means that feeling does not stand alone, but is only a factor in a more complex mental process which includes cognition, intuition, or perception of reality, i.e., knowledge of self as affected in feeling and of not-self as the ground which gives rise to its feelings. Therefore—
The Self manifests energy in thinking.—Thus, underlying elementary feeling, we have the beginning of knowledge. The Self forms ideas of what will produce pleasurable and painful feelings (i.e. of what will affect it for good or for bad), and of what is needful for its own preservation and its own highest Good. Hence in Intellect the active energy of the Self takes two forms (a) that of obtaining knowledge of things from experience, and retaining and reproducing it in the form of ideas, which is theoretical Intellect, and (b) of deriving from these experiences an idea of its own highest good and the means of realising it more and more in the future,—which is practical Intellect. Then the practical knowledge thus obtained guides the energy of the Self to a life of activity for the realisation of its idea of highest Good—which is Volition.
Here then (viz. in a and b) we find the Self putting forth energy as Intellect or faculty of knowledge. And the knowledge which it gives is real and not merely phenomenal or apparent knowledge. Every finite thing manifests its real and essential nature in the energy of resisting and thereby affecting, in various ways, other finite things. And other finite things (when mental), in knowing the influences which come to them from the other things, thereby know the real nature of the things, because the real nature of the things is present in the influences which they disseminate. The common distinction between the appearances and the reality of things is therefore superficial and deceptive, if not altogether unreal. This is a sense of realism in which realism is justified. Reid was right when he said that, in looking at the sun, what we are conscious of is the real sun, because the influences which a thing
