Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/389

THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. 377 intelligible region another human being? And when by means of expressions perceived as emanating from such another being I realise the thoughts of this other being, which we both believe to be indicative of certain natural occurrences, can Transcendentalism persuade us that, in this case, my own thinking is also the only veritably existing reality, and that all the rest the bodily expressions and the thoughts inferred therefrom in another being, together with the natural occurrences believed by both of us to be indi- cated that all these seemingly interacting agencies are in reality non-existent, except as my own thought realising certain facts in universal consciousness ? Birth and death, consanguinity and natural development, the whole stirring scene of our natural griefs and joys have no place in a philosophy in which understanding originates nature, and in which, therefore, thought and being are identical. In such a spiritually constituted world the acorn does not in truth reproduce the oak by natural growth, nor does the supreme marvel of natural achievement in reality occur microscopical germs do not faithfully re-evolve the bodily and mental faculties of parent-organisms. Our world is not the triumph of life over death by constant organic resuscitation ; but, on the contrary, a mere confused reflex of unrecognised eternal facts, only a sombre, death- like fiction awaiting intellectual vilification. The worst feature, perhaps, of such a belief in a hyper- organic, thought-originated world, would be its necessary injunction of intellectual quietism as final aim of all our exertion. Transcendentalism has to insist on the immutable and sempiternal permanency of the completed system of all world-relations, as constituting an eternal fact or undeviating standard of truth in universal consciousness. If our known world consists really in the intellectual synthesis found accomplished in conceptual consciousness a synthesis whose system of relations we are endeavouring to comprehend as held together, beyond the reach of time, by a single activity of the synthetical unity of apperception ; if such is the pro- cess by which our world is made, then it is clear that, in order to raise such a synthetically constituted universe from the rank of mere subjective fiction and fitful apprehension to that of steadfast, universally valid objectivity and unity, there must be hypostatised an eternal intelligence actually originating and energising through synthetical thought the ^ complete and undeviating system of world-relations which our own wavering thought only inadequately recognises. The climax of possible existence for us would then be thorough