Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/505

THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. 489 from this again to this determinate attribute or essence its TO TL r/v elvcu (what it was all along). From this point of view the objectivity or being-in-the-world of a thing is not something alien to its determination by mind an unresolvable surd but merely the first of a long series of thought determinations that become through the processes of judgment and inference ever more adequate to express the .significance of the point in reality with which we are con- cerned. Moreover it is not something which is left behind, but it is a predicate which is taken up as thought advances and absorbed in the concrete reality the thing acquires as it becomes more completely known, just as the substance of a .seed or embryo is not something that is left behind, but is taken up into the life of the plant or the animal organism. We only need to apply these considerations to the argu- ment quoted above to perceive that it proceeds upon a quite opposite assumption, the assumption, namely, that the starting-point of knowledge is an immediated diversity between subject and object. Facing the mind as the TOTTO? fIS&v is the object as the seat of reality, and knowledge is conceived of as the process whereby a reality having con- creteness and individuality in itself is decked with a spurious individuality by means of the abstract concepts which are the predicates of our judgments about it. I do not deny that there is much in the prevailing mode of regarding the problem of the relation of thought to reality which seems to justify such a view. Even the more careful idealist writers are not free from the tendency to lay undue stress upon the logical judgment as the t} r pe of all thought, with the result that a division is made at the outset between knowledge and reality, and the mind is conceived of as "in contact with reality " in perception, and having for its pro- blem to bridge the gulf which separates it from the world of existence. But this I believe to be a fundamentally mis- leading point of view, and it is much more in harmony with the leading lessons of modern philosophy to conceive of the distinction between subject and object, the given and the thought to which it is a given, as itself a moment in the development of primitive experience. If this is so, we may admit that the " this," if we take it in the first of the above senses, falls far short of the mind's ideal, but we must at the same time deny that it is something alien to thought as such. Similarly we may admit that it is to thought a dead centre, but it is dead not because it is a residuum obtained by ab- stracting all possible predicates, but because it is itself the