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processes of the subject's own mental life whereby those contents are apprehended, it must be pronounced an inconceivable thought that the subject invests the contents of his experience with time as a form which has only subjective significance. He came to see that it was the constancy of connexion exhibited amongst the elements of experience which first suggests the notion of cause; that it could not, therefore, be the notion of cause which first makes objective experience possible. In short, Adamson was driven to the conclusion that throughout what the idealists had been taking to be the logical conditions of experience-viz., the general and abstract -are, in point of fact, the late results of experience-our interpretations, in other words, of those constancies of conjunction in the material of experience which constitute what we call the laws of real fact. And in the long run, it seemed to him, the basis of all logical necessity is the necessity of fact. A somewhat similar line of reflexion is pursued by Professor Hobhouse in his careful and suggestive work on The Theory of Knowledge. Quite in accordance with the thought of Adamson, Professor Hobhouse contends that the mistake of natural or intuitive realism was to start with the assumption that the independence of the object is immediately given, whilst the mistake of any subjective idealism was to assume that the object is first given as inward. In truth, he argues, it is not given as either. It is given as a content present to an inward state, but the distinction between inner and outer, or between subject and object, gradually comes to recognition in the course of mental evolution. At no point in the development of knowledge do we discover thought as such determining the nature of the reality which it thinks. Each judgment claims to be true of reality, and makes that claim on the ground of its special relation to the given. "The understanding makes knowledge, but it does not make nature." So, too, the various writings of Professor Fullerton, particularly his exhaustive work entitled A System of Metaphysics, are

devoted to the task of unfolding a view of nature and mind that is, in general, in conformity with the trend of thought I have been indicating. And I think it may be claimed that much of Shadworth Hodgson's Metaphysic of Experience tends in the same direction. Nor should one neglect to mention the name of Professor Lossky, whose valuable analysis of the nature of judgment makes unmistakably for epistemological conclusions of a like import.

The movement I have thus rapidly traced is a distinctive movement in philosophy,—a movement that for nearly half a century has been consistently progressing and maturing, and before which "the long and difficult path of facts," that Adamson declared to be the only road to philosophic truth, lies open instead of being more or less closed as, I think, it came to be for the earlier idealism.* Nevertheless, the movement in question may be looked upon as a perfectly legitimate development of what is contained in the "constructive speculation" of the period immediately preceding its own. Unlike the "neo-realism" now so much in evidence, it was no reversion to pre-Kantian modes of philosophising, but was carrying on the traditions of the critical method. To a large extent, the very premisses upon which it was proceeding were an inheritance from the long labour of the post-Kantian idealists. For one thing, the old arguments advanced by Berkeley in favour of idealism had been thoroughly sifted by Hegel and by such thinkers as T. H. Green; and the "objective idealism" of the nineteenth century had aimed, at all events, to free itself from the subjectivism that dogged the footsteps even of Kant. Nor would it require any long search in the recent literature of idealism to come across lines of reflexion from which a transition to realism of the type I have been depicting would be but

I mean that the subordination of all fact to the conditions of thought tended so to emphasise the importance of the latter as to make it appear as though the detailed investigation of particular kinds of fact were of comparatively slight philosophical significance.

a short advance. Idealism," writes one of its most distinguished representatives, "in dealing with the higher life of reason, has been intent merely upon the affinity of all objects with spirit. It is still occupied in endeavouring to reduce all things into spirit: it is trying to show that every natural object, and every atomic part of every natural object, and, I suppose, every point in space and every instant of time, if they are real, must be spiritual realities, that is, conscious or feeling centres. It is assumed that only in this way can the world be proved to be spiritual and the last dualism be overcome. And it is certainly not realised that if idealism succeeded in this enterprise and reduced all things into feeling, it would then be obliged either to content itself with a world without distinctions, or to evolve out of feeling the difference it had deleted. In part, this abstract idealism is not explaining the world of objects, but explaining it away."* And he goes on to argue that its spiritualisation of the world will remain barren until it reinstates the variety of real being, and recognises that space, time, matter, and natural objects have each a real nature of their own. "Every object, in the degree in which it is known, is found," he adds, "to possess qualities of its own; and, in the degree in which it is understood, takes its place in a necessary order."

I have, then, I hope, sufficiently indicated the trend of thought towards which this paper is a contribution, and I need offer no further explanation of the term "critical" than the foregoing remarks and those of the next section will provide. In many crucial respects, what is currently called the " new realism" seems to me to be drifting into the very subjectivisin it was intended to avoid, and I shall try to bring out the significance of certain positions I hold to be essential by contrasting them with those taken by the writers who have. associated themselves with the "new realism."

Sir Henry Jones, The Working Faith of the Social Reformer, pp. 77-8.

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§ 2. Can Realism Dispense with a Theory of Knowledge?

Professor Marvin, the author of the opening essay in The New Realism, strenuously insists that the movement in question is a return to dogmatism," and even suggests that its more appropriate title would be "neo-dogmatism." Metaphysics should be emancipated from epistemology "-such is the thesis which he endeavours at some length to substantiate. A theory of knowledge is, he argues, no more logically fundamental to metaphysics than it is to the other sciences, for the actual conditions of valid knowledge can only be determined on the basis of data furnished by logic, physics, psychology, and metaphysics. Only inductively and empirically can it be shown either what knowledge is possible, or how it is possible, or what are the limits of our knowledge; only from the vantage ground of actual scientific achievement can we scrutinize the truth of our positive knowledge. Furthermore, no light can be thrown by epistemology upon the nature of the existent world or upon the fundamental postulates and generalisations of science, except in so far as the knowledge of one natural event or object enables us at times to make inferences regarding certain others; instead of furnishing the basis for a theory of reality, epistemology always presupposes some theory of reality in order to make headway at all. The source of any genuine theory of reality is positive science, and the business of the metaphysician is to think through, to make explicit, and to organise the theory of reality which the scientists are implicitly entertaining.

Now, if epistemology be supposed to have for its subjectmatter knowledge or ideas as distinct from reality, and to have as its problem to inquire whether and how far from these assumed entities a transition can be made to things as actual existences, then I readily admit not only that such an inquiry is not "fundamental," but that it has no claim whatsoever to rank as a science. It would, however, be a sheer blunder

to identify the critical method with an "epistemology" of that description. The contrast drawn by Kant between his own method and that of the empirical school ought in itself to be sufficient to guard against such a misinterpretation.

Not only so, Kant neither raised any doubt as to whether knowledge is possible nor instituted any inquiry designed to test the legitimacy of such doubt.* The problem with which the Kantian philosophy took its start was not whether knowledge is possible, but how knowledge is possible. The idea that the critical method, as Kant conceived it, was necessary in order to show that we can know the trees, the birds, the rocks, the earth, and the stars" is such an extraordinary caricature of the critical standpoint that it leaves one gasping in a vain attempt to imagine what unhappy phrase in the Critique can be responsible for it. Our ordinary commonsense experience of the world of nature and the world of mind, the systematised bodies of knowledge represented by the mathematical and physical sciences, these were assumed by Kant as data that everyone admits, and he never dreamed of undertaking to demonstrate that they were possible. What he proposed to do was to inspect knowledge in its character as apprehensive of fact, and to determine not the laws under which it is gradually attained, but the conditions implied in its

* Dr. Bosanquet seems rather to countenance this misconception when, in describing the change in spirit which came about with the development of post-Kantian speculative philosophy, he writes :-" All difficulties about the general possibility-the possibility in principle-of apprehending reality in knowledge and perception were flung aside as antiquated lumber. What was undertaken was the direct adventure of knowing; of shaping a view of the universe which would include and express reality in its completeness."-(Phil. R., January, 1917, p. 8.) + New Realism, p. 62.

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Respecting pure mathematics and natural science, Kant writes:"Von diesen Wissenschaften, da sie wirklich gegeben sind, lässt sich nun wohl geziemand fragen: Wie sie möglich sind; denn dass sie möglich sein müssen, wird durch ihre Wirklichkeit bewiesen."—(Kritik, B. 20.)

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