Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/358

344 A. K. ROGRES : which they appear, is the ultimate unity of the universe, 1 and a thought has value simply as it ministers to this pro- cess ; there is no such thing as a definite and concrete reality getting itself represented in thought, which is what we commonly regard as a very important function of think- ing. 2 There is, indeed, a truth which underlies this objection to epistemology ; no doubt the mere correspondence of an idea to reality is not enough. 3 That human thought is such a mere reproduction of an eternal thought is precisely where the older Hegelians left us, and it is quite right to call attention to the fact that our experience has also a moro positive value. But I do not see why, because our thought is a real factor in the life of the world, it should therefore be debarred from also being a representation of other reality ; why the construction of the world by the self should be equivalent to the existence of the world solely as so con- structed. 4 The natural belief is that our thought can help along the course of the world just because of its ability to reconstruct and represent to us what this world is, and so enable us to act intelligently ; and I do not see why such a view is not entirely reasonable. At any rate, the rejection of it brings us back to experience as the sole reality, and I confess again my inability to see why this is not what common sense speaks of as my experience. Any attempt to avoid this conclusion seems to me to be possible only by using our terms ambiguously. We may argue that experi- ence cannot belong to a self, which is itself only one category among others within experience ; but if we distinguish between the self as an existence, and the act of thought by which this self is made an object of knowledge, the difficulty seems to me to disappear. Why should not a self, as a connected stream of experience, have the power of objectify- 1 " The reality first given to us indefinitely opens out upon us into differences and sunders into the primary distinctions of subject and object. But we are not entitled therefore to forget or deny the unity of the reality in which the distinction takes place," Jones, Lotze, p. 170. 2 Prof. Dewey denies that the self can be the highest category of thought (MiND, vol. xv., p. 74; for the reason that it is more than think- ing (i.e., doing and feeling). This implies that a thought-category has only a teleological, and not a representative use ; otherwise there is no reason why a category should not be more than thought, and still be a thought-category, i.e., represented in thought. 3 Jones, Lotze, p. 41. 4 The two schools of Hegelianism seem to me to complement each other here, the one emphasising the eternal reality known to the exclusion of human knowledge and its positive value, the other the function of finite growth in knowledge to the exclusion of any reality which it refers to, and which makes its functional use possible.