to justify itself it must do so at the bar of Reason: it cannot save itself by a mere appeal to instinctive or unreasoned belief, especially when that belief may be seen at a glance to involve a number of unscientific and untenable assertions. Reflective criticism brings to light important and undeniable distinctions which are ignored in the primitive realistic beliefs of the race. The philosophical thinker will avail himself gladly of these distinctions to purge the crude or instinctive doctrine of the unscientific elements which bring it into discredit, while at the same time he endeavors, in view of this idealistic criticism, to state in an unexceptionable form the indestructible elements of truth which he believes the original belief to contain. In regard to this indestructible basis of truth he must meet the criticisms of the idealist by showing that Idealism as an epistemological doctrine only exists as a criticism of Realism, and derives any plausibility it possesses from the surreptitious or unobserved importation into its statement of our ineradicable realistic assumptions. Were it not for these assumptions the idealistic theory could not be stated in words. Idealism is really an attempt to obliterate the distinction between knowing and being, which it finds established in common belief and in the realistic theories. The gist of epistemological Idealism is that the knowing is the thing known; that being known to different consciousnesses is the only being or existence of the object; that cognitive states of a number of conscious beings exist, but that the "it," the object which we ordinarily suppose these cognitive states to refer to — which we suppose to be known by means of these cognitive states — is nothing beyond the cognitive states themselves.[1] Now on such a theory it is pretty evident that the distinction of Knowing and Being, of independent subject and object, would never have arisen, and would not have required therefore to be explained away. Hence, it may be repeated, Idealism exists only as a criticism of Realism. When developed itself as a substantive theory, it leads to a view of existence which is a reductio ad absurdum
- ↑ Obviously on such a hypothesis the designation "cognitive" applied to the states is no longer appropriate, since they have ceased to be the instruments of knowledge.
