Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/497

PHILOSOPHICAL TEEMINOLOGY. 483 increase and decrease, and its changes can therefore be submitted to calculation. That this world which alone is present to thought and unified by our thought, is the only one which is there at all, or is in any sense more real than the world perceived and felt by our senses, to assume this is a useless and unfounded addition to that " regulative idea," if we may introduce here that illuminating concept of Kant's in whose spirit this is thought. But that this most powerful idea should cease to regulate and to serve as guiding maxim is, if we may judge by the previous course of development, just as improbable as it would be undesir- able for the progress of knowledge. 74. But the more we maintain and affirm this predominant significance of the mechanical principles, the more is it incumbent upon us, if we are to estimate their absolute value aright, to reflect critically upon their origin, and to assign limits to their use accordingly. To criticism the whole of this most fruitful line of thought must appear artificial, and every analysis of all reality, or of any reality which is regarded as independent, into self-subsistent " things " (substances) must appear as something posited by human will, or what is here the same, by human thought. Reality itself is so, especially the "external world," and things are for naive thought (imagination) as active individuals within it. This naive thought is, as it were, artificially extended by the reflective understanding ; it peoples the world with efficient qualities, forces and souls. But then follows the scientific understanding, which desires to rule over the world and therefore to make it accountable ; it negates the naive thought and the reflexion which depends upon it ; it strips the " world " of all that which makes things appear as essentially (qualitatively) different. In that which it allows to remain it finds what it has allowed to remain matter and motion ; these can be subjected to calculation in proportion as, after their apparently given connexions have been removed, they have been resolved into like units which are not further reducible, and which can be arbitrarily placed in new combinations by thought, or indeed by real activities. Now critical reflexion affirms (as we have said) that all separations are posited, and before or behind all, that of subject and object ; what is " given " is only their unity and in reality (realiter, or as the schools would have said formaliter) their indissoluble connexion. And again, after the positing of an objective "external world" has been critically re- produced, it must be known and recognised anew as a whole, in its essential unity, even when it is torn away from all