing X= X, I distinguish the X which is in the place of the subject from the X which is in the place of the predicate ; and, then, I posit a certain relation by mentally constituting a synthesis of the two. This I must do, if I recognize the relation existing between the terms of the judgment; that is, if I make a true judgment as the terminal, so to speak, of an act of real cognition. But here two things of common experience must be borne in mind. I may have some sort of a mental presentment of terms which might possibly be formed into a judgment, or even of these terms as somehow set objectively in the relations appropriate to a possible judg- ment, without either actually recognizing them as terms of 144 THINKING AND KNOWING a judgment or synthesizing them as an actual judgment of my own. I may see X=X, and make use of this percept as a kind of momentary stepping-stone in an argument, with- out judging X really to be = X. It is not in mathematics alone that men conduct complicated trains of ideation, with more or less control by active thinking, and yet only occa- sionally perform the mental act of judgment, in the more proper meaning of that term. Moreover, in considering the relation of thinking to knowing, it is always essential to inquire carefully what it is that is really judged. Is it that X is equal to X; or only that i" am proceeding along the right path toward the solution of my problem ? The life of our daily activities is full of problems for consciousness to solve ; but more and more does the practical solution of many of these problems take place as the result of past acquirements and growths of cognition, with relatively little actual judg- ment exercised at the precise moment of such solution. Yet all this psychic life is illuminated by spots of mental awaken- ing to the higher and more complicated activities of a self- conscious and apperceptive sort ; and then we find ourselves really judging. Such genuine judgment is always itself a movement of consciousness toward an end which is a men- tal synthesis of distinguishably separate terms. But, second, after saying thus much we must not be con- sidered as advocates of that atomistic view of psychologists who find insoluble puzzles where none exist, and who even go to the length of declaring impossible what is plain matter- of-fact in every man's daily experience. It is not a fair representation of consciousness, or even an adequate sug- gestion for an outline picture of it, to compare its successive states to a line in which the single sensations, or ideas, are points. The so-called " stream of consciousness " may, not inaptly, be compared to a river that at times widens and at other times greatly narrows its bed ; perhaps it sometimes also disappears underground, only to reappear on the other THINKING AND KNOWING 145 side of some considerable extent of the territory measured by objective time. But its unity is never, at any instant, comparable to that of a point ; nor is the succession of its states in the one life like the succession of points, or small portions, of a physical line. The fact simply is that, in judging, we are in a kind of conscious active process which terminates in the positing of a unifying relation between two consciously separable terms. There is something very significant in the temporal char- acteristics of judgment as an inseparable factor of cognition ; and this is the slowing-up — almost amounting to a pause — in the time-rate of consciousness, when the business of judging takes place. Nor is this characteristic a mere effect in the imagination of the subject. Psycho-physics shows beyond all contradiction, what every unsophisticated observer of men knew beforehand, that it takes time to judge. Un- judged impressions flit rapidly, or troop in confused swarms before the mind. " There they go," — we are accustomed to say ; as though they were not of our mind and we could not, therefore, detain them. But we " come to " judgment more slowly ; we bring the sensations and ideas to some common point of view, and we take a little time to pronounce a synthesis between them. All this is, in some sort, capable of measurement and of expression in so many one-thousandths of a second. How many more

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