Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/501

THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. 485 elements of thought, volition, and feeling must be included is one thing, to maintain that it must be one in which the peculiar nature of any one of them must be cancelled is quite another. What we know of them in ordinary conscious experience rather supports the opposite conclusion, for as it is admitted that knowledge, apart from feeling and volition, is a nonentity, it is equally clear that feeling and volition, apart from the experience of a soul which is cognitive in the sense in which we commonly understand cognition, are in- conceivable. The second argument, however, deals directly with the question on hand and is a more serious matter. It takes two forms which we may state briefly as follows : The object of knowledge presents itself to us with the two characteristics of infinitude and immediacy. Knowledge seeks to exhaust this infinitude in a series of finite predicates and at the same time to substitute for the immediacy of the percept the mediated necessity of a logical system. Its ideal is thus the unity of thought with reality, of subject with reality. Now let us suppose this ideal realised, what has happened ? From the side of the thing we may be said to have completely idealised our object, but in doing so we have destroyed it, for it has in the process passed over to the side of idea. Similarly from the side of knowledge and idea : we have established the unity of subject with object, but it is no longer the unity of knowledge, for this demands the anti- thesis of thought and thing, and this antithesis has been destroyed. To this argument based upon the contradiction involved in the conception of the ideal of knowledge as the unity of subject and object is added another based upon the conception of the ideal as the complete individualisation of the object. Knowledge aims at the complete differentiation of the subject, but as the instrument with which it works is always the abstract predicate, it necessarily fails to do justice to the contents which it endeavours to express, and the true individuality of the object falls outside the system of our predicates. As Mr. McTaggart puts it : " The fact that the object is more or less independent as against us and with- out some independence knowledge would be impossible . . . renders it certain that every object has an individual unity to some extent. Now knowledge fails to give this unity its rights. The meaning of the object is found in its This, and its This is, to knowledge, something alien. Knowledge sees it to be, in a sense, the centre of the object, but only a dead centre, a mere residuum produced by abstracting all possible predicates, not a living and unifying centre, such as we know