Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/393

THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. 381 individual conception. Indeed, representations analogous to space-relations enter into the present Transcendental world-construction almost as fully as they once entered into Spinoza's constitution of the absolute substance. But, of what is the space of our actual world made ? "Whoever has realised how space-relations are throughout conditioned by specific energies and structural collocations, forming part of our individual organism, can no longer deceive himself with the idea that anything equivalent or similar to space can be intellectually realised or even vaguely imagined as subsisting without the agency of individual vitality, speci- fically organised from periphery to centre. It becomes transparent, and this to an almost painful degree, in the presence of so much exalted thought and conviction on the part of Transcendentalism, that it is after all nothing but our own apperceptive faculties, potentially idealised, that are made to serve for the consciousness of a universal subject. And, to complete our humiliation as pretended recognisers of the great world-scheme, the im- potence of our constructive imagination, in comparison with the rich competency of nature, discloses itself overwhelm- ingly in the fact that, in spite of all its straining after supreme idealised perfection, Transcendentalism has taken heed only of an inferior portion of our being ; omitting almost altogether, in its constitution of universal existence, the very consummation of all faculties to which intelligence is in reality merely subservient. Transcendentalism represents indeed an apotheosis of the centripetal efficiencies of our organisation of the ingoing apperceptive current. But the centrifugal activities, the outgoing exertions, that have to mould the raw material of nature in conformity with the generical unity of purpose which we intellectually realise, and which is potentially predetermined in individual life by its definite cycle of development, during which it is gradually falling into more and more complex relational fulfilments with its environment, all these volitional operations, verit- ably constituting the practical and ethical import of life, find no suitable place in the Transcendental scheme, a scheme aiming only at eternal recognition, and not at moral and aesthetic world-idealisation within actual existence, through rational employment of natural means. It is the understanding of the consistent texture of the manifoldly interdependent perceptual compulsions in their multifarious bearings on our individual and generical well- being, that makes up veritable knowledge. And the true import of all this knowledge is the power it gives us voli-