Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/77

THE METAPHYSICAL METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY. 65 Hume, and so is driven to assume chaos, how can the finding of order and nexus in sensations be an answer to him ? I reply, that finding order and nexus in sensations is very different from assuming them. Finding them as an inseparable and primordial fact in sensations convicts Hume of an assumption in supposing that they require accounting for, or in other words, that disorder and isolation are the primordial fact, while order and nexus are derivative facts. Kant adopts Hume's assumption, pushes it to its extreme, and then makes another assumption, causal agency in the Subject, to account for order and nexus. Kant assumes with Hume, that they require accounting for. Now to find them is not to account for them ; and therefore it is, that Kant must logically assume chaos. He is with Hume looking for the genesis of order and nexus. And thus the ruin of Kant's theory is the ruin of Hume's assumption. But our present method, which directs us to ask first, what order and nexus arc, before asking for their genesis, puts us on a track by which we perceive, that order and nexus are inseparable and primordial facts of experience, a perception which precludes us from assuming that they require accounting for, or seeking for their genesis. Thenceforward we have only to trace the development of one kind or mode of order and nexus out of another kind, that is to say, the order and nexus in the ex- ternal world, and the order and nexus of logical ideas, out of the primordial order and nexus in the strm of consciousness. This brings me to the second head under which I pro- pose to consider the method, namely, its adopting the analytical distinction between nature and genesis, or history, as its guiding principle. So intimately and thoroughly is this distinction bound up with it, that much which also falls under the present head has been already said under the former one. In fact the analysis of anything cannot but be the analysis of u-Jiat that thing is ; and subjective analysis, of what that thing is known as. Nevertheless there is a gleaning which still remains to be gathered. Questions of genesis or histoiy in one way come under questions of sub- jective analysis, since the events which they relate to are part and parcel of experience, and in another way they form a group apart from them. There is a comprehensive sense in which the question of analysis is to be entertained, which embraces under it both the question of analysis in a narrower sense and the question of genesis in a narrower sense. These questions in the narrower sense form two groups contra- distinguished from each other, both being contained under subjective analysis in the wider sense. We have hitherto 5