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DR. McCOSH'S WORKS. 
 
 FIRST AND FUNDAMENTAL TRUTHS. Being a Treatise on Metaphysics. 
 
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PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY 
 
 SHOULD IT BE FAVORED BY AMERICA? 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES McCOSH, LL. D., D. D., LIT. D. 
 
 KX-PRBSIDKNT OF PRINCETON COLLEGE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1894 
 

 : , v 
 
 , 
 
 Copyright, 1894, 
 BT CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THIS little work embraces the article I read at the 
 great exhibition at Chicago on " Reality : What Place it 
 should hold in Philosophy." It also contains my little 
 work, " The Prevailing Types of Philosophy : Can they 
 logically reach Reality ? " 
 
 The work is, to some extent, negative and undermin- 
 ing; it points out a chasm in modern philosophy. I 
 would not give it to the public were it not that I have 
 previously presented the positive and constructive side 
 in my larger work en " First and Fundamental Truth." 
 I wish the two works to go together, as constituting 
 what I have been able to do for fundamental philosophy. 
 
 Agnosticism is upheld and propagated in the present 
 day by several influential men, such as Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer and Professor Huxley. It is in the air, and 
 our young men have to breathe it and suffer the conse- 
 quences. It is evidently exercising a relaxing influence 
 on the faith and doctrinal convictions of the rising gener- 
 ation. It is in my view the grand office, at present, of 
 the higher philosophy, to meet and expose this doubting 
 spirit. 
 
 The question is, are the philosophies of the day fitted 
 to do this ? 
 
 M147786 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 With our eyes open, we are apt to look on the scene at 
 some distance, rather than on things that are pressingly 
 near and supposed to be known. So it is with mod- 
 ern metaphysicians (it was different with the ancient 
 Greeks); 1 they direct their attention to more remote 
 objects rather than those which are close to us, such as 
 Reality. 
 
 We know self and certain things around us as Real ; 
 as having TO 6V, Ens, Being, Existence. Now this Reality 
 requires to be carefully considered by students of the 
 First Philosophy, as Aristotle happily called it. I am to 
 show that Reality is a truth to be assumed, and that no 
 attempt need or should be made to establish it by 
 mediate proof. Of those who have made the attempt, 
 it will be found that they have more in the conclusion 
 than they have in the premises, and that in fact they 
 have assumed reality in order to prove it. 
 
 Mr. Spencer, the most comprehensive speculator of the 
 day, has brought philosophy to a crisis. He is doing for 
 later speculation, especially that of Kant and Hamilton, 
 what Hume did for the systems of Descartes, Locke, and 
 Berkeley, that is, bringing them to a reductio ad absur- 
 dum by showing that they deprive us of all knowledge 
 of the nature of things. Philosophy has to start anew 
 on the track of realism. I am not satisfied with the 
 agnostic position of Spencer ; I am also dissatisfied with 
 the replies commonly made to him ; 2 they have tried to 
 prove reality, instead of showing that we are entitled to 
 assume it. 
 
 1 See Appendix A. 2 See infra, p. 47. 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 I am aware that the realistic views presented in this 
 work are so different from the prevailing ones are, in 
 fact, so revolutionary that it will be needful to pi-ess 
 them upon the attention of thinkers before they are 
 adopted. This will have to be done by men who have 
 greater influence among metaphysicians than I have been 
 able to attain. Of the ultimate reception of these views 
 on Reality (it may be somewhat modified) I have not a 
 remaining doubt. 
 
 I acknowledge my obligations to my pupils, Professor 
 Ormond of Princeton College, and Professor Armstrong 
 of the Wesleyaii University, Connecticut, for suggestions 
 offered in the construction of this work ; as also to 
 another pupil, Professor Winans, Professor of Greek, 
 Princeton, for aiding me in the collection of passages ex- 
 hibiting Aristotle's doctrine of knowledge which I have 
 stated in the Appendix. 
 
 January 1, 1894. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 SECTION I. 
 
 FAGK 
 
 REALITY: WHAT PLACE IT SHOULD HOLD IN PHILOSOPHY ... 1 
 
 SECTION II. 
 WAY IN WHICH REALITY is DISCOVERED 7 
 
 SECTION III. 
 WHAT is REALITY ? 9 
 
 SECTION IV. 
 GREEK PHILOSOPHY 19 
 
 SECTION V. 
 DESCARTES 21 
 
 SECTION VI. 
 THE EXPERIMENTAL SCHOOL 22 
 
 SECTION VII. 
 THE A-PRIORI OR KANTIAN SCHOOL 24 
 
 SECTION VIII. 
 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL 43 
 
 SECTION IX. 
 THE SENSATIONAL SCHOOL 50 
 
X CONTENTS. 
 
 SECTION X. 
 HUXLEY AND HERBERT SPENCER 55 
 
 SECTION XL 
 REALISM AND RELIGION 57 
 
 SECTION XII. 
 THE RESULTS REACHED 58 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 A. ARISTOTLE ON THE COGNITIVE POWERS OF THE MIND ... 70 
 
 B. DOCTRINE OF DR. THOMAS AQUINAS 75 
 
 C. RECENT CRITICISMS OF KANT 75 
 
 D. PLACE OF INDUCTION IN METAPHYSICS 78 
 
PHILOSOPHY OP EEALITY. 
 
 SHOULD IT BE FAVORED BY AMERICA? 
 
 SECTION FIRST. 
 
 REALITY : WHAT PLACE IT SHOULD HOLD IN 
 PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 THIS is an important question ; I regard it as the most 
 important in philosophy in the present day. Scanty sys- 
 tems have arisen from the oversight of it. 
 
 I. 
 
 In establishing my positions I remark that every one 
 believes in realities. Every one believes in two kinds of 
 realities. He believes in his own existence. He believes 
 or rather knows that he thinks and feels ; that he is 
 liable to grief and joy, to hope and fear. He believes 
 and knows things without him ; in that man or woman, 
 in the various organs of his body, in that wall or house, 
 as also in that tree before him, in the greenness of its 
 foliage, in the hardness of its trunk, and in the smell and 
 taste of its fruit. 
 
 We can appeal to the proper tests in justifying reality. 
 First the objects are self-evident. We know ourselves 
 by simply looking within, and objects around, by simply 
 looking without. We need no further evidence. But 
 secondly, this is confirmed by the circumstance that this 
 belief or knowledge is necessary ; we cannot be made to 
 
2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 believe or know otherwise. We cannot be made to be- 
 lieve, by any argument or by any reasoning, that these 
 objects do not exist. But all the while we have a belief 
 or conviction which abides with us. Then, thirdly, this 
 belief or knowledge is universal. Not only do I believe 
 in these objects, but every man does the same. He is 
 sure that he himself exists, and that certain objects 
 around him exist. He carries this conviction with him 
 wherever he goes. Philosophy, which is an expression of 
 our nature, should do the same. 
 
 II. 
 
 Reality cannot be established by syllogistic or mediate 
 proof of any kind. No man can prove mediately his own 
 existence, or the pains he feels in his own body, or the ex- 
 istence of that stone or plant which he sees and touches. 
 If he is not satisfied with this statement on its being 
 announced let him try the proof. He will find that he 
 has no mediate proof, and that he is assuming when he 
 imagines that he is proving. To prove that there is life 
 or mind, we must have life or mind in the premise. 
 Without this the alleged proof will evidently be illogical. 
 For it is acknowledged on all hands that in order to a 
 right conclusion we must have the object or truth in the 
 conclusion involved in the premise or premises. 
 
 The attempt to prove Reality has ever led to un- 
 measurable confusion and error. Descartes, the father 
 of modern philosophy, propounded an argument, Cogito, 
 ergo sum. But if the ego be in the cogito, the whole 
 alleged argument for Reality is an evident assumption, 
 for already we have the Reality there. If the ego be 
 not in the cogito, we have no proof whatever, as what 
 we have in the conclusion is not in the premise. 
 
REALITY: PLACE IT SHOULD HOLD IN PHILOSOPHY. 3 
 III. 
 
 Reality is got not by reasoning, but by immediate in- 
 spection, by what is usually called Intuition. We have 
 Cognitive faculties for this purpose, especially the inward 
 and outward senses. We know ourselves, and especially 
 our various ideas, moods, sufferings, by self-consciousness. 
 We know these extended things, by the senses as cogni- 
 tive, particularly by sight and touch. We need no 
 mediate proof. In regard to these things, proffered pro- 
 bation would be felt as an incumbrance and would turn 
 out to be invalid. 
 
 We have here primary truth which does not need sup- 
 port, but which may give support to other truth reared 
 upon it. Knowing objects to be real, we may draw other 
 objects from them which are also real by argument, say 
 by mathematics, by ordinary science, by common obser- 
 vation. 
 
 There may be times when we are not sure whether 
 the object is a reality or a phantom, whether that white- 
 ness seen in the darkness is a ghost or a sheet put out to 
 be dried. We are to settle the question by an examina- - 
 tion of the appearance, using, if need be, all the senses. 
 
 It is to be understood that when we have the real we 
 can also have things, derived from it logically, also real. 
 Thus having the individual oak as real, we have oaks in 
 general as also real. The reality in the singular goes up 
 into the general. 
 
 There are some who maintain that Realism must not 
 only establish the reality of objects, but must show what 
 the reality consists in. Now, I am willing to admit in 
 establishing reality we must know somewhat of the 
 nature of the reality. It is thus that we can separate it 
 from other things, only thus we can think or speak of 
 
4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 it. Still it is not by psychological but by the physical 
 sciences that we must determine the real nature of the 
 object. Mental science must know somewhat of the 
 nature of water before it can declare it to be a reality. 
 But it is not psychology but chemistry that must settle 
 what this reality is, that water is composed of oxygen 
 and hydrogen. It is astronomy and not philosophy that 
 must show us what is the relation of the planets one to 
 another. 
 
 It is to be understood that while the mind has the 
 Real by the cognitive powers, it may also have the Ideal 
 by the imagination, and the two not inconsistent one 
 with the other. It may form a figure of ugligness or 
 beauty to which there is no corresponding fact. With 
 these we may be amused, or we may be exalted above 
 ourselves and above the earth. These fancies will pre- 
 sent themselves spontaneously, or we call them up by 
 an act of will. If reality has its solid blessings so has 
 ideality its pleasing fancies. We should profitably retain 
 and cherish both. But we should always distinguish be- 
 tween them. 
 
 I should like to inquire here how the various systems 
 of philosophy, ancient and modern, accord with these 
 views. I must content myself here with reviewing one 
 system, but that by far the most influential for the last 
 few ages. 
 
 The prevalent philosophy in the present day is that of 
 Kant ; and this in all countries, European and American, 
 in which philosophy is valued. I wish it to be under- 
 stood that I look on Kant as one of our great thinkers. 
 There never can come a time when certain truths of 
 Kant and the German philosophy are to be regarded as 
 superseded. But Kant was guilty of one great over- 
 sight. He did not start with Reality in his primitive 
 
REALITY: PLACE IT SHOULD HOLD IN PHILOSOPHY. 5 
 
 assumptions. While we cannot dispense with him, the 
 crisis has come in which the Critical Philosophy should 
 be critically examined, when it will turn out that its 
 supremacy should be set aside. 
 
 Kantians of all descriptions are forever referring to 
 space and time as forms of sense. I do not say that too 
 much importance has been attached to space and time 
 while light has been thrown upon them by these discus- 
 sions. But along with these forms there should have 
 been assumed Reality in the things made known to us. 
 Reality is not an end to be gained after a process or by 
 a process, but is a means to an end. We are to begin 
 with Reality and carry it with us, and it should run on 
 throughout the whole of life. 
 
 There is admirable system in the Categories and in 
 the Ideas with which Kant follows up his Forms of Sense ; 
 and in them Reality is not to be regarded as superseded 
 or set aside. But if we have not Reality throughout 
 the foundation is insecure ; and hence the vacillations 
 through which the German philosophy has passed, and 
 which are not to be arrested till Reality has its place to 
 stay the whole. 
 
 Kant began with phenomena. But the phrase has two 
 senses. In ordinary science it means a fact to be ex- 
 plained, that is referred to its law. Or it may retain its 
 Greek meaning and signify appearance to be explained. 
 It is in this sense that Kant uses the phrase. With these 
 appearances he starts, and from these he never could de- 
 rive and infer any real object without having in the con- 
 clusion what was not in the premises. He should have 
 begun with Realities as made known by the conscious- 
 ness and the senses. Only thus can we have a true 
 philosophy with a well laid superstructure. A philosophy 
 which does not thus begin with Reality must always have 
 something insecure in its foundation. 
 
6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 We have come to a crisis in philosophy. We must 
 start anew, taking with us what we have omitted, and 
 thus rectify the oversight of which we have been guilty. 
 No philosophy is to be accepted which does not hold 
 resolutely by Reality. 
 
 It is well known that German philosophy has been 
 largely swaying German theology. It is worthy of in- 
 quiry whether the neglect of Reality has not been injur- 
 ing both its philosophy and its theology, and has been 
 injuriously affecting both the philosophy and theology of 
 Great Britain and America, and been the sources of their 
 vacillation in late years. Even the first truth in theology 
 implies Reality, " for the invisible things of God are 
 clearly seen from the things that are made," which things 
 that are made clearly imply Reality. 
 
 Hitherto America has had no special philosophy as the 
 ancient Greeks had, as the Scotch have had, and the 
 Germans have had. But there is a philosophy lying be- 
 fore it, and it should appropriate it, and call it its own 
 an advance beyond Locke, beyond the Scottish School 
 the American philosophy. This would be in thorough 
 accordance with the American character which claims to 
 be so practical. 
 
 The change from the speculative to this thoroughly 
 realistic philosophy would not be unlike that from the 
 European Monarchies to the American Republics. Where 
 could this be inaugurated so appropriately and auspi- 
 ciously as at the World's Great Exposition ? 
 
SECTION SECOND. 
 
 WAY IN WHICH EEALITY IS DISCOVERED. 
 
 STARTING in this way with real objects, we prosecute 
 farther investigations by Induction. This is the method 
 pursued by Reid and the Scottish School. It was derived 
 originally from Francis Bacon, and had already reached 
 many important results in physics in the discoveries of 
 Sir Isaac Newton and others. The Scottish School per- 
 ceived this, and were anxious to secure like results by 
 the same method in the. study of the human mind, using 
 self-consciousness rather than the senses in the gathering 
 of the facts. In this way they had been so far success- 
 ful as may be seen in the account which Reid, Stewart, 
 and others had given of the faculties of the mind. Not 
 that they for one instant regarded this Induction as the 
 foundation of their philosophy, which had its foundation 
 within itself in the principles of common sense and the 
 fundamental laws of thought and belief. But they rep- 
 resented Induction as the means of discovering these 
 laws. Thus they built up a philosophy resting on deeper 
 principles, but discovered by the cautious and safe 
 method of Induction. 
 
 We may consider more carefully the way in which 
 reality is discovered. Take this stone and this tree : I 
 perceive them to be realities at once by the sense ot 
 sight and the sense of touch, and I cannot be made to 
 decide otherwise. I cannot prove it immediately or by 
 syllogism, for I have no prior premises to establish the 
 
8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 point that this stone exists, that this tree exists. It is 
 the same with any other object, such as this chair and 
 this table, this door and this window, this church or this 
 steeple. The mind has cognitive powers by which it 
 discerns these objects, that they exist. 
 
 By the same or further cognitive powers it may come 
 to know further qualities of these objects ; of this stone 
 that it is hard, or of that log that it is brittle ; or of this 
 tree that it grows slowly or grows rapidly ; of this chair 
 that it can hold only one person ; of this table that it is 
 square ; of this door that it is wide ; of this window that 
 it is narrow ; of this church that it can hold a thousand 
 people ; of this steeple that it is one hundred feet high. 
 Thus we may increase our knowledge of objects from 
 day to day till the number comes beyond our calculation. 
 
 When there is an addition or multiplication of real 
 objects, there is no lessening or increasing of this reality, 
 which continues the same. In the same way, by the 
 inner sense or reflection, we at once discover, not by rea- 
 soning, something in our hope and grief and joy. Hav- 
 ing reality in the individual stone or tree, we have reality 
 in the general notion in stones or trees. Having reality 
 in the qualities of the concrete object, we have reality in 
 the abstract; thus, reality in the stone implies reality 
 in its qualities of hardness. 
 
 Reality is in all these quarters. I think we are enti- 
 tled to call the inquiry into, and the results which issue 
 from it, the Philosophy of Realism, and to adopt it as 
 the true philosophy. 
 
SECTION THIRD. 
 
 WHAT IS REALITY? 
 I. 
 
 EVERYBODY knows the existence of Reality; or, to 
 vary the phrase when we speak of things acting, every 
 one knows Actuality. 
 
 Of all thoughts, or perhaps I should rather say of all 
 perceptions, it seems to be the clearest. Yet it is one of 
 the most difficult to explain, or even express. This is 
 simply because it is so simple : it does not admit of anal- 
 ysis ; it has no distinct elements into which to resolve it, 
 and there is no common genus or species under which to 
 place it. The only way of showing its nature is to point 
 to examples of it. We look on the wall of the room in 
 which we sit, and know it to be real. We see a bird fly- 
 ing, and know it to be an actuality. We are conscious of 
 ourselves in pain, and we are sure of our own existence in 
 a state of pain. 
 
 There may be realities which we cannot discover : we 
 do not know whether the planet Jupiter is inhabited. 
 But there are things which we know to be real. We 
 know body as it is presented to us as extended and ex- 
 
10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 ercising power or properties. In self -consciousness we 
 know self as feeling, knowing, willing. Thus we know 
 the manifestations of body, such as shape, resistance, and 
 mobility. Thus we know the manifestations of self, as 
 knowledge, desire, resolution. The qualities which we 
 perceive in ourselves, specially such as love, benevolence, 
 justice, are actualities. All these differ from imagina- 
 tions, say a fairy, a ghost, a mermaid; and commonly 
 the two can be distinguished. We call the one real, the 
 other unreal. 
 
 n. 
 
 We cannot explain or even understand the facts of 
 which we are conscious without calling in two cognitive 
 powers, the external and the internal senses. These can- 
 not be resolved into anything else, say, as is often at- 
 tempted, into sensations, impressions, ideas ; for none of 
 these contain cognition, and cannot, therefore, give us 
 knowledge by accumulation or combination. Nor can 
 knowledge be drawn from them by reasoning ; for, not 
 being in the premises, they cannot reach it, except by 
 falling into the acknowledged fallacy of having more in 
 the conclusion than in the premises. 
 
 In acquiring a knowledge of external things, sensa- 
 tions are involved ; feelings in the organism by all the 
 senses : but these not having knowledge cannot give it to 
 us logically. In looking at the table before us, there is 
 the exercise of coats and humors, of rods and cones, and 
 of the optic nerve ; but we do not notice these in vision ; 
 their existence has been made known to us by the phys- 
 iologist. In hearing, the tympanum, the hammer, the 
 stirrup, and auditory nerve do not form part of our intui- 
 tive knowledge ; they are merely the means of giving an 
 exact field to our perceptions, but are no part of the real- 
 
WHAT IS REALITY? 11 
 
 ity directly perceived by us. With these concurrences 
 we look immediately upon the thing, as we look through 
 perfectly transparent glass upon the tree without notic- 
 ing the medium. 
 
 In standing up for realism it is to be understood that 
 we hold by the known actuality of mind, with its percep- 
 tions, thoughts, and feelings, as well as of matter with 
 its extension and force. We have as clear a perception 
 of the one as of the other. We know both by a power 
 of intuition or direct inspection ; the one by percep- 
 tion of the senses, the other by self-consciousness. We 
 know each of them by its peculiar properties : the one as 
 resisting our energy and extended in three dimensions ; 
 the other, as knowing and judging with appetencies and 
 feelings. We possess these knowing powers naturally; 
 we carry them with us at all times ; they are in our very 
 nature and constitution. 
 
 It is to be noticed that we know not only body and 
 mind : we know the affections or qualities of both ; indeed, 
 it is by, or rather with, their qualities that we know the 
 substances. We know extension and solidity in matter ; 
 cognition and emotion in mind. In particular we should 
 insist that we know moral qualities, such as good and 
 evil, and the obligation lying upon us to do the one and 
 avoid the other. It is of the utmost importance in ethics 
 to claim that there is a known reality in these moral 
 qualities, quite as much so as there is extension in body 
 and perception in mind. , 
 
 III. 
 
 But it is asked contemptuously, Do you really believe 
 that we perceive things as they are ? that things really 
 are what they appear to us? If you say so, then you 
 must hold that a man in a mist is larger than when in 
 
12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 clear air ; that the sun when setting has a more expanded 
 surface than at midday ; that the sky is not an expanse, 
 but a concave firmament ; that the ocean as we look on 
 it from the shore is a perfect level, without any curva- 
 ture; that the lines in a railway draw nearer to each 
 other as they recede ; that a measured mile seen across 
 an arm of the sea is longer than when seen across hill 
 and dale on land. Such puzzles seem to show that, what- 
 ever supposed things be, they are not what they appear 
 to us to be. Pointing to these difficulties, sceptical phi- 
 losophers argue that we can never discover realities. The 
 great body of philosophers employ themselves in showing 
 how reality is to be reached by a process which they 
 point out. I believe that none of the theories which they 
 advance are satisfactory. 
 
 In order to remove the perplexities which have gath- 
 ered round the subject, it is of importance to clear up 
 two points : First, what are the realities which we pro- 
 fess to discover ? These are : 
 
 1. All that we know by intuition, that is, by an imme- 
 diate perception of the object. Thus we know matter as 
 extended and resisting our energy. We also know mind 
 as knowing, thinking, feeling, resolving. Of this intui- 
 tive knowledge there are three criteria clear and decisive. 
 First, it is self-evident. We know the object at once on 
 looking at it. In looking at the table, I am sure there is 
 a colored surface before me. Being thus self-evident, it 
 is, Secondly, necessary ; we cannot be made to believe 
 otherwise. Thirdly, it is universal, that is, held by all 
 men on the objects being presented to them. These are 
 the tests of primary truths, and they sanction the convic- 
 tion that we know realities. 2. All that is drawn from 
 this by logical deduction. Ever since the time of Aris- 
 totle we have had a test of the legitimacy of inference 
 
WHAT IS REALITY? 13 
 
 in the syllogism, which is expounded in the treatises of 
 formal logic. 3. All that is got by scientific induction. 
 We have tests of the legitimacy of this in the Preroga- 
 tive Instances of Bacon, and more especially in John 
 S. Mill's Canons of Induction, expounded in the books 
 of Inductive Logic. To this class of realities belong 
 the ascertained laws of nature, such as gravitation, chem- 
 ical affinity, the association of ideas. In these we rise 
 above the individual facts revealed by external and inter- 
 nal perception, and correlate the facts. The laws thus 
 reached are not apodictic, or demonstrative like mathe- 
 matical truths. But they are to be accepted provision- 
 ally as realities, which, it is allowed, may be modified and 
 rectified by advancing discoveries ; thus gravitation is a 
 reality, but may possibly be resolved in the end, as its 
 discoverer believed, into a higher reality. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Secondly, in order to determine the precise reality, we 
 have to draw certain distinctions. I have unfolded these 
 elsewhere, 1 but to make our discussion complete it is ex- 
 pedient to repeat them here, and apply them to the sub- 
 ject before us. Our object is to determine the reality, 
 and we have : 
 
 1. To distinguish between the real object and the sen- 
 sations and feelings associated with it; generally be- 
 iween our sensations and perceptions. The former of 
 these have indeed a sort of reality as affections of self, 
 and they have no external reality, and we fall into error 
 when we suppose that they have. 
 
 2. As the most important, we have to distinguish be- 
 tween our original and acquired perceptions. From an 
 
 1 See First and Fundamental Truths, part ii. book i. ch. iii. 
 
14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 early period of our lives, during infancy and at all later 
 dates, these two are closely associated with each other, 
 and it is at times difficult to distinguish them. We claim 
 a certainty in our original perceptions only ; there may 
 be error in our derived perceptions, and no reality in 
 them. 
 
 I believe we can determine precisely what we know 
 intuitively and directly by the various senses. The eye 
 gives us a colored surface, nothing more. Hearing gives 
 us a sound in the ear, from which we argue a cause, which 
 is found by science to be undulations. In smell we have 
 an affection of the nostrils ; in taste, an affection of the 
 palate; in touch proper, or feeling, an affection of the 
 part from which the afferent nerve comes. In the mus- 
 cular sense and energy, we have resistance offered, im- 
 plying resisting energy. These are our primary sense- 
 cognitions, all noticed by self-consciousness ; they reveal 
 realities, and upon them, by legitimate processes, we may 
 rear other knowledges, also of reality, as derived from 
 what is real. But we may also draw erroneous deduc- 
 tions when we pass beyond our intuitive knowledge. We 
 do not know distance intuitively by the eye or by the 
 ear, and we declare that the rock seen across the sea is 
 only one mile distant, when actual measurement finds it 
 to be two. I have shown that to preserve us from error 
 we have to draw a like distinction in memory between 
 our original memories and our constructed memories, in 
 which latter there may be errors. 
 
 3. There is the distinction between the Primary and 
 Secondary Qualities of Matter. This distinction has not 
 always been correctly enunciated, but, when properly 
 viewed, it has a most important place in determining 
 what reality there is in the supposed qualities of matter. 
 The Primary Qualities, such as extension and resisting 
 
WHAT IS REALITY? 15 
 
 energy, are perceived, as Reid has remarked, directly ; 
 and are in all matter, as Locke has shown. These always 
 imply realities. The Secondary Qualities are reached 
 by argument, and the conclusion may not be correctly 
 drawn. Thus in heat there is a reality in the organic 
 sensation ; but the external cause, supposed to be a mode 
 of motion, is discoverable only by a scientific process, to 
 be tested by the canons of induction. 
 
 By calling in such obvious principles and distinctions 
 as these, we are able to stand up for the trustworthiness 
 of the senses. What we see intuitively by the eye is not 
 the sky, or the sea, or the rock, or the man in the mist, 
 at a distance, but the object on the eye which is always 
 real. 
 
 We are thus able without difficulty to determine what 
 is real within us and around us more satisfactorily than is 
 commonly done by metaphysicians, by a process which, 
 if we examine it, will be seen to reach reality only by 
 unknowingly assuming it. 
 
 V. 
 
 As to this knowledge, it should always be understood 
 that it is only partial. " We know in part." This doc- 
 trine is opposed, on the one hand, to Gnosticism, which 
 claims to know all ; and, on the other hand, to Agnosti- 
 cism, which professes to know nothing. Between these 
 two we should hold by Mereognosticism, which holds 
 that we know, but only in part. What we do know we 
 should stand by, or rather stand upon, as a foundation 
 to give us stability, and on which we may rear other real- 
 ities. 
 
 As we all spontaneously believe in, or rather know, 
 reality, so it should have a place, a deep and a thoroughly 
 
16 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 pervading place, in all philosophic systems. Whatever 
 else philosophy may be, it is a science of foundations, 
 and should commence with and rest upon the reality of 
 things as a basis. An intellectual system which does not 
 contain and embrace actuality must be a speculation 
 rather than a philosophy. 
 
 We should not attempt to prove reality by mediate 
 proof. Indeed, it cannot be demonstrated by any such 
 process. The very constitutive principle of Logic or in- 
 ference is, that there be nothing in the conclusion which 
 was not contained in the premise (or premises). If re- 
 ality be not in the premise, you cannot legitimately get 
 it in the conclusion. The conclusion we reach here is, 
 that in all philosophy we must assume reality. Beyond 
 this we can do nothing more than show that we are en- 
 titled to assume it. 
 
 Not that it is to be represented as unproven and un- 
 provable ; it has its proof in itself. Not that it is to be 
 described, as it often is in the present day, as unknown 
 and unknowable ; it is the first known, the best known 
 of all truths. We need not try to prove it by mediate 
 evidence, for we have immediate evidence, which is 
 stronger, as on it mediate proof must depend in the last 
 resort. It does not need other evidence, it has its evi- 
 dence in itself; it is self-evident. It does not require 
 external support ; it stands on its own basis, and gives 
 support to other truths. You cannot find any other truth 
 clearer or more certain by which to establish it. Any 
 external probation might rather unsettle it as tending to 
 throw it off its proper foundation. We do not reach it 
 by a process ; it is rather the starting-point of many pro- 
 cesses. It is not a conclusion reached ; it is a premise 
 necessary to innumerable conclusions. 
 
 It is possible, indeed, speculatively and in words, to 
 
WHAT IS REALITY? 17 
 
 deny reality. But naturally and spontaneously we know 
 all the while that the very denial implies the existence 
 of the one who makes the denial. A man may affirm that 
 the river before him does not exist ; but he shows that 
 he believes in its existence by his declining to cast him- 
 self into it. He may say there is no carriage on the road 
 before him ; but he hastens to go out of its way when it 
 approaches. He may insist that there is no sword in 
 that man's hand; but he turns aside when it would 
 pierce him. He may assure us that he does not exist ; 
 but in the very declaration he manifests his own exist- 
 ence. 
 
 Now, the question I have to ask is, What do the lead- 
 ing philosophic systems of the day make of reality ? I 
 am to put this question to each of them. Do they ac- 
 knowledge it, or do they deny it ? Do they accept it in 
 whole, or only in part? Do they attempt to prove it, or 
 simply assume it ? 
 
 Some acknowledge that there is reality in certain ob- 
 jects and deny it in certain others, both of which are 
 supported by the same intuitive evidence. Thus some 
 claim that there is actuality revealed by the external 
 senses, but not by the internal sense, and are landed in 
 materialism. Others hold firmly by what we know of 
 mind or self, but discard the fleeting phenomena of bod- 
 ily senses, and are idealists. Some seriously try to prove 
 the existence of reality ; but as they evidently fail, there 
 are others who feel as if we have only a phenomenal 
 world, or a sort of dreamland. The fault of the great 
 body of metaphysicians has been that they have acted on 
 no principle, and have admitted actuality in some cases 
 and denied it in others, both having a like evidence or 
 want of evidence ; and have thus made philosophy capri- 
 cious and inconsistent. 
 
18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 Let us understand definitely what is the question I 
 put. It is not what is the belief held and acted on by 
 the system-builders as individuals, for practically they 
 have all acted on the reality of things. David Hume 
 said again and again, "Though I show what are the 
 sceptical issues of the philosophy of the day, in actual 
 life I believe and act as other people." Nor is my ques- 
 tion how the philosophers wished their systems to be 
 understood. Locke and Kant both held that their sys- 
 tems were realistic; but both philosophies, it can be 
 shown, were idealistic on the one hand and sceptical on 
 the other in their logical tendencies. We may be sure 
 that all philosophies will issue sooner or later at the 
 place to which logic drives them. 
 
 There is a Nemesis in philosophy as there is in moral- 
 ity. Hume the sceptic was the Avenger who drove to 
 its consequences the errors that prevailed from Descartes 
 to Berkeley. Herbert Spencer is the Avenger who is 
 leading on to Agnosticism the error that has remained in 
 the prevailing philosophies. We shall have to inquire 
 how we are to build on the ground which has been left 
 waste. 
 
 Philosophy in this age takes three types : I. The SEN- 
 SATIONAL and EXPERIENTIAL; II. The A-PRIOKI or 
 KANTIAN ; III. The SCOTTISH. These stand before us 
 as mountain chains with valleys between, but with ranges 
 of hills proceeding from them, and at times joining on to 
 each other. They are found not only in Great Britain 
 and America, but in Germany, France, Italy, and all civ- 
 ilized countries. The question I put is, What do these 
 make of reality ? 
 
SECTION FOURTH. 
 
 GEEEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 HERE it may be interesting to notice that the aim of 
 the Greek philosophy the earliest deserving the name, 
 all prior being loose and undiscriminating was to dis- 
 cover reality as opposed to appearances. Its earliest 
 metaphysical school was the Eleatic, and its search was 
 for existence, TO oV and TO clvaL. In their subtle disqui- 
 sitions, they often confused what is simple, and made 
 assertions which have no meaning. It can be shown 
 that the Greek philosophy kept it steadily in view to dis- 
 cover, not the absolute, as the German historians so 
 often represent them as doing, but the real. This was 
 the aim of Socrates when he insisted so much on defini- 
 tion. Plato found the real among the fleeting in his 
 Ideas. Aristotle classified the real under his ten Cate- 
 gories. The Stoics found reality specially in virtue as 
 the only good, and the Epicureans in pleasure. It was 
 because this was their search that the Greek philosophy 
 has been so abiding, and that students ever turn back to 
 it, while other systems have been swallowing each other 
 and have had only a temporary sway. So, then, as we 
 assume spontaneously the existence of a self and a non- 
 self, let us also assume it in philosophy, as the reflex 
 expression of our spontaneities. Philosophy should com- 
 mence with it, and take it with it by implication wher- 
 ever it goes. In all its investigations, it should presup- 
 
20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 pose and proceed upon it. A philosophy without it is a 
 speculation and not truth. 1 
 
 The relation between mind and body has always been 
 regarded as a mystery which we cannot thoroughly clear 
 up. Yet we may reverently inquire what the process 
 is, and state what it is so far as we know it. Mr. J. S. 
 Mill has shown that all physical causation is dual or 
 plural ; it consists of two or more agents constituting the 
 cause, and producing a change on each of the agents. A 
 blow is inflicted on a man's brain which causes his death ; 
 here the cause is the blow and the state of the brain, and 
 the effect, the death, is the joint result of the two. So in 
 Sense-Perception there is an outward object, it may be 
 in the body or beyond the body, and thus standing in a 
 particular relation to the mind ; the effect is the percep- 
 tion of the object. So, in all cases, there is a mutual 
 affection of the external object, which in the last resort 
 is the nerves and brain on the one hand, and on the 
 other hand the mind, with its perceptive power ; and the 
 result is a perception of the object. This seems to be a 
 statement of the facts. There is no doubt mystery, that 
 is, some things which we do not understand ; but there is 
 no more mystery than in any other causation : the two 
 agents have the property of acting on each other. But 
 if this be the true account, possibly after all only a 
 partial account, we are delivered from all the useless 
 intermediaries which metaphysicians of late ages have 
 introduced to explain what they do not explain, and 
 which may need no explanation. Aristotle briefly ex- 
 presses the exact facts : " The sensible objects call the 
 perceptive sense into activity." 2 
 
 1 See Appendix A. 2 See Appendix A. 
 
SECTION FIFTH. 
 
 DESCARTES. 
 
 THIS doctrine of Reality following the Greek philos- 
 ophy continued during the middle ages, except among 
 the small body of sceptics, but all this was changed by 
 Descartes, the great philosopher of the French School. 
 
 Cogito ergo sum was his aphorism, thereby seeking to 
 strengthen his belief in reality of self, founding it upon 
 argument, with a premise and a conclusion. But if 
 the ego be in the cogito, the conclusion is a mere pleo- 
 nasm. If the ego be not in the cogito, the conclusion 
 does not follow, and the conclusion is not legitimate. 
 Some have denied that this is really an argument. It is 
 represented as a primitive judgment, seen by them to be 
 true at once. But surely Descartes knew what an argu- 
 ment was ; and when he put his statement in the form of 
 an argument, he must have regarded it as such ; but in 
 doing this he did not properly express the process that 
 passes in the human mind, which is not Cogito ergo sum, 
 but ego cognitans assumed. This is a truth on which 
 other truths may rest. But from that day to this, phi- 
 losophy has always had some sort of process in the way in 
 which we know ourselves* 
 
SECTION SIXTH. 
 
 THE EXPERIENTIAL SCHOOL. 
 
 LOCKE may be regarded as a representative of this 
 school. He is not a sensationalist, though he is often so 
 designated. Often have I heard him spoken of in the 
 lectures of German professors by the name of Locke", as 
 the representative sensationalist. But Locke allots to 
 man two inlets of ideas, sensation and reflection ; and 
 attaches the greater importance to the second. To re- 
 flection we are indebted for all our ideas of mind and its 
 qualities, of spiritual things and of God. Besides, he 
 gives to mind a special power of intuition which per- 
 ceives at once the agreement and disagreement of ideas 
 (not of things), and thence rises to demonstration ; 1 and 
 he affirms that ethics might be made demonstrative, 
 though he never showed how this could be done. 2 
 
 Locke was personally a determined realist, and be- 
 lieved that his philosophy was realistic; but he never 
 reached a full and satisfactory reality. Primarily, ac- 
 cording to his theor}', we perceive ideas within ourselves ; 
 knowledge is simply the perception of the agreement or 
 disagreement of ideas, and we get all our ideas and know- 
 ledge by experience, which is limited, and can never rise 
 above itself, any more than water can rise above its foun- 
 tain. The consequence is, that he was never able to 
 1 Essay, b. iv. ch. L 2 Essay, b. iv. 1 7. 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL SCHOOL. 23 
 
 reach truth above experience, to universal and necessary 
 truth holding true in all time and in all places. He 
 believed most firmly in God and in infinity ; but, as 
 Hume showed, he could not by mere experience prove 
 the existence of a God who is beyond all experience of 
 sense and consciousness. 
 
 His greatest admirers were never able to show how he 
 could find, on his theory of knowledge, an actuality ex- 
 ternal to the mind. He tells us : " 'T is evident the mind 
 knows not things immediately, but only by the interven- 
 tion of the ideas it has of them." l His whole account 
 of human understanding proceeds on this principle. He 
 fondly held that the ideas were resemblances and repre- 
 sentatives of things ; but he had no proof of this, and did 
 not pretend to have any. The mind perceives ideas, but 
 does not perceive things, and therefore cannot possibly 
 know that the ideas which it knows are copies of the 
 things which it can never know. We are thus shut up 
 into an ideal world, and have no means of breaking out 
 from this shell or prison, and can never know that there 
 is such a thing as body beyond our idea of it. 
 
 Berkeley started from this position, and followed out 
 Locke's theory to its legitimate consequences, maintain- 
 ing that ideas are the reality, and constitute the whole 
 of the reality which man can find. Hume interposed at 
 this point, and drove the whole process to scepticism, 
 to what would now be called agnosticism. We have im- 
 pressions, and ideas the reproduction of impressions, and 
 have and can have nothing else. 
 
 1 Essay, iv. L 
 
SECTION SEVENTH. 
 
 THE A-PKIORI OB KANTIAN SCHOOL. 
 
 LOCKE'S Philosophy was the prevailing one from the 
 date of his " Essay on Human Understanding," in 1690, 
 to about 1830, when there was a shaking of thought, 
 which issued in the second French Revolution and the 
 Reform Bill of England, and a reaction in philosophy 
 against the prevailing empiricism among conservative 
 minds afraid of the too rapid advances of radical and 
 revolutionary opinions. Since that time indeed, fifty 
 years prior in Germany Kant's philosophy has been 
 the prevailing one among deeper thinkers all over the 
 thinking world. It was set up to oppose the scepticism 
 of Hume, which awoke Kant, as he tells us, from his 
 dogmatic slumbers. It was also meant, following Leib- 
 nitz, to counteract the empiricism and supposed sensa- 
 tionalism of the " very celebrated Locke," as Kant desig- 
 nates him. 
 
 It embraces a vast body of profound truth firmly con- 
 catenated, and has brought out more fully than was ever 
 done before some of the deeper powers in the human 
 mind. It reached the highest crest of the wave at the 
 centenary, in 1881, of Kant's great work on the " Kritik 
 of Pure Reason." I may be mistaken, but I think I see 
 signs of late years of its being subjected to a severe ques- 
 
THE A-PRIORI OB KANTIAN SCHOOL. 25 
 
 tioning on the part of those who think that some of its 
 principles are keeping us away from reality. In one of 
 its forms, that of its high speculative ideas, it has gone 
 up years ago into the clouds of Hegelianism, from which 
 sober thinkers are turning away; in another form, in 
 which it has only appearances and unknown things, it 
 has run aground into the clay of the Agnosticism of Her- 
 bert Spencer, whom one half of our ambitious metaphysic 
 youths are following, and the other half are criticising. 
 It is time that we have a thorough criticism of the crit- 
 ical philosophy, such as we had half a century ago of the 
 philosophy of Locke. 
 
 For years past I have been urging general objections 
 to the system of the great German metaphysician. 1 In 
 this paper I am simply inquiring whether it has reached 
 and embraced reality. 
 
 The Kritic of Pure Reason, reared as a castellated 
 structure strong and compact, is the Ehrenbretstein of 
 German philosophy. It is a skilfully constructed, but is 
 an artificial and not a natural product. It will be seen 
 as we advance that it does not begin with reality, and so 
 cannot find it as it goes on, nor end with it logically. It 
 keeps reality at a distance, lest it should lead into mate- 
 rialism, which pretends to be so real. But Realism em- 
 braces both a material and a spiritual actuality, and each 
 should have its own place in a natural system in which 
 there is a body provided, where the spirit may dwell and 
 appear in living form. 
 
 n. 
 
 1. The Method pursued, the Critical, does not reveal 
 Reality to us. Kant acted rightly in departing from the 
 
 1 See my work, Realistic Philosophy, vol. ii., article on " Criti- 
 cism of Critical Philosophy." 
 
26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 Dogmatic Method, which had been used by Descartes 
 and so many philosophers prior to his time. That 
 method is used in mathematics, where we have axioms to 
 start with, which we need only clearly to define. But it 
 is not applicable in sciences which deal with scattered 
 facts, and which we should pursue in the Inductive 
 Method, in mental science, with self-consciousness as the 
 agent which makes known the facts to us. 
 
 Kant takes credit for introducing a new Method, 
 neither the Dogmatic nor the Inductive, but the Critical. 
 Pure Reason, he says, can criticise itself. By this Method 
 he constructed his system, which has been the admiration 
 on the part of profound thinkers, even of those who may 
 not regard it as the plan of Nature or of God. I ac- 
 knowledge that criticism has a function to perform : it 
 has to examine the works constructed by man, such as 
 literary style, theories of poetry and the drama, works 
 of art, as paintings, statues, and buildings. But we do 
 not venture to criticise the works of Nature and of God ; 
 our business is simply to discover what these are, and to 
 fall in with them. No one has ever ventured to con- 
 struct physical science by criticism ; say chemistry, or 
 biology, or physiology. Were such an attempt made, it 
 would issue in a series and succession of systems jostling 
 each other, with no means of effecting a settlement. 
 These effects have actually followed from the applica- 
 tion of the critical methods to mental philosophy. Since 
 the days of Kant, there has been a succession of systems 
 superseding each other with no principle of final appeal. 
 Every few years there appears a fresh and independent 
 youth, proclaiming: Kant has not followed a certain 
 principle to its consequences; let us carry it out thor- 
 oughly. It was thus that philosophy advanced from 
 Kant to Hegel. Another says, There is a grand principle 
 
THE A-PRIORI OR KANTIAN SCHOOL. 27 
 
 which has been overlooked : let us introduce it and it will 
 mediate between the systems; and thus a new system 
 has been introduced to multiply the confusion. This 
 was the mode of procedure in ancient physics, and the 
 Stoics had one cosmology, and the Epicureans another. 
 All this has been abandoned in modern science ; and we 
 have a means of settling disputes, not by criticism, but 
 by conformity of theories to the facts of Nature. The 
 Critical Method has carried us away from Reality, and 
 should now be let down from its high place as chief, to 
 occupy a subordinate position. 
 
 There is a sense in which the truths both of physics 
 and metaphysics are to be submitted to criticism. The 
 profound wisdom of Bacon insisted on the inductive sci- 
 ences beginning with " Necessary Rejections and Exclu- 
 sions," and Whewell insists on the " Decomposition of 
 Facts." But this is merely to put irrelevant matter out 
 of the way to enable us to study by induction the facts 
 of our nature without and within us. 
 
 Metaphysical philosophy is the science of First and 
 Fundamental Truths, and these are to be discovered 
 solely by the careful observation of what passes in our 
 minds. But let it be understood that our induction of 
 them does not give to these truths their validity; it 
 merely enables us to observe them. This is a distinction 
 which I have been laboring to make students of mental 
 philosophy see and acknowledge and proceed on. 1 In- 
 duction certainly does not give authority to Primitive 
 or A-Priorl truth ; but it is necessary in order to our be- 
 ing able to discover its nature, and to use it in philoso- 
 phy. The careful induction of Newton did not make, 
 create, or invent the law of gravitation, or give to it its 
 function ; but it was necessary to make it known to us. 
 1 See Appendix D. 
 
28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 Such fundamental and necessary truths as personal iden- 
 tity, substance, causation, moral obligation, responsibil- 
 ity rising to a knowledge of God, are in our very nature, 
 and have their authority in themselves and from God. 
 But it is one of our highest prerogatives that we can rise 
 by internal reflection and induction to the precise know- 
 ledge of these truths, and use them in philosophy and 
 tbeolog} r . 
 
 The Kritik of the Speculative Reason embraces three 
 points: I. ^ESTHETIC, or the a-priori elements in the 
 Senses; II. ANALYTIC, or the a-priori elements in the 
 Understanding ; III. DIALECTIC, or the a-priori elements 
 in Reason. I am to subject these to an examination. 
 
 ILL 
 
 2. In ^ESTHETIC he misses Reality ly making our 
 primitive perceptions look to phenomena and not to things. 
 What is meant by phenomenon ? In scientific investiga- 
 tion it is commonly used to denote a fact revealed in 
 order to be referred to a law. But in the philosophy of 
 Kant it is employed, in the original Greek sense of the 
 word, as an appearance. According to Kant and his 
 school, the mind in sense-perception and in self-conscious- 
 ness begins with phenomena in the sense of appearances. 
 This, it can be shown, prevents it from reaching realities. 
 
 It might be argued that appearance of itself implies 
 reality ; a phenomenon is a thing appearing. In one of 
 Longfellow's poems, there is a dispute between the tree 
 on the river's banks and the tree reflected in the waters 
 as to which is the reality. The question can be settled ; 
 there is a reality in both, but of a different kind. The 
 tree on the banks has solidity, the tree in the stream is a 
 reflection of light. In all appearances presented to us, 
 
THE A-PRIORI OR KANTIAN SCHOOL. 29 
 
 there is a thing that appears, and what we have to ascer- 
 tain is the precise actuality. It can be shown that this 
 was the search of the Greek philosophy. In the Kantian 
 system there is an appearance presented, but this appear- 
 ance is entirely subjective ; that is, in the mind. The 
 mind in perception cannot look beyond itself, and so can- 
 not know anything external. He argues, indeed, in the 
 preface of the second edition of the Kritik : " The real 
 existence of things outside of us, and independently of our 
 consciousness of them, is an assumption without which he 
 could not have found even a beginning for his philoso- 
 phy." I am glad to find him making such an assump- 
 tion ; it is an assumption given us by our consciousness. 
 But he tries to prove it by a very doubtful probation. 
 " The simple but empirically determined consciousness of 
 my own existence proves the existence of objects in space 
 outside of me." I cannot see that the conclusion follows 
 from the premise. Whether assumed or proven, it is clear 
 that he holds by the existence of external things; but 
 the nature of these external things cannot be known by 
 us. Even the mind itself is not known as a thing. This 
 is one of Kant's most pernicious errors, more so than even 
 his denial that we know anything of the nature of mat- 
 ter. Nothing remains, as we shall see forthwith, but a 
 conglomerate of forms, categories, and ideas, embracing 
 no reality beyond themselves. 
 
 We now see where Herbert Spencer and the Agnostics 
 of our day get their views and their nomenclature. They 
 deny that they are sceptics, and that they do not believe 
 in a reality of things ; but then they affirm that the na- 
 ture of things cannot be known by us. Mr. Spencer 
 thinks that there is a God, but then he is unknown and 
 must ever be unknowable by man. 
 
 Kant draws the distinction between phenomenon and 
 
30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 noumenon, between the thing appearing and the Ding 
 an Sich, the thing in itself, or, as Dr. Mahaffy translates 
 it, the thing per se. The distinction will come before us 
 once and again. It is an altogether unsatisfactory one. 
 We cannot know that a thing exists without knowing 
 something about it, without knowing it under the aspect 
 in which it makes its existence known to us. 1 In sense- 
 perception we know not only that the thing before us, 
 say that book, exists, but we know it in part ; we know 
 it as a colored surface. We are certainly not omniscient; 
 we do not know all about any one thing, about ourselves, 
 or other things. But we know what we know, know so 
 much of the thing, not, it may be, of the thing in itself, 
 which is meaningless, as a thing cannot be in itself, but 
 of the thing-, the very thing. In denying this, which he 
 does, Kant is undermining realism, and leaving us in the 
 darkness of nihilism. 
 
 IV. 
 
 3. In ^ESTHETIC and ANALYTIC he makes us perceive 
 things, not as they are, but as made or modified by forms 
 in the mind. 
 
 First, our perceptions or intuitions by the senses and 
 by self - consciousness come to us under the forms of 
 Space and Time, Space being the form of the bodily 
 senses, and Time being the form both of the external and 
 internal senses. We are not to look on these two forms, 
 Space and Time, as having any objective existence, any 
 independent or real being. They are forms in the mind 
 imposed on what we perceive. It follows that we do 
 not and cannot know the world without us, nor even the 
 internal self as it is. We perceive everything as through 
 
 1 I have all along been insisting on this. It is confirmed by Zel- 
 ler. See Appendix C. 
 
THE A-PRIORI OR KANTIAN SCHOOL. 31 
 
 stained, and it may be twisted glass, which gives its 
 color and form to what comes under our notice. At this 
 point Kant's idealism enters, and it runs on through the 
 whole of his philosophy, till, as we shall see, it culmi- 
 nates in pure idealism. In opposition, Realism holds that 
 Space and Time, as well as the things contained in them, 
 are realities, and are what we intuitively perceive them. 
 We know matter so much of matter; we know mind 
 so much of mind ; and we also know space and time, in 
 which matter and mind are so much of space and time. 
 As having such a knowledge, we believe in the mathe- 
 matical truths derived from them by legitimate inference. 
 If we allow, with Kant, that they are not objective real- 
 ities, we shall be constrained by logic to hold that the 
 things perceived, body and mind, are also ideal. We 
 notice a body in space and an event in time, and we have 
 the same evidence, an immediate evidence, of the exist- 
 ence of all four, the body, the space, the event, and time. 
 Secondly, the mind begins with the perceptions of 
 sense, and then the understanding pronounces judgments 
 upon these. The judgments are pronounced according 
 to mental forms called Categories. Great pains are 
 taken to show how these Categories are deduced. They 
 are very much the same as the judgments of the Aristo- 
 telian or Formal Logic, of which Kant was professor : 
 I. QUANTITY: II. QUALITY: 
 
 Unity, Reality, 
 
 Plurality, Negation, 
 
 Totality. Limitation. 
 
 III. RELATION: IV. MODALITY: 
 
 Inherence and Subsistence, Possibility and Impossibility, 
 
 Causality and Dependence, Existence and Non-Existence, 
 
 Reciprocity of Agent and Necessity and Contingence. 
 Patient. 
 
32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 I am not concerned to examine these forms, or deter- 
 mine whether they are the best possible classification of 
 judgments. Modern logic makes the judgments fewer. 
 But they have been made greatly more scientifically cor- 
 rect by the criticism of Kant. Here, however, our in- 
 quiry is simply, Have we come nearer to actuality ? On 
 the contrary, we have gone farther away from it. We 
 have subjected what we know of it to a farther modify- 
 ing process. These Categories, which are all merely sub- 
 jective, impose themselves upon the concepts which have 
 been formed by space and time being imposed on the sen- 
 sibility. The place allotted to the Real seems to me to 
 be very artificial and awkward. He does not place it in 
 ^Esthetics, or the domain of the senses ; we do not im- 
 mediately perceive it. He places it in Analytic, under 
 judgment. The Real which he reaches is a mere form 
 in the mind, not implying anything objective out of the 
 mind. Taking this view, the tendency of the German 
 philosophy has been ever towards idealism. Even the 
 sensationalists among them, in reducing all our powers 
 to sensation, do not regard our sensations as giving us a 
 knowledge of things. 
 
 One of the Categories is Cause and Effect. It obliges 
 us to look on every event as having a cause, but this does 
 not prove that it really has a cause ; we can be assured 
 of this only by the experience of sense, which cannot rise 
 above what we experience, and cannot therefore give us 
 any universal truth. We would prove that a God exists 
 arguing from the world, which is a visible effect, "a 
 manufactured article," as Sir John Herschel expresses 
 it, to a cause in God. But the argument is invalid, as 
 we are not allowed to assert that causation is universal. 
 As Hume argues, we are not entitled, from causation in 
 our limited experience, to infer a causation in world-mak- 
 
THE A-PRIORI OR KANTIAN SCHOOL. 33 
 
 ing, which is beyond our experience. The same may be 
 said of all the twelve Categories, as unity, as existence, 
 as necessity; they carry no weight beyond the experi- 
 ence of sense. It thus appears that ^ESTHETIC, or the 
 science of the S3nses, does not give us things as they are ; 
 that ANALYTIC, or the science of the understanding, 
 takes us farther away from things ; and we have now to 
 turn to DIALECTIC, which inquires what reality there is 
 in these processes of sense arid understanding. 
 
 V. 
 
 In the ^Esthetic and Analytic, Kant is building up: 
 starting with phenomena formulated by Space and Time, 
 and going on to the Categories, or the various forms of 
 logical judgment. Under the head of Dialectics, he in- 
 quires what validity there is in the structure which he 
 has reared. 
 
 Rising above Sense, rising above Understanding, the 
 mind can form Ideas of Pure Reason, as he calls them. 
 These are Substance, the Interdependence of Phenomena, 
 and God. These Ideas give us a Rational Psychology, 
 a Rational Cosmology, and God. We feel now as if a 
 domain were thrown open to us wide and pure as 
 heaven itself. We hasten to enter it, and hope that we 
 have here a lasting possession where we can abide for- 
 ever, and hold communion with the loftiest thoughts. 
 But Kant proceeds to tell us that this grand scene is a 
 mirage. 
 
 Kant is too powerful a logician not to see, and too 
 honest a man not to admit, that these Forms of Sense 
 and Categories of the Understanding cannot give us 
 known and objective existence. He uses stronger lan- 
 guage than I have done in expounding his system, in 
 
34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KEALITY. 
 
 showing that neither sense nor understanding can reveal 
 reality. They do not profess to give it to us : they can- 
 not give it, for they do not themselves have it. Hitherto 
 he has been rearing an edifice, stone upon stone, all of 
 Cyclopean dimensions. Now the giant takes as much 
 pains to pull it down. The constructive work is ended ; 
 the destructive work begins. As Hamilton puts it, the 
 intellectual Samson pulls down the house upon himself. 
 
 As to Substance, we have an Idea of it, and it seems 
 to stablish us ; but it is only a form in the mind. He 
 examines Descartes' fundamental argument, " Cogito 
 ergo sum." If the ego be in the cogito, it is all a mere 
 assumption ; if it is not in the cogito^ we cannot put it 
 in the conclusion without having more in the conclusion 
 than in the premises. 
 
 As to the Interdependence of Phenomena, he labors to 
 prove that, on the supposition that phenomena are facts 
 and not mere forms, we are landed in a succession of 
 contradictions or Antinomies. As an example, we are 
 led, on the one hand, to hold that the world has a begin- 
 ning in time, and, on the other, that it has had no be- 
 ginning in time. For myself, I hold that pure Reason 
 alone cannot establish either of these positions; but 
 Kant holds that it can prove both, and that the two 
 counteract each other and leave us only zero. 
 
 As to the Idea of God, we are obliged to contemplate 
 Him theoretically, but we can prove his existence only 
 on the principle of cause and effect ; but we have no evi- 
 dence that this is universal, and so the argument is not 
 conclusive. Speculatively there is a God, logically and 
 really there is no proof of the existence of God. 
 
 Let us realize the position to which we have been 
 brought. Let us see where we stand, on rock or quag- 
 mire. In Sense we have some reality in phenomena 
 
THE A-PRIORI OR KANTIAN SCHOOL. 35 
 
 which are subjective, but imply an external reality. In 
 Understanding we have less reality, but we have sub- 
 jective Categories binding the appearances. In Reason 
 we have only the ghosts of departed realities. Our in- 
 heritance does not consist of coins, but only of paper 
 currency with no guarantee behind. 
 
 It might seem as if in being led to do all this work, 
 and passing through all these difficult passages, we had 
 been deprived of our promised wages. But Kant denies 
 this, and reminds us that he has never given us any as- 
 surance of our finding reality. There is no deception, for 
 there has been no promise. But he admits fully and 
 proclaims decidedly that there is Illusion. We all fall 
 naturally and necessarily into the illusion, just as when 
 we stand on the shore we see the ocean level and not 
 rounded ; just as when we look up into the sky we see it 
 as a vault and not an expanse. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Kant calls in Moral Reason to save us from the nes- 
 cience of the speculative Reason. This Moral Reason 
 announces a fundamental law : it is expressed in the 
 Categorical Imperative (an admirable phrase), and is 
 simply a modification of our Lord's supreme law, " Do 
 unto others as ye would that they should do unto you." 
 It is, " Act according to a rule which might be applied to 
 all intelligences." This implies that man is free, and as 
 a corollary that he is responsible ; that there is a judg- 
 ment day, and therefore a future life, and a God to 
 guarantee the whole. Morality, immortality, and God 
 are thus bound up together. 
 
 I think that Kant means us to understand that he has 
 here reached reality. The moral law and its corollaries, 
 
36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 freedom, responsibility, and a judgment day, are all 
 actual existences. He thus held resolutely by great 
 truths which preserve us from scepticism, and lead the 
 way to and guarantee other truths. I am inclined to 
 think that he meant these moral truths to sanction the 
 validity of the truths of the speculative reason, specially 
 the existence of responsible beings who are under the 
 moral law. He thus counteracts by his moral principles 
 the nescience of his speculative principles. Viewed 
 under this aspect, the tendency of his philosophy is all 
 for good. 
 
 However, it has been doubted whether he can reach 
 and retain an independent moral reason in consistency 
 with his speculative nescience. The nescient principle 
 carried out logically, seems to bear against the moral 
 reason quite as much as the speculative reason. How 
 does moral perception come in ? He says that the senses 
 alone have the power of intuition which he denies to the 
 Reason. But if the reason have no power of intuition, 
 how can we come to discern and appreciate moral good? 
 If it comes in by the gate of sense, shaped by the Cate- 
 gories and idealized by pure reason, then we are landed 
 in nescience by the moral reason as we are by the specu- 
 lative reason. Whatever may be Kant's doctrine on this 
 subject, it is evident that his moral law, if it has any 
 meaning, must apply to living beings who are supposed 
 to be under it ; but we can know that there are such 
 beings only through the forms of sense, the Categories 
 of the understanding, and the ideas of pure reason ; and 
 these he shows are illusions. I do not see how he can 
 logically reach the reality of the moral power, or the 
 corollary which he derives from it, the existence of God. 
 From ideal, that is, illusory premises, we can draw only 
 ideal and illusory conclusions. From ideal facts we can 
 
THE A-PRIORI OR KANTIAN SCHOOL. 37 
 
 infer only an ideal God : this in truth seems to be all 
 that some of the theologies of Germany have. 
 
 It has been urged all along ever since the publi- 
 cation of the " Kritik " that Kant is inconsistent in 
 standing up for the reality of the moral, and denying 
 that of the speculative reason. I believe that both stand 
 on the same foundation, which is a foundation of reality. 
 But, whether consistently or inconsistently, Kant has 
 done immeasurable good by standing up so resolutely 
 for the reality and validity of the Moral Reason. 
 
 VII. 
 
 I may notice here the tendency for the last few 
 ages to acknowledge that the intelligence of man leads 
 to infidelity, from which we may be saved by Faith or 
 Feeling. This style of speaking was derived from Kant 
 and Jacobi, and has been adopted by many German, 
 British, and American thinkers. They tell us, with a 
 sigh, often of affectation, that the understanding leads 
 to scepticism, and then, with Jacobi, call in faith to lift 
 them out of the slough. I do not believe that there is 
 any such schism in the mind which God has made in his 
 own image. I deny that one part of our nature contra- 
 dicts another. I deny that the understanding, following 
 its laws, issues logically in scepticism. I am sure that 
 he who thinks that intelligence ends in scepticism will 
 not be brought back to truth by a loose appeal to faith. 
 The sceptic who has attacked the validity of reason, 
 having tasted blood, will, on a like principle, attack the 
 trustworthiness of faith. I am sure that intelligence and 
 faith both reveal truth to us, each in its own way ; the 
 one of things that are seen, the other of things that are 
 not seen. 
 
38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 In the philosophy of Kant there are two powerful but 
 discordant elements, the ideal and the nescient, each of 
 which has produced its proper effect. The ideal ran its 
 course in the first instance ; passing through Fichte and 
 Schelling, and culminating in Hegel, being pantheistic 
 throughout. I do not wonder that Kant, who wished to 
 be regarded as a realist, was offended with Fichte, who 
 seized certain of his principles and followed them out to 
 a pure idealism. Schelling worked to correct the one- 
 sidedness of Fichte, and brought in object as well as sub- 
 ject ; but made the two identical and both subjective, so 
 that he can have no objective reality. And what shall 
 I say of Hegel? He has dived down into depths and 
 mounted into heights to which I cannot follow him, and 
 in which human logic, as it appears to me, has no place. 
 When I find that he employs his a-priori powers to set 
 aside the demonstration of Newton, that he holds Being 
 and Not-Being as identical, that Being and Thinking are 
 the same, and that contradictories may both be true, I 
 regard his system as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole 
 of his philosophy. I have heard in Berlin an eminent 
 professor of his school proving to his own satisfaction 
 that all is one : that you and I, God and Nature, mind 
 and body, truth and error, good and evil, are all one. 
 In his all-comprehensive system, which embraces every- 
 thing, he has a reality claimed by him, but it is a reality 
 merely in his a-priori forms. He would turn away with 
 disdain from the reality which I am pleading for, and 
 which insists that we intuitively know things as they 
 are. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Upward of two hundred works have been published 
 in Germany, besides dozens in other countries, on the 
 
THE A-PRIORI OR KANTIAN SCHOOL. 39 
 
 philosophy of Kant, who has been almost deified for one 
 hundred years by his followers, as Aristotle was deified 
 for five hundred years in mediaeval times. Most of the 
 works are liable to the objections which I have taken to 
 Kant. There are some, however, who are longing for 
 reality in philosophy, and, perceiving that Kant has not 
 furnished it, have endeavored to discover it by a course 
 of their own. But they have been so bound as by cords 
 with the forms of Kant, that they have not been able to 
 break forth into full and independent liberty. 
 
 In seeking to avoid the extremes to which Hegel led 
 his admirers, there has been a loud cry of " Back to 
 Kant ! " I believe this to be a wiser course than to go 
 on with Hegel or beyond him. Kant's Kritik is, after 
 all, a more consistent structure than that of any of his 
 followers. In many of his logical analyses, and in his 
 ethical principles, he has expounded truths on which the 
 mind may rest in the assurance that it will never be 
 moved. But should philosophy be brought back to the 
 position of Kant, being in a state of unstable equilibrium, 
 it will run on in one or other of the courses which 
 Kantism has hitherto followed, either with idealism or 
 agnosticism ; or, more probably, with an incongruous 
 mixture of the two which will not amalgamate. 
 
 In examining the New Kantian School I have fallen in 
 with a work by Stahlen, which seems to me to state and 
 review the more eminent systems of that school fairly 
 and searchingly, and I take advantage of the criticism 
 urged. 1 
 
 There is Lange, author of a learned and elaborate 
 work, " History of Materialism." This is esteemed by 
 the New Kantians as the most philosophic performance 
 
 1 Kant, Lotze, and Ritschel, by Leonhard Stahlen, translated 
 by D. W. Simon, Ph. D. 
 
40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 of the present day. The author is regarded as an apostle 
 of the Kantian view of the world, and the leader of the 
 new movement. Says Stahlen: " It is decidedly and at 
 once significant of the direction which Lange's thought 
 takes, that he sets aside the realistic factor which Kant's 
 theory of knowledge endeavored to retain." " The thing 
 in itself is simply a limitative or regulative conception. 
 We do not know whether things in themselves exist." 
 44 His own presuppositions leave him no alternative but 
 to teach that the entire phenomenal world, as well as the 
 organs by means of which it is apprehended, are a pro- 
 duct of our representation." 
 
 There is Lotze, whose instructions have been attended 
 by so many English and Americans as well as Germans. 
 He has a kind of reality. He assumed " the existence of 
 an infinite multiplicity of simple beings which constitute 
 the basis of the world of sense, and, after Herbart's ex- 
 ample, designates them the Reals. In Lotze's view, these 
 same Reals are of the nature of souls, spirits, because of 
 their independent existence." Surely all this is a specu- 
 lative fancy, which explains nothing, and of the existence 
 of which we have no proof from sense or consciousness. 
 " What, then, becomes of the world of sense ? It is a 
 mere phenomenon ; and not even objective phenomenon, 
 but phenomenal in a purely subjective sense." Space 
 and Time are ideal. " But if space is a mere form of 
 subjective intuition, that which we intuite in space is as 
 exclusively in us as space itself ; outside of us there is 
 nothing. Time also, in like manner, is a form of intui- 
 tion ; the temporal-spatial world itself is phenomenal." 
 He proceeds a step farther. " According to Lotze, the 
 being of things is a standing in relations. It is of the 
 very idea and essence of that which exists to stand in 
 relations; there is no such thing as existence without 
 
THE A-PRIORI OR KANTIAN SCHOOL. 41 
 
 relations ; there is no other sort of actual existence but 
 the standing in relations." 
 
 Stahlen seems to be justified in his strong statements. 
 "The corner-stone of the Kritik of Reason is, we do not 
 know even ourselves as we are in ourselves, but merely 
 as we appear to ourselves." He concludes : " The edifice 
 of the Kantian philosophy has fallen in ruins before our 
 eyes, crushed beneath the weight of its own contradic- 
 tions ; and even the ruins themselves have disappeared 
 in a bottomless pit. In so far, therefore, the result of the 
 critical system is null. We have seen that it cannot pos- 
 sibly be the system of truth ; that, on the contrary, the 
 consequences are utter illusion and nihilism." 
 
 While Kant had a strong ideal element, he had an 
 equally strong in the end a stronger nescient ele- 
 ment. It is affirmed that the mind begins with phenom- 
 ena in the sense of appearances, and can never know 
 things as they are, either without or within us ; in fact, 
 either body or mind. This view, as we shall see imme- 
 diately, was adopted so far by Hamilton, and from him 
 has been taken up by a powerful speculator who has the 
 advantage of a large acquaintance as an amateur 
 with physical science, who argues powerfully that things 
 exist, but with equal power that we can never know their 
 nature. We see now how it is that Agnosticism is so 
 prevalent ; is, in fact, the prevalent heresy of our day. 
 Professor Huxley, President of the Royal Society of 
 London, who sits in the chair of Newton and has adopted 
 the scepticism of Hume, and Mr. Spencer, who is so in- 
 fluential a thinker, have brought us to this blank issue. 
 Agnosticism is in the air, and our young men are obliged 
 to breathe it as they read the pages of many of our 
 popular journals. Not that the writers or readers are 
 able to follow the concatenated reasoning of Kant, 
 
42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 Hamilton, and Spencer; but they catch the results, 
 and carry them out to their practical consequences. 
 
 But our souls cannot live in this void any more than 
 our bodies can live in a vacuum, and there must soon be 
 a rush out of this confined, this dark and damp malarial 
 cellar, into the free and open, the pure and healthy air, 
 where we can live and breathe, walk and run. 
 
SECTION EIGHTH. 
 
 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL. 
 I. 
 
 THIS school has not so much influence now as it had 
 at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, 
 when it was the only philosophy taught in Scotland, and 
 had large power in France where it met the prevailing 
 sensational philosophy, and when it was expounded in 
 most of the colleges of the United States. In Scotland 
 it has able and independent supporters, though Kant 
 and Hegel divide the dominion with it. In France and 
 the United States it has a traditional influence for good, 
 where its sound and safe principles are taught by many 
 professors, who are unaware of the source from which 
 they have drawn them. 
 
 The founder of the school was Francis Hutcheson, 
 who, in general philosophy, held with Locke that all that 
 is perceived by the mind are ideas ; but Shaftesbury 
 brought in a number of other senses besides the sensa- 
 tion and reflection of Locke, such as the moral sense and 
 the sense of honor. The true representative of the school 
 is Thomas Reid, a careful observer, a sincere lover of 
 truth, an independent thinker, carefully avoiding all rash 
 speculations. He had two great ends in view in all his 
 writings. The one was, to lay down principles in opposi- 
 tion to his contemporary, David Hume, who was under- 
 mining all natural and moral truth ; the other end was, 
 
44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 to overthrow and set aside Locke's theory of ideas, which 
 seemed to him to come between the mind and things, and 
 thus to be the main support of the scepticism of Hume. 
 
 II. 
 
 To accomplish the first of these ends, he called in 
 Common Sense. The phrase and the doctrine are de- 
 fended by the erudition of Sir W. Hamilton ; but they 
 are somewhat ambiguous. Besides its Aristotelian mean- 
 ing, where it denotes the percepts common to all the 
 senses, it has two meanings in conversation and in litera- 
 ture: it may signify good sense or sound judgment in 
 the affairs of life said to be the most uncommon of all 
 the senses or, the principles of thought and belief com- 
 mon to all men. It is only in this latter sense that it 
 can be used in philosophy. Less ambiguous phrases may 
 be employed to denote this last quality, say " fundamen- 
 tal laws of thought and belief," employed by Reid's dis- 
 ciple, Dngald Stewart. Thus expressed, it may be main- 
 tained that the doctrine of Reid and his school met 
 Hume more satisfactorily than Kant did with his greater 
 logical power. 
 
 To accomplish his second point, Reid gives what he re- 
 gards as the true account of sense-perception. He ar- 
 gues most conclusively that we cannot arrive at a know- 
 ledge of the external world by reasoning. He unfolds 
 what he regards as the mental process in sense-percep- 
 tion. There is first a sensation produced by the external 
 object ; then there is a perception suggested instinctively 
 by the sensation. The instinctive suggestion seems to me 
 to be as little satisfactory as the idea of Locke. He does 
 not give the mind, with Aristotle, a knowing or gnostic 
 power. It is thus by an indirect or mediate process that 
 
THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL. 45 
 
 we reach reality. It does not appear that the mind can 
 directly perceive ; that is, know the thing. 
 
 He further holds that we do not perceive things, but 
 only the qualities of things, which imply the existence of 
 things. This doctrine is not announced so openly by 
 Reid, but is emphatically declared by Dugald Stewart. 
 Neither has expressed the true doctrine, which is, that 
 we perceive things, the very things, by sense-perception. 
 We perceive things by their qualities. 
 
 III. 
 
 Sir William Hamilton is the most erudite of the Scot- 
 tish metaphysicians. In this respect he is worthy of be- 
 ing put alongside of the great German scholars. He 
 gives us quotations, with critical strictures, from obscure 
 writers of various ages and countries. In all his discus- 
 sions he uses a sharp, two-edged sword. He was brought 
 up in the school of Reid, and boldly defended him when 
 the younger metaphysicians were beginning to assail him 
 because of his caution. In his lectures on Logic and 
 Metaphysics, afterward published, he travels far beyond 
 the narrow field cultivated by the Scottish School. He 
 has made very valuable contributions, and thrown out 
 very definite opinions in regard to all the mental sci- 
 ences, except, perhaps, Ethics, which he does not seem to 
 have specially studied. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Scottish School generally, especially Dugald Stew- 
 art, give a high place to moral perceptions. In this re- 
 spect they are all realists, except Thomas Brown, who 
 makes virtue consist in mere feelings. None of them al- 
 lows that the mind is capable of rising to a positive idea 
 
46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 of infinity. Hamilton argues powerfully, with British 
 philosophers generally, that our idea of infinity is merely 
 negative, though he seems to allow that, while we have 
 no positive idea of infinity, we have a faith in it, as if 
 we could believe in a thing of which we have no idea. 
 Surely there must be some way of showing that, as we 
 think and talk: intelligently abo'ut infinity, eternity, om- 
 niscience, we must have some positive though necessa- 
 rily inadequate idea of it. I maintain that we have an 
 idea of something that is beyond our widest concept, and 
 is such that nothing can be added to it. 
 
 We have here to do simply with the relation of Ham- 
 ilton's philosophy to Realism. He professes throughout 
 to be a realist. Those things we immediately perceive 
 are the real things. " The material reality is the object 
 immediately known in perception." "The very things 
 which we perceive by our senses do really exist." 1 But 
 he studied the philosophy of Kant, with which very few 
 Scotchmen were at that time acquainted, and, perceiving 
 the common points of agreement between the Scotch and 
 German schools, he sought to combine them. But they 
 will not coalesce. Hamilton reached and expounded a 
 doctrine which seems to me to conflict with the realism 
 of Reid. He adopted and defended with great logical 
 ability the doctrine of Relativity. " Our knowledge is 
 relative, first, because existence is not cognizable abso- 
 lutely and in itself, but only in special modes ; second, 
 because these modes thus relative to our faculties are 
 presented to and known by the mind, only under modifi- 
 cation, determined by these faculties themselves." 2 My 
 readers will notice that here we have thoroughly Kan- 
 tian principles, which cannot be grafted on the realist 
 stock. In the three general propositions, and in the sev- 
 1 Met., vol. i. pp. 279, 289. 2 Met., vol. i. p. 148. 
 
THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL. 47 
 
 eral clauses, there are an immense number and variety 
 of assertions wrapped up. Some are commonly enter- 
 tained, but others are joined on to them, from which I 
 strongly dissent. I acknowledge, first, as self-evident, 
 that things are known only as we have the capacity to 
 know them ; and this is limited. I acknowledge, sec- 
 ondly, that we do not know all things ; nay, that we do 
 not know all about any one thing. In other words, that 
 our knowledge is partial or finite, as distinguished from 
 perfect or absolute. I may admit, thirdly, that man dis- 
 covers internal objects only under a relation to himself 
 and his cognitive powers. So much I allow. But, on 
 the other hand, I demur, first, to the Kantian statement, 
 that we do not know existence in itself, or, as he ex- 
 presses it elsewhere, that we do not know the thing in 
 itself (Ding an Sich). I do not like this language : it is 
 ambiguous ; when thoroughly sifted it is meaningless. I 
 doubt much whether there can be such a thing as " exist- 
 ence in itself," and of course what does not exist cannot 
 be known. If he means that we do not know things as 
 existing, I deny the statement. Everything we know we 
 know as existing ; not only so, but we know the thing 
 itself ; not all about the thing, but so much of the very 
 thing. Then I demur, secondly, to the statement which 
 is thoroughly Kantian, that the mind in cognition adds 
 elements of its own. As Hamilton expresses it: "Sup- 
 pose that the total object of consciousness = 12 ; and 
 that the external reality contributes 6, the material sense 
 3, and the mind 3. This may enable you to form some 
 rude conjecture of the nature of the object of percep- 
 tion." l To suppose that in perception or cognition the 
 mind adds anything, is a doctrine fraught with destruc- 
 tive consequences ; for, if it adds one thing, why not two 
 1 Met., vol. ii. p. 129. 
 
48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 things, or ten things, or all things, till we are left in ab- 
 solute idealism, which means absolute nihilism ? 
 
 Hamilton is logical enough and candid enough to ad- 
 mit the issue. Comparing his philosophy with that of 
 Germany, he says : " Extremes meet. In one respect 
 both coincide, for both agree that the knowledge of noth- 
 ing is the principle or consummation of all true philoso- 
 phy, Scire nihil ; studium quo nos laetamer utrique" 
 But the one doctrine, openly maintaining that nothing 
 must yield everything, is a philosophic omniscience ; 
 whereas the other, holding that nothing can yield noth- 
 ing, is a philosophic nescience. In other words, the doc- 
 trine of the unconditioned is a philosophy confessing 
 relative ignorance, but professing absolute knowledge; 
 while the doctrine of the conditioned (Hamilton's doc- 
 trine) is a philosophy professing relative knowledge, but 
 confessing absolute ignorance." 1 I confess I always feel 
 chilled when I read this passage. 
 
 Hamilton's learned follower in Oxford, Dr. Mansel, 
 in his famous Bampton Lectures, used his principles to 
 undermine Rationalism in religion ; but in so doing he 
 undermined, without meaning it, religion itself, as he 
 did not leave to us those great truths of Nature which 
 conduct us to revealed religion. 
 
 Sir James Mackintosh and Dr. Chalmers, who were 
 trained in the Scottish school, were greatly delighted 
 when, in their later life, they discovered the close resem- 
 blance of the German and Scottish philosophies. The 
 two agree in standing up for what the one called a-priori 
 and the other fundamental principles. But while they 
 agree they also differ. The main difference is, that in 
 discovering what these principles are, the one proceeds 
 in the Critical and the other in the Inductive method. 
 1 Discussions, p. 609. 
 
THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL. 49 
 
 The one discards observation ; the other uses it, not in- 
 deed as the foundation of first truths, but as the means of 
 discovering them. I am trying to give the proper place 
 to the induction which is so recommended by Reid, Stew- 
 art, and Chalmers, and vhich is fitted to keep philosophy 
 from the extravagances into which it is so apt to fall, 
 and which can be corrected only by its being ever com- 
 pelled to fall back on facts and the observation of facts. 
 Just as logic is an expression of the -processes of the mind 
 in discursive thought, so is metaphysics the expression of 
 what passes in the mind in discerning primary truth. 
 The exact expression is reached in both cases in a careful 
 observation of the mind in the respective operations. 
 
SECTION NINTH. 
 
 THE SENSATIONAL SCHOOL. 
 
 Sensationalism had already appeared in the philosophy 
 of Thomas Hobbes, who derived all our ideas and know- 
 ledge from sensation, and allowed that we could never 
 reach a spiritual reality in man or God. But what is 
 specially called the sensational school originated with 
 Condillac, who left out the Reflection of Locke, took no 
 notice of his power of Intuition, and represented all our 
 ideas, even the highest, as '* transformed sensations." 
 
 In Great Britain the school has had a series of able 
 men holding by Sensationalism, in James Mill, John 
 Stuart Mill, G. H. Lewes, Alexander Bain, and in part 
 Herbert Spencer. All of these have proceeded more or 
 less fully on the negative and sceptical principles of 
 David Hume. 
 
 We may take JOHN STUART MILL as the represen- 
 tative British sensationalist, as he sees more clearly than 
 any other the logical consequences of the system, and 
 is candid enough to admit and defend them. Body is 
 defined by him as the "possibility of sensations," and 
 mind as "a series of feelings aware of itself." 1 Almost 
 every intelligent reader has felt this to be a very scanty 
 remnant of the knowledge which we thought we had 
 of ourselves, and of the persons and objects around us. 
 
 1 Exam, of Hamilton, and my work, Exam, of Mill. 
 
THE SENSATIONAL SCHOOL. 51 
 
 Most people have felt it to be a reductio ad absurdum of 
 the whole system. Naturally we think that we have 
 more than this in body and mind ; that we perceive body 
 as having extension and a power of resistance ; that we 
 are conscious of mind as having intelligence and moral 
 perception. But Mr. Mill is a clear and candid reasoner, 
 and these are the legitimate results of the sensational 
 system. You can get something higher, say personality 
 and intelligence and conscience only by introducing them 
 from without, surreptitiously to clothe the nakedness of 
 the system. 
 
 GEORGE HENRY LEWES holds the doctrine of Rea- 
 soned Realism. 1 He admits that " the ordinary man 
 believes that the objects he sees, touches, and tastes do 
 veritably exist, and exist as they are seen, touched, 
 tasted." This doctrine is at once rejected. His system 
 is Realism, " because it affirms the reality of what is 
 given in feeling ; and Reasoned Realism, because it jus- 
 tifies that affirmation through the ground and processes 
 of philosophy, when philosophy explains the facts given 
 in Feeling." Observe here that feeling is all in all. 
 " The reality of an external existence, Not-self, is a fact 
 of Feeling ; Knowledge in all its manifold varieties is a 
 classification of virtual feelings." His general conclu- 
 sion is : " Mind is a form or function of Life." The 
 Moral Sense consists of certain organized predispositions 
 that spontaneously or docilely issue in the beneficent 
 forms of action, which the experience of society has 
 classed as right." Surely this is a very meagre account 
 of the high qualities of which we are directly conscious 
 in mind. 
 
 ALEXANDER BAIN says: "Mind possesses three at- 
 tributes or capacities: (1) It has Feeling, in which I 
 1 Problems of Life and Mind, pp. 263, 287. 
 
52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 include what is conveniently called Sensation and Emo- 
 tion. (2) It can act according to Feeling. (3) It can 
 think." Consciousness is the same attribute of mind as 
 "Feeling and Emotion." Thinking consists in discov- 
 ering Difference and Agreement, and in Retentiveness ; 
 and it proceeds by the laws of Contiguity and Similarity. 
 The Moral Faculty is resolved into "Prudence, Sym- 
 pathy, and Emotions generally." In this list of man's 
 powers we miss those which raise him above this world 
 and ally him to God. In regard to the independent 
 existence of body his language is ambiguous. " There 
 is no possible knowledge of the world except in reference 
 to our minds. Knowledge means a state of mind." The 
 latter clause is correct. The former may mean that we 
 know matter simply as related to us, whereas we know 
 it with qualities of extension and force, as having an ex- 
 istence independent of our existence. Mind and matter 
 are not at all carefully distinguished ; they are repre- 
 sented as the opposite sides of the same thing, as if the 
 soul, which is spiritual, could have a side except in a 
 metaphorical sense. 1 
 
 In France, where Sensationalism so prevailed at the 
 end of last century, it may suffice to look to H. TAJNE, 
 the present representative of the system. He makes In- 
 telligence to consist largely of names, images, and ideas. 
 He reduces ideas to a class of images, and images to a 
 class of sensations. Names are a class of images. The 
 laws of ideas bring back the laws of images. Mind is 
 an aggregate {polypier) of images. In itself, external 
 perception is a true hallucination. We have found that 
 the objects that we call body are only internal phan- 
 toms ; that is, the fragments of one detached from them 
 
 1 Mental and Moral Science, pp. 1, 8, 24, 250, 433 ; Senses and 
 Intellect, p. 250. 
 
THE SENSATIONAL SCHOOL. 53 
 
 in appearance and opposed to them, while in reality they 
 themselves are the self under another aspect. So much 
 for body, which he makes so illusory. As to moral per- 
 sonality, that which makes the continuity of a distinct 
 person, it is the continued renaissance of the same group 
 of distinct images. 1 
 
 It may seem as if sensationalism is a very inoffensive, 
 as it is a very simple, creed. But, if truly believed in, 
 it arrests the growth of all higher aims and aspirations, 
 moral and spiritual. 
 
 In closing this survey I may refer to TH. RIBOT, who 
 has given us many valuable facts as to the relation of 
 mind and body, but as a philosopher is a sensationalist, 
 undermining in his journal that high school of philoso- 
 phers who appeared in France in the second quarter of 
 this century, including Cousin, Saisset, Simon, and others. 
 
 In this criticism, I have been looking at the men 
 solely in regard to their ability to find actuality. Locke 
 was personally a believer in things without us, as we 
 naturally apprehend them ; but could get no proof of 
 their existence, as he held that the mind can perceive 
 only its own ideas. Of the sensationalists proper, some 
 have no other reality than sensations or feelings modi- 
 fied and transformed, and have not reached and cannot 
 reach things without or within us. None of them have 
 a belief in man's personality and continued identity as 
 evidenced in memory. None of them can rise to truth 
 beyond experience, to truth necessary and universal. 
 None of them acknowledge that we perceive immedi- 
 ately moral good, or that we can stand up for an immu- 
 table and eternal morality. 
 
 Meanwhile two formidable men have appeared to 
 carry out the empirical doctrine to its logical results. 
 
 1 Taine, De ? Intelligence. 
 
54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 Professor Huxley expounds and defends the doctrine of 
 Hume slightly modified. He represents the mind as 
 having Impressions, which he divides into A, sensa- 
 tions ; B, pleasure and pain ; (7, relations between these. 
 This is a very meagre account of the furniture of the 
 mind. 
 
SECTION TENTH. 
 
 HUXLEY AND HERBERT SPENCER. 
 
 AT this place Spencer comes in. It is evident that he 
 is much swayed by, and started from the position of 
 Hamilton and Mansel, whose philosophy was the reign- 
 ing one in Great Britain at that time. Many think, and 
 I agree with them, that he followed out their doctrine to 
 its logical conclusion. I do not see that Hamilton's prin- 
 ciples can stop short of the agnosticism of which Spencer 
 is the ablest expounder. I pressed Dr. Mansel to meet 
 this downward current, but he never did so, and Hamil- 
 ton's pupils have not done so. He is the most powerful 
 philosophic speculator of our day. He would discuss 
 every subject connected with the operations and laws of 
 nature and answer every question. I have sometimes 
 thought that at times he speculated beyond the capacity 
 of the human intellect. He does not proceed in the slow 
 and cautious way of observation recommended by Fran- 
 cis Bacon ; but by the power of thought rises at once to 
 the highest laws, and draws from them a long line of con- 
 sequences. 
 
 I would not charge him with being an out and out 
 defender of nescience or agnosticism. In certain places 
 he argues most powerfully for the existence of objects. 
 But then these objects are in their very nature unknown 
 and unknowable to us. 
 
56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 He argues resolutely the existence of God, but then 
 God is unknown and unknowable by man. He identi- 
 fies him with the unknown God to whom the Apostle 
 Paul saw an altar dedicated. Now, both the human head 
 and the human heart require a God so far known, to 
 whom we give obedience and love. In his Psychology 
 he speaks in the same way of the human mind. He 
 argues its existence, but he denies that we know or can 
 know it as a faculty. He uses the very strongest lan- 
 guage on this subject. " We know nothing about it and 
 never can know anything about it. Is it not enough to 
 say that such knowledge is beyond the path of human 
 intelligence as it now exists, for no amount of what we 
 call intelligence, however transcendent, can grasp such 
 knowledge." He tells us that "a nervous shock is the 
 ultimate unit of consciousness ; and that all the unlike- 
 ness among our feelings result from unlike modes of this 
 ultimate unit." (Spencer's Psych.) I confess I have 
 an extreme aversion to this phrase " nervous shock" 
 as used by Spencer and Bain to express mental action. 
 Apparently he can get no farther than Hume the sceptic, 
 who made mind consist of impressions and ideas. He 
 declares formally and emphatically, " Mind being com- 
 posed of Feelings and the relations between Feelings 
 and the aptitudes of Feelings for entering into Relations 
 varying with their kinds." (Psych.) What ! What, is 
 this all he can make of man's intellectual talents, of his 
 philosophic talent, of his mathematical, of his artistic, of 
 his mechanical talents, of his sagacity on the practical 
 affairs of life. Surely these are as prominent as our 
 feelings and have as much right to be included in our 
 mental powers. 
 
SECTION ELEVENTH. 
 
 REALISM AND RELIGION. 
 
 THE Realistic view, as the true one, is the one most 
 favorable to religion, which proceeds on facts and not on 
 phenomena in the sense of appearances. Thus, when it 
 says : Rorn. i. 20 : " For the invisible things of God from 
 the creation of the world are clearly seen, being under- 
 stood by the things that are made, even his eternal power 
 and godhead," where both " the invisible things of God " 
 and "the things that are made " are facts and not mere 
 phenomena. The same may be said of such passages as 
 these : " Rejoice with them that do rejoice and weep with 
 them that weep." All such passages refer to facts and 
 not to vague appearances, and carry with them our con- 
 victions and our confidence. 
 
 In Germany they follow Kant and regard what we 
 discern and what is revealed to us in Scripture as phe- 
 nomena, that is, as appearances. The view which they 
 take is in consequence pliable and insecure, first in their 
 philosophy and then in their theology as swayed by their 
 philosophy. These views fermenting in Germany come 
 over into Great Britain and America and trouble our 
 theology and our students. 
 
SECTION TWELFTH. 
 
 THE RESULTS BEACHED. 
 I. 
 
 AT the close we may take a look backward at the 
 ground over which we have traveled. 
 
 EXPERIENTIAL PHILOSOPHY cannot give us universal 
 or necessary truth, or any truth beyond the narrow limits 
 of observation. It is doubtful whether it can furnish a 
 valid argument for the existence of God. In the system 
 of Locke we are supposed to perceive only ideas, and are 
 precluded from the knowledge of things. 
 
 SENSATIONALISM gives us sensations and feelings va- 
 riously compounded, and we cannot from these derive 
 mind or even body as substances, but only, as Mill con- 
 cludes, "possibilities of sensation" and " a series of feel- 
 ings aware of itself." 
 
 THE A-PRIORI SCHOOL OF KANT makes our first per- 
 ceptions to be of phenomena (appearances) and not of 
 things. Then all that we know has Forms imposed upon 
 it by the subjective mind, so that, while we must believe 
 in the existence of things, we do not know what they are. 
 We pronounce judgments upon them, but according to 
 the restrictive laws of subjective Categories. The result 
 is, that, when we would argue the existence of substance, 
 cause, and other connections, and of God, we find our- 
 selves in a world of Illusions. A vigorous attempt is 
 made to save us from nescience by calling in Moral Rea- 
 
THE RESULTS REACHED. 59 
 
 son, which gives us a high idea of duty, of a judgment 
 day, and of God, which are all real ; but it is doubtful 
 whether the system can legitimately give us a known 
 world of things to which to apply them. It is evident 
 that an ideal world can give us only an ideal or pan- 
 theistic God. 
 
 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL proposes to be, means to be, 
 and professes to be realist ; but in the pages of Reid and 
 Stewart it speaks doubtfully about our perceiving things, 
 and in the pages of Hamilton it gives us only relative 
 knowledge, which is not a knowledge of things as they 
 are, and ends avowedly in nescience. 
 
 II. 
 
 I have shown that Hamilton was led into agnosti- 
 cism by the critical philosophy of Kant ; and Mansel 
 applied this doctrine to overthrow rationalism. It was 
 when Hamilton and Mansel were in the ascendant that 
 Herbert Spencer began to think and write on these 
 subjects, and drove the prevailing doctrine to agnosti- 
 cism. He argues powerfully that we are constrained to 
 believe that things exist ; but he maintains as resolutely 
 that we do not and cannot know the nature of things. 
 It can be shown, as I have done in various parts of my 
 works, that we cannot know that things exist except we 
 know so much of their nature. 1 Without this, any pre- 
 dication of their nature would be meaningless ; it would 
 be a predication about something unknown, and we could 
 have no apprehension of what the predication referred to. 
 This is the position to which Kant and Hamilton have 
 brought us, and it is now occupied by Mr. Spencer : that 
 things exist, but that we do not and cannot know their 
 1 See Appendix C. 
 
60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 nature. Spencer shows that, while we have sensations, 
 which are simply affections of the nerves, and can pro- 
 nounce judgments upon them, we have, and can have, 
 no insight into what they are. 
 
 III. 
 
 If there be any truth, even partial truth, in this repre- 
 sentation, philosophy has come to a crisis, such as it did 
 when Berkeley drove the partial idealism of Descartes 
 and Locke to pure idealism, and Hume drove the whole 
 school to nihilism. Speculations have thus been shown 
 to be false by the consequences to which they lead. The 
 vessel has foundered because it has not followed the 
 right track. The train has been wrecked by the burst- 
 ing of the materials which it carries. As philosophy has 
 inflicted the wound, it must hasten to heal it. It must 
 begin to build anew (for the human head, not to speak 
 of the human heart, will not be satisfied with an agnostic 
 philosophy) ; and it will have this advantage, that the 
 ground has been so far cleared of incumbrances. I trust 
 it will rise as a phoenix from its ashes, profiting by the 
 blunders it has made, and purified by the fires through 
 which it has passed. 
 
 Realism is the one thing to be introduced into modern 
 philosophy (it will be shown that it had a place, though 
 not always the right place, in the ancient Greek phi- 
 losophy) to give it coherence and consistency. Philoso- 
 phy, whatever else it may do, aims at settling foundations. 
 But reality is the firmest of all foundations. A chink has 
 appeared in the wall, indicating that there is some in- 
 security at the base. There are crevices staring us in 
 the face, and they have to be filled up. We may find 
 .that these evils can be remedied by giving reality its 
 
THE RESULTS REACHED. 61 
 
 proper place in the rock on which the building stands, 
 and in the cement which binds the parts together. In 
 this process some abutments which are incumbrances 
 will require to be taken down ; but the edifice will rest 
 more firmly upon its well-laid foundation. 
 
 We see how it is that Agnosticism is so prevalent in 
 the present day. Young men, pondering a deep subject 
 in religion, in morals, or science, with which they are 
 troubled, find that philosophy, with all its professions 
 and pretensions, gives them little to rest on in the last 
 resort ; and they conclude that nothing can be known as 
 it is. Those who would confute this Agnosticism ex- 
 perience great difficulty in doing so. The reason is, that 
 they have no ground, no TTOV orw, on which to stand. 
 They commonly satisfy themselves with proving, which 
 they can do easily and successfully, that nescience is sui- 
 cidal. It is an evident contradiction to affirm that we 
 know that we can know nothing. But they do not see 
 that in establishing this point they are only playing into 
 the hands of the agnostics. For by far the most pow- 
 erful argument of Hume and the sceptics is, that there 
 are contradictions, antinomies (as they call them), in our 
 nature, and so conclude that human reason cannot be 
 trusted. They set two strong contradictory propositions 
 before us that counteract and arrest each other, and leave 
 nothing between. Many an ambitious youth is laboring 
 to pull down Mr. Spencer's imposing structure only to 
 find it falling on himself. He propounds an argument 
 which seems profound ; but, on searching it, it is seen to 
 assume the reality which he proposed to prove. The 
 only successful method of meeting Agnosticism is to 
 assume reality ; not trying to prove it, but taking it for 
 granted, as we do the axioms of geometry as an intuitive 
 truth, which can stand the tests of intuition. 
 
62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 IV. 
 
 It is acknowledged on all hands that we cannot prove 
 every truth by syllogism, or by any mediate or external 
 evidence. We can prove only by premises given and 
 allowed. But, if we are to prove every truth, we have 
 also to prove the premises, which have to be proven by 
 prior premises ; and thus we need an endless chain of 
 premises hanging on each other, and the whole hanging 
 on nothing. There are truths which do not require to 
 be proven ; they have their evidence in themselves, and 
 we have an intuitive power of discerning it. Of this 
 character are the axioms of geometry. No one should 
 attempt to prove them ; if any one does, he will find that 
 the evidence he employs is not so clear and certain as the 
 axiom itself is. We assume the axiom without seeking 
 proof, and in doing so we are not acting unreasonably ; 
 we are assuming what we know by a higher reason than 
 mediate reasoning. Spontaneously we are sure that we 
 have reality in what is presented to us by the senses 
 and by self-consciousness. I believe that this is the first 
 truth which the infant mind knows as it wakes into 
 existence. Being so, philosophy should take it up and 
 start with it ; it should not attempt to demonstrate it. 
 If any one is not satisfied with this statement let him 
 try to prove his own existence. What external proof 
 can he bring? Perhaps he may answer, Some one, my 
 father, told me so. But does he not see that, in order to 
 reach the existence of the father, he has to assume his 
 own existence ? 
 
 V. 
 
 I am insisting that to every philosophy the question 
 be put, What do you make of reality ? If you omit it, I 
 
THE RESULTS REACHED. 63 
 
 demand that you give it a place ; otherwise your system 
 is a mere speculation. If you give it a place, I ask, At 
 what place? at the entrance? in the middle? or at the 
 close ? In this inquiry it will turn out that reality can- 
 not be proven except by premises that contain reality, 
 and that it is to be assumed in philosophy, even as it is 
 taken for granted and acted upon in our native per- 
 ceptions. 
 
 I am aware that in pursuing this course perplexities 
 and difficulties will arise, as they do in all branches of 
 investigation, physical and metaphysical ; but there will 
 be far greater difficulties in following any other course ; 
 for the reality which we have unnaturally shut out will 
 ever be coming back to assert its existence, authority, 
 and claims, and to disturb and confound the errors which 
 have taken its place. It will turn out that, whatever 
 mysteries may cast up in carrying out this assumption, 
 there will be no positive contradictions ; and the reality 
 will hold its place when the spectres and illusions have 
 been obliged to vanish in the light of actuality. 
 
 Of all things, it is most essential that we should know 
 what is the precise reality which we intuitively know. 
 This must be carefully separated, by the " necessary re- 
 jections and exclusions," from all adventitious circum- 
 stances, such as sensations and feelings. 
 
 We look through a perfectly transparent glass on a 
 tree before us. What is it that we see? It is not the 
 glass, but the tree ; so when we take away the glass it 
 is not the eye but the tree that we perceive. A like 
 remark may be made of all the senses. Let us try to 
 ascertain the precise object perceived by each of the 
 windows of the soul. 
 
 In Sight what I perceive is not the retina and brain 
 affection, but a colored surface. In the Muscular Sense 
 
64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 I do not observe the nerve which moves the muscle in 
 locomotive action, nor the nerve which carries up the 
 notice of the motion to the brain ; I perceive merely 
 the muscle resisted by an object. 
 
 In Touch Proper, or Feeling, we do not discern the 
 nerve, but merely the sensitive feeling which we localize 
 at the point which the nerve reaches. 
 
 In Hearing I am conscious, not of the tympanum, the 
 hammer and stirrup, and other apparatus, but simply of 
 a sound in the ear. 
 
 In Taste we know our palate as affected. In Smell we 
 know our nostrils as affected. 
 
 By the last four of these we know directly only what 
 are called Secondary Qualities of body ; that is, special 
 affections of body for which we are prompted to seek a 
 cause beyond our organic frame, as it is not in our frame, 
 and are commonly able to find it. By a combination 
 of the perceptions of the primary and secondary qualities 
 thus reached, we are able to form a knowledge of body, 
 say of an orange : by sight, as extended, or in space and 
 as colored ; by the muscular sense, as having resisting 
 force ; by hearing, as capable of issuing sound ; by touch, 
 taste, and smell, as capable of rousing sensations of spe- 
 cial sorts. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Having now an internal and external world, all of 
 realities, we can add to them indefinitely by reasoning, 
 and by the continued observations of sense and conscious- 
 ness. Thus we can know not only the shape of this 
 triangle, but by necessary inference that its angles are 
 equal to two right angles. We have the moral law: 
 " Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto 
 you ; " but further, as a consequence that we should show 
 
THE RESULTS REACHED. 65 
 
 kindness to this poor man, this negro, this enemy of ours, 
 this slave, this criminal, and this infidel. We have the 
 facts brought back by memory, the records of history, 
 the discoveries of science. By these processes, conducted 
 by ourselves and others whom we trust, we can increase 
 our knowledge wide as the knowable world, and all be 
 of realities. 
 
 But it is asked in a disdainful manner, Do you pre- 
 sumptuously propose to set aside all previous philoso- 
 phies : that of Plato and Aristotle, of Descartes and 
 Locke, of Kant and Reid ? I answer at once and deci- 
 sively, I reject none of the great truths which have been 
 established by the great thinkers of the world, greatly to 
 the benefit of the world. I mean simply to settle some 
 of them upon a surer foundation. Some of them seem to 
 me to be resting on perishable piles, like the houses in 
 Venice ; I would found them on the rock of reality. In 
 some of them there are visible cracks and excrescences, 
 sceptical and ideal ; I would fill them up by bringing in 
 the reality, which they have overlooked because it is so 
 near, and put it in the room of the incumbrances. We 
 may thus retain, and in a secure position, all that is true 
 and good in the systems of ancient Greece and modern 
 Europe. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 I acknowledge and claim, if the philosophy of reality is 
 assumed, amendments will require to be made on certain 
 of the prevailing philosophies, in the way both of addi- 
 tion and subtraction. Empiricists will have to take in 
 much that they have overlooked and omitted. Along 
 with their sensations and feelings, imnges and symbols, 
 they will have to accept and embrace higher truths, such 
 as self - personality, substance, moral obligation, which 
 
66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 are all realities revealed by consciousness. We have as 
 strong and quite as convincing proof of the latter of 
 these principles as we have of the former. The Scottish 
 School must be made to throw away its crutches of im- 
 pressions, instincts, suggestions, and common sense, and 
 give the mind a power of seeing things directly. The 
 a-priori philosophy must be made to begin with things 
 material and mental, instead of subjective laws. It must 
 be led to regard space and time as realities quite as much 
 as the objects we perceive in them. The Categories of 
 the understanding must take the shape of, and be repre- 
 sented as, laws of the mind ; such as cause and effect, 
 which we perceive to be in the very nature of things act- 
 ing. The higher ideas, such as substance, the connection 
 of things and Deity, must be so apprehended and stated 
 as to show that they are realities which we can know and 
 believe in, and feel them to be the most steadfast and 
 exalting truths which the mind can dwell on. 
 
 But it will be objected that in this realistic philosophy 
 we seem to have no room left for idealism. I answer, 
 that I leave to it its own province, which is one of the 
 richest and most fertile which God has allotted to man ; 
 it is the region of imagination, with fancy and feeling to 
 endear them to us. But we must keep idealism in its 
 own province. We do not allow it a place in science, 
 say in astronomy or chemistry, in social or political sci- 
 ence. We do not permit it to attempt to improve or 
 beautify the laws of gravitation, of animal and plant life, 
 of the economic law of supply and demand. We insist 
 on all these keeping rigidly to facts. We then allow ideal- 
 ism to come in and embellish them as it can. And the 
 wider the sciences of fact extend their discoveries, the 
 more extensive is the field opened to the play of the im- 
 agination. Now, there should be like restrictions and 
 
THE RESULTS REACHED. 67 
 
 extensions in metaphysics as physics. We must settle 
 what are first and fundamental truths by scientific inves- 
 tigation ; and then, above this solid ground, we may al- 
 low a covering to be spread, rich as the clouds of the 
 
 evening sky. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Agnosticism appears in a variety of forms. In partic- 
 ular, it takes a vulgar and a philosophic form. In the 
 former, it is obliged to admit the sensible, but turns away 
 from all the higher truths of God and immortality ; of 
 these, it is said, we can know nothing. It is obliged, in 
 spite of itself, practically to acknowledge reality in the 
 common affairs of life at least in regard to meat and 
 money ; but would leave all spiritual truth in the regions 
 of doubt and darkness. In this shape it is an impression 
 and a vague credulity, rather than a fixed conviction and 
 faith ; and in arguing with it we feel as if we were fight- 
 ing with a ghost. It is only when attacked that it takes 
 the form of a fixed creed. Thus put it claims to a phi- 
 losophy ; and puts itself in the form of a general doc- 
 trine. It is of vast moment in these circumstances to 
 have a decision in the final court of appeal, and to show 
 that agnosticism is utterly untenable, being contrary to 
 our fundamental cognitions. This is what I have en- 
 deavored to do in this treatise, leaving the vulgar agnos- 
 ticism without a foundation. 
 
 X. 
 
 In closing this paper, I may remark that our sponta- 
 neous belief that we are in the midst of reality, gives us 
 a feeling of assurance and stability in all the affairs, in- 
 
68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY. 
 
 eluding the practical affairs, of life. It goes with us, 
 and should be encouraged to go with us, wherever we go. 
 It is the business of philosophy not to undermine and 
 restrain it, but to explain and defend it. 
 
 Physicists, in their deeper researches, are ever coming 
 to mysteries which they are apt to designate as metaphys- 
 ics. What should they do in these circumstances ? When 
 there is a reasonable hope of going farther, they should 
 just continue their researches on the method prescribed 
 by the logic of science. But when they have come to a 
 truly metaphysical truth, when they have come to a 
 first truth, to what is self-evident and necessary, to what 
 shines in its own light, and rests on its own foundation, 
 then they should feel that they have come to the rock, 
 and should rest and be satisfied. This they should al- 
 ways do when they come to what is self-evidently real. 
 It should be one main end of metaphysical philosophy to 
 furnish to them the tests of such truths, with an arrange- 
 ment and classified list of them. This I have endeavored 
 to do in my work on " First and Fundamental Truth." 
 What is found deficient in that work will doubtless be 
 supplied by others. 
 
 It is only on the supposition of things within and with- 
 out us being real, that we have logical proof of the exist- 
 ence of God. " The invisible things of God are clearly 
 seen, being understood from the things that are made, 
 even his eternal power and Godhead." It is from the 
 things that are made we get a legitimate argument for 
 what we do not see, the existence of the Maker. As 
 long as we look on what we perceive as mere phenom- 
 ena, sensations, or subjective ideas, the God we reach 
 must be of a like character, ideal or pantheistic. 
 
 Every student of the history of religion knows that 
 philosophy and theology are apt to affect each other. A 
 

 THE RESULTS REACHED. 69 
 
 high theology has often elevated philosophy by bringing 
 in its high ideas, so allied to religion and to God. A 
 pretentious philosophy, passing beyond its proper sphere, 
 has often corrupted religion. Even the grand systems of 
 Plato and Aristotle have been made to corrupt the sim- 
 plicity of the faith, as we may see in Origen, in the an- 
 cient Church, and in the scholastic writers of mediaeval 
 times, and in the pantheistic systems. The holy doc- 
 trines of the Church in Germany have had more influence 
 than any other external power in constraining philoso. 
 phy to look to the highest attributes of man, his freedom, 
 his personality, and his immortality. A meagre theology, 
 overlooking the higher perfections of God, has favored 
 an empirical philosophy. The sensational philosophy has 
 produced a theology which takes no account of the holi- 
 ness of God. The rationalism of England, in the end of 
 last century and the beginning of this, allied itself with 
 the theory which accounted for all our ideas by associa- 
 tion, and with utilitarianism. The ideal philosophy gives 
 us an ideal theology, which tends toward pantheism, and 
 has produced those plausible theories which have come 
 over to us from Germany. 
 
 We claim to be formed in the image of God, and a re- 
 alistic philosophy, teaching us to look to the various pow- 
 ers of man, should raise our faith to the contemplation of 
 a full-orbed Deity : our understanding leading us to look 
 on him as omniscient, our moral nature to regard him as 
 holy and just, and our feelings to cleave to him as benev- 
 olent. The full truth revealed by theology and philoso- 
 phy is : God is a Spirit ; God is Light ; God is Love. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 APPENDIX A. 
 
 ARISTOTLE ON THE COGNITIVE POWER OF THE MIND. 
 
 EVER since Descartes, the Father of Modern Philosophy, 
 drew so decidedly the distinction between mind and body, there 
 has been a change of view among metaphysicians generally as to 
 what the mind starts with in its intelligent acts, and as to the 
 nature of sense-perception. Descartes, who was so resolute a 
 defender of spiritualism, maintained that mind cannot act di- 
 rectly on body, nor body upon mind. To explain their evident 
 intercourse, Malebranche, following Descartes, taught the doc- 
 trine of Occasional Causes ; Locke called in Ideas ; and Leibnitz 
 advocated Preestablished Harmony, to show how mind could 
 know body. None of these theories could accomplish the end 
 they were meant to serve ; could in any way explicate the na- 
 ture of perception by the senses. The Idea, as has been shown 
 by Reid and Hamilton, only brought in new difficulties, only 
 introduced officious intermeddlers. It may be profitable in these 
 circumstances to turn to the views of Aristotle. These were 
 commonly adopted by the schoolmen throughout the thousand 
 years of mediaeval times. 
 
 It is evident that he gives a higher, or rather a deeper, place 
 to native cognition than is now done. In treating of the intel- 
 lectual powers, the moderns speak of the Senses and of the dis- 
 cursive faculties of Judgment and of Reasoning, which is made 
 up of correlated judgments. But they neglect to announce that 
 
APPENDIX. 71 
 
 the senses, external and internal, give knowledge of realities ; 
 and judgments imply real or imaginary objects, on which they 
 are pronounced. Our judgments are always predications about 
 something apprehended. They are the declaration of a relation 
 between two or more things which, in the order of things and of 
 time, must be prior to the judgments upon them. To judge or 
 reason, we must have objects about which to judge or reason. 
 The unit of thought is not, as Hamilton and most modern met- 
 aphysicians maintain, judgment, but cognition by sense-percep- 
 tion and self-consciousness. What we start with in intelligence 
 is knowledge, and thus and then the judgment has materials on 
 which to act, and may rise to higher cognitions of realities by 
 observing further relations between things, and drawing conclu- 
 sions. 
 
 The judgments may be about objects, imaginary as well as 
 real. But imaginations are formed of things which we have ex- 
 perienced, put in new forms and dispositions. Our judgments 
 about them do not make them real, but they imply a reality, 
 from which the imaginations have been drawn. Our idea of 
 a mermaid is derived from the woman and the fish. Our sys- 
 tems of Psychology will ever be perplexed and confused till they 
 give knowledge of concrete things a primary place in the opera- 
 tions of the mind, and make judgment depend upon it. 
 
 Aristotle's Divisions of the Powers of the Soul. I do not 
 claim that the Stagyrite has stated all that I have now laid 
 down, but he has given a higher or rather a deeper place to cog- 
 nition than the moderns. 
 
 His penetration allured him to draw innumerable distinctions 
 among the powers of the soul. It might be argued, I think, 
 that all these proceed on real differences. But I have not been 
 able to discover that he sums them up in a comprehensive unity. 
 He does not profess to give an exhaustive and logical classifica- 
 tion of the mental powers. The parts are not exclusive and 
 independent. 
 
 Perhaps his most fundamental division of the faculties is that 
 noticed by Sir W. Hamilton into the Gnostic and Orective, 
 adopted by Aristotle's commentator, Philoponus. 
 
72 APPENDIX. 
 
 This is a distinction, noticed not only by Philoponus, but by 
 others who follow Aristotle, such as Thomas Aquinas, who, in 
 philosophy, seems to me to be the most judicious of the school- 
 men. (See Appendix B.) 
 
 In De Anima, II. 2, Nutritive, Sense-Perception, Discursive, 
 Motive, OperrriKov, cucr^TtKoV, SiavorjriKOV, KIVT]<TL<S. 
 
 Again, De Anima, II. 3, Nutrition, Sense-Perception, Appe- 
 tence, Local Motive, Discursive Power, OpeirnKov, alo-OrjTLKov, 
 ope/CTiKoV, KivrjTLKov KciTa TOTTOV, Sictvo^TiKoV. 
 
 Again, De Anima, III. 10, Nutrition, Sense-Perception, Cog- 
 nition, Will, Appetence, ^peTm/coV, aicr6r)Tu<6v, VOT/TIKOI/, /3ovXev- 
 
 TlKoV, O/DCKTlKoV. 
 
 Throwing out nutrition, which is a physiological process, and 
 taking sense-perception and the discursive power together, as 
 cognitive powers, and similarly together Will and Appetence, we 
 have the two forms, the Cognitive and Motive. 
 
 He sums up the powers in two groups, under a different no- 
 menclature : 
 
 De Anima, III. 9, TO xpiriKov and TO KIVCLV rrjv Kara TOTTOV 
 Kivrjo'iv (TO KLVT/JTIKOV) ; discerning and motive. 
 
 De Anima, III. 9, If a tripartite division of the soul is made, 
 in each there is opets, for Will is in the rational or intelligent 
 part ; and in the non-rational part, desire and impulse, yj ti 
 
 So we have the Soul defined as that in which we live, per- 
 ceive, and think, that is, the Vital principle, Sense-Perception, 
 and Discursive Power, II. 2. 
 
 " The part of the Soul which is rational is divisible into two : 
 the Will (/SouAeuriKov), and the Intelligent (eVio-T^onicov). 
 That these are different from one another, may appear from 
 their objects (^TroKet/aeva). For as color and flavor and sound 
 and odor are different from one another, so nature has made 
 the perception of them different : sound we have through the 
 hearing sense, flavor by the taste, and color by the sight ; so, 
 likewise, we must assume the same arrangement elsewhere, 
 namely, that, since the objects differ, there are different parts 
 of the soul by which we get knowledge of them. That which 
 
APPENDIX. 73 
 
 is perceived by the reason (TO voyrov) is different from that 
 which is perceived by the senses ; and as we know both by the 
 mind, there must therefore be a part which has to do with the 
 objects of sense-perception, different from that which has to do 
 with the things perceived by the reason." This last quotation is 
 from the " Magna Moralia " (I. 35), which, if not written by 
 Aristotle, was written by some one who felt his influence. 
 
 Aristotle on Sense-Perception. There is the frequently 
 quoted passage : " Sense-Perception is the power of perceiving 
 the form (etSos) of sensible objects without the accompanying 
 matter (uA??), just as the wax takes the figure of the seal without 
 the iron or gold which makes the ring." De Anima, II. 12. 
 
 He enunciates what I regard as the true doctrine, and which 
 I have quoted in the text. De Sensu, 2, TO aia-Oyrbv Ivepytiv 
 Trotet TTJV aiaO^iv. 
 
 He gives to the senses the power of a certain kind of know- 
 ledge. " Animals participate in a certain kind of knowledge, 
 some more, some less, some, indeed, very little ; they have sense- 
 perception, and sense-perception is a certain kind of knowledge " : 
 yvwtrews TIVOS iravra /ACTCXOVO-I, TO. /xei/ TrAciovos, TO, 8* eAarrovos, 
 TO. Se TrdfJLTrav //.i/cpas cuo^o-iv yap l^ovo-tv, vj 8' aur^o-is yvwo-ts 
 TIS. This passage is very decisive as to man, and all animals 
 having knowledge, a certain kind of knowledge. De Anim. 
 Gen., I. 23. 
 
 He assures us that the perceptions of the senses are always 
 true, <u //,!> cuo-0iyo-ets aXrjOeiS cuet'. De Anima, III. 3. 
 
 He shows that the deceptions of the senses are merely appa- 
 rent. He saw that the difficulties might be cleared up by attend- 
 ing to what each sense testifies, and separating the associated 
 imagination and opinions, or judgments. De Anima, III. 1, 3, 6. 
 
 He tells us : " It is not possible to have knowledge till one 
 comes to individual things." Metaph., I. 2, 11. 
 
 He announces a realistic doctrine : "A man can think (vofja-ai) 
 whenever he wishes, but not so exercise perception, for the ob- 
 ject must be there : " Siavorja-ai //./ TT' avro3, OTTOTGLV /3ovAr;Tat, 
 al(T0a.V(rOai S' ou/c TT' OUTW avayKalov yap \nrap\.iv TO 
 De Anima, II. 5. 
 
74 APPENDIX. 
 
 " The sensible object removed removes the perception, but the 
 perceptive faculty, on the other hand (removed), does not re- 
 move the object of perception " : TO fj.lv cuo-0??Tov avaipStv <rvv- 
 avatpei rrjv alfrOrjcnv, 17 8* aicr&rjcrLS TO alcrOrjTOV ov crwaipei. Cdt- 
 egor.j 5. 
 
 Aristotle has not only individual senses, he has a master sense, 
 TO Kvpiov alffOrjT^pLoV) or a common sense, KOii/ry cuo^o-is. This 
 faculty distinguishes between the different sorts of Sense-Percep- 
 tion, sight, taste, etc., and synthesizes and comprehends various 
 perceptions as belonging to one object, De Anima, III. " There 
 is a common power which accompanies all the separate parts, by 
 which the mind perceives alike that it sees and that it hears ; 
 for not by the sense of sight does the mind see that it sees ; and 
 it distinguishes, and is able to distinguish, for example, that 
 ' sweet ' is different from ' bright,' neither by taste nor by 
 sight, nor by both these together, but by some common faculty 
 (' mental part,' //.o'pioi/), working with all the instruments of sense- 
 perception. For perception is single, and the master sense is 
 single." De Somno, II. 
 
 It is to be regretted, I think, that at the time of Aristotle, and 
 for some ages after, the Greeks had not given a place to self- 
 consciousness. To it should have been allotted the power which 
 the mind has of seeing that it sees. I believe it was not till 
 towards the time of M. Aurelius, in the middle of the second 
 century after Christ, that self-consciousness, o-wei'S^cris, had a 
 separate and important place allotted to it. 
 
 Metaphysicians will find it necessary in these times, when 
 philosophical inquiry seems to be tending towards nescience, to 
 look to and consider the views held by the great leader of 
 thought for a millennium, and by those who were led by him. 
 Reality, with the capacity of knowing it, is the one thing neces- 
 sary to make knowledge consistent in itself, and consistent with 
 our nature. It is the one thing needful to introduce in order to 
 meet the agnosticism to which Huxley and Spencer are reducing 
 all philosophical inquiry. The common opponents of Spencer 
 and of agnosticism leave this out, and their replies are inconclu- 
 sive, and are felt to be unsatisfactory. 
 
APPENDIX. 75 
 
 APPENDIX B. 
 
 It may serve a good purpose to give the views of Saint 
 Thomas, the angelical doctor, on the same subjects (" Summa 
 Theologica," P. 1, Quaest. Ixxxv. 6). He quotes Augustine : 
 Omnis qui fallitur, id in quo fallitur, non intelligit. Aristotle 
 is quoted as " the Philosopher " : intellectus semper est verus. 
 He discusses his subject, and his conclusion is : Cum quidditas 
 rei sit proprium objectum intellectus, nunquam contingit circa 
 ipsum falli nisi per accidens, prout ipsi compositio vel divisio, 
 seu discursus admiscetur, in quibus fallitur quandoque. He 
 approves Aristotle : Sensus enim circa proprium objectum non 
 decipitur, sicut visus circa colorem, nisi forte per accidens in 
 impedimento circa organum contingente. He sums up : Ad pri- 
 mum ergo dicendum quod falsitas dicitur esse in mente secun- 
 dum compositionem et divisionem. Et similiter dicendum est ad 
 secundum de opinione et ratiocinatione. Et ad tertium de errore 
 peccantium qui consistit in applicatione ad appetibile. Sed in 
 absoluta consideratione quidditatis rei et eorum quae per earn 
 cognoscuntur, intellectus nunquam decipitur. 
 
 APPENDIX C. 
 
 RECENT CRITICISMS OF KANT. 
 
 There are some indications that the recoil against the com- 
 bined Idealism and Nescience of Kant has commenced. Dr. 
 Hutchison Stirling announces emphatically that Kant has not 
 answered Hume, and that never has the world been so befooled 
 by a system as it has been befooled by the system of Kant. He 
 uses very strong language. He declares the system of Kant to 
 be " a vast and prodigious failure," and his method as only "a 
 laborious, baseless, inapplicable superfetation." Princeton Re- 
 vieiv, Jan., 1879. 
 
 I may quote a little more fully from Stahlen : " Kant's aim 
 was to vindicate the objectivity of human knowledge in opposi- 
 tion to the scepticism of Hume. This he deemed possible only 
 
76 APPENDIX. 
 
 in one way, namely, by showing that that which gives objective 
 validity and necessity to our knowledge of things is to be found, 
 not in the things themselves, but in the human mind itself." 
 He goes on : " Kant's intention was to establish the reality of 
 our knowledge in opposition to the scepticism of Hume. But 
 what he meant to be a rescue turns out to be rather an entire 
 overthrow of the knowledge of objective truth. For the method 
 which he follows tends to show that what we know is merely the 
 phenomenal appearance, not the truth nor the thing itself." But 
 what is the phenomenal ? The answer is, " Phenomenon in the 
 Kantian sense is not objective but subjective phenomenon, that 
 is, it is not a coming to light or coming forward of the thing 
 itself, but purely a mode in which we represent things, an affec- 
 tion of our sensibility, a modification of our consciousness which 
 reveals nothing whatever of the nature of the thing as it is in 
 itself." 
 
 This, I may remark, is the very objection which I have been 
 taking for years past, that Kant makes the mind start with ap- 
 pearances instead of things, and that we cannot know things 
 except under forms imposed by our own minds. He insists : 
 " Objective knowledge, a knowledge of anything that has actu- 
 ality outside and independently of our consciousness, there is 
 none." This is true not only of tilings external to ourselves, 
 but of the mind itself, as Kant is constantly asserting that " we 
 do not know even ourselves, but merely as we appear to our- 
 selves." He says I have no right to say that a thing is, if I am 
 in entire ignorance how or what it is (p. 26), an objection which, 
 I may add, I have been constantly taking. I have been par- 
 ticularly pleased with the following extract from Zeller : 
 " But, however unworthy of acknowledgment the prudence 
 with which Kant refrained from drawing the extreme conclu- 
 sions of his idealism, it must not be forgotten that this very 
 course involved him in great difficulties. Not only when the 
 general postulates of his system were denied, but also when 
 these were admitted, there were still to be found many pro- 
 foundly critical questions left unanswered, many a doubt un- 
 solved. This was true especially of Kant's positions concerning 
 
APPENDIX. 77 
 
 the thing in itself (Ding an Sick). On the one hand, for in- 
 stance, on the supposition that direct experience presents things 
 to us only under the forms of perception and thought, only as 
 phenomena, the question could still be raised whether it had 
 really been proven that the essence of things is of necessity un- 
 knowable for us, whether we possess no means of determining 
 their essence through the observation and comparison of phe- 
 nomena. If. on the other hand, the complete incognizability of 
 the thing in itself was granted, the question still emerged, whence, 
 then, can we obtain any knowledge of its bare existence ? If I 
 know absolutely nothing of what an object is, I cannot know 
 whether it is, and that it is ; for every assertion concerning the 
 existence of a thing presupposes some concept of the thing whose 
 existence is affirmed, no matter how incomplete this concept 
 may be. When Kant endeavored to show the existence of things 
 outside us, he understood by these at best some reality apart 
 from us, which occasions our sensations; when he demanded 
 belief in a Deity, he understood by Deity the independent cause 
 of the world. When, on the other hand, he maintained that we 
 can know absolutely nothing of the thing in itself, that it is an 
 unknown JT, a mere problematic or limitative concept, this re- 
 quired that he should leave it completely undetermined whether 
 any reality apart from us exists at all. His explanation of the 
 idea of cause as a category of the understanding, which as such 
 is applicable to phenomena alone, should have prevented him 
 from applying it to the thing in itself, from postulating this thing 
 as the cause of our presentations. Nay, he should have gone 
 further, and have said straight out that we have no ground for 
 the assumption of the thing in itself, that it is of no service in 
 the explanation of phenomena, that it only marks the limit of 
 our activity, and as such it can in itself lie just as well within as 
 without us. This deduction was in reality drawn before long in 
 the Kantian school, the more readily, the more undeniable it is 
 that Kant's refutation of idealism, and his moral argument for 
 the existence of God, are far removed from the validity of strict 
 demonstration." Zeller's " Geschichte der deutschen Philoso- 
 phic seit Leibnitz," pp. 414, 415 (second edition). 
 
78 APPENDIX. 
 
 APPENDIX D. 
 
 THE OFFICE OF INDUCTION IN FUNDAMENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 I have had great difficulty in getting a hearing for one point 
 in my philosophic views. In the discovery of a priori truth I 
 allot an important function to inductive observation. This seems 
 to identify me with the empiricists, from whom I entirely sepa- 
 rate myself. I hold that there is no induction in the spontane- 
 ous exercise of intuition ; it sees the object at once. But if we, 
 as metaphysicians, express the law in a general form or law, we 
 need to proceed by a careful observation, the facts being given 
 us by self-consciousness. We have to inquire what is the pre- 
 cise a priori law, say of causation, as it manifests itself. If we 
 neglect to do this, there is a great risk of presenting the princi- 
 ple in a mutilated, which is, so far, an erroneous form. The 
 vagaries of metaphysicians commonly spring from an imperfect 
 induction. But in calling in induction we do not give it an 
 authoritative or guaranteeing office. Induction merely lets us 
 know what the law in the mind is ; it does not give it its impera- 
 tiveness. It needs anxious inspection to find what the law of 
 causation is, but the law operates whether we observe it or not. 
 This distinction is easily understood by those disposed to give 
 their attention. It saves me from the inconsistency and the im- 
 becility with which I have been charged in a recent criticism. 
 It gives to reason and to observation each its proper place in the 
 construction of fundamental philosophy. It may be made the 
 means of reconciling the Scottish and German philosophies. 
 
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