Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison

“ If it is objected that this view of psychology, as limited to the subjective world, is insufficient, seeing that in great part of his work the psychologist is bound to assume the correlation of mind and body, and the existence of an external cause of impressions, I reply that, on its physiological or experimental side, psychology simply places itself at the point of view of the other sciences. ”

“ Whether we can absolutely prove so much or no, it is certain that so much is involved in every constructive system of metaphysics; and certainly we cannot believe less without lapsing into scepticism. If we put this metaphysical sense upon the words, then I most certainly believe, in Berkeley's phrase, that "the absolute existence of unthinking things are words without a meaning." There is no metaphysical thing-in-itself, no res completa, except the universe regarded as a self-existent whole. ”

“ If, with Goethe, we say that nature is the garment of God by which we see Him, we make nature the phenomenon of a divine essence. If we take atoms and the void as our metaphysical principia, then the human consciousness and the variegated face of nature as it appears to that consciousness are phenomena of what Berkeley calls the materialist's "stupid thoughtless somewhat." If we say with the Hegelians that Thought is the ultimate reality which manifests itself alike in nature and man, we are engaged with the same metaphysical contrast ”

“ But for myself, I question whether he does not go too far in admitting an undifferentiated sensuous consciousness as the primordial fact in the evolutionary process. It is in vain that we project our imaginations towards such a hypothetical beginning: it has nothing in common with what we understand by knowledge, and is therefore perfectly unrealizable by us. Being thus totally heterogeneous, it cannot form a step on the road to knowledge: I mean that it does not in any sense pave the way for it or render the emergence of cognition easier to conceive. ”

“ The mere fact that we believe ourselves to have successfully made the leap from the subjective to a real which is independent of our subjectivity, does not reveal to us off-hand the ultimate ground or essence of that real. Epistemology, in short, has to do entirely with the relation of the subjective consciousness to a trans-subjective world which it knows or seems to know. Metaphysics has to do with the ultimate nature of the reality which reveals itself alike in the consciousness which knows and the world which is known. ”

“ THE problem of epistemology arises from the very nature of knowledge. Knowledge implies a reference to that which is known, and which is therefore to be distinguished from the knowledge itself considered subjectively as an act or process of the being who knows. What is known, the object of knowledge, may be styled most generally Reality. Knowledge bears in its heart, in its very notion, this reference to a reality distinct from itself. No idealist will deny, at all events, that knowledge seems to us to carry this reference with it. ”

“ Is the ultimate essence and cause of all things only "dust that rises up, and is lightly laid again"; or is it the Eternal Love of Dante's Vision — "the love that moves the sun and the other stars"? That is the fundamental metaphysical antithesis. If we embrace the, one alternative, however we may clothe it in detail, we recognize the universe as our home, and we may have a religion; if we embrace the other, then the spirit of man is indeed homeless in an alien world. ”

“ In other words, it falls absolutely outside of, or beyond, the little world of consciousness, and the conscious being cannot in the nature of things overleap or transcend itself. The knowledge which we call most immediate or direct is only relatively so; so far as it is knowledge, it is mediate, or the result of a process. Knowledge puts a man in relation with things through the medium of his perceptions, but his perceptions are not the things; he does not pass over into the things, nor do the things pass over into him. ”

“ Knowledge is an activity, an activo-passive experience of the subject, whereby it becomes aware of what is not itself. The cognitive state is thus related psychologically to the subject whose state it is, and epistemologically to the object of which it is the knowledge. Epistemologically there is a union of subject and object: the knower and what he knows are in a sense, as Aristotle says, one. But ontologically, or as a matter of existence, they remain distinct—the one here and the other there—and nothing avails to bridge this chasm. ”

“ Psychology, according to Locke's way of putting it, deals with "ideas," which he defines as "the immediate objects of the mind in thinking"; [1] it treats ideas as mental facts which have an existence of their own in consciousness. Epistemology deals with the "knowledge" which we reach by means of these ideas or immediate mental facts. It takes the ideas not as themselves bits of fact, but as signs or symbols of some further reality ”

“ But knowledge is not a fusion of knower and known, nor is it all explained by being regarded as a kind of physical continuity or immediate contact between the knowing subject and the object known. Though science may prove all perception to be dependent on the existence of a physical medium between the object perceived and the sense-organs, thus reducing all the senses to varieties of touch, the psychical facts which result are yet totally different, and as it were apart from the series of physical movements from which they result. ”

“ What is the ground of our belief in an independent world? Our cognitive states appear to refer themselves to a reality which we know by their means. Epistemology does not, like psychology, rest in the appearance. It seeks to determine whether the appearance is true, and, if true, in what sense precisely it is to be understood. The point on which psychology is dumb, forms the central problem of epistemological science. What is reality, the epistemologist asks. Is there any reality beyond the conscious states themselves and their connections? ”

“ Their distinction is undeniable, though an ill-advised Realism and an all-advised Idealism alike try to undermine it or to explain it away. In fact, as we saw at the outset of this paper, the distinction may be said to be involved in the very nature or notion of knowledge. Knowledge means nothing if it does not mean the relation of two factors, knowledge of an object by a subject. But knowledge is not an entity stretching across, as it were, from subject to object, and uniting them; still less is knowledge the one reality of which subject and object are two sides or aspects. ”

“ A theory of knowledge or a philosophy of belief is a necessary preliminary of all scientific and metaphysical inquiry.
In endeavoring to establish such a theory, we must start from the ordinary consciousness. What does the plain man believe about perception and the real world of physical things? He believes that his senses, especially sight and touch, put him in immediate relation with real things. He has only to open his eyes or to stretch out his hand, and he is face to face or in actual contact with the realities themselves. ”

“ But, as I have said, to wish to overpass these limits is to rebel against the very nature of selfhood, and epistemologically to kick against the very notion of knowledge. That very self which is a principle of isolation in existence is the principle on which all communion, all fellowship rests, alike in knowing and in feeling. ”

“ For it must not be forgotten that the question which epistemology finds before it is the relation of the individual knower to a world of reality a world — whose very existence it is bound to treat at the outset as problematical. How, or in what sense, does the individual knower transcend his own individual existence and become aware of other men and things? ”

“ Consciousness, as such, is shut up to its own contents or constituents. What transcends consciousness, i.e. any existence which is other than consciousness cannot be in consciousness; albeit the ordinary naïve idea seems to be that consciousness, as it were, goes out of itself, and actually lays hold of things, or throws its net over them. In literal fact, however, this is not so. The psychical experiences which constitute knowledge are one thing, and, according to the doctrine of a Realism that understands itself, the thing known is another. ”

“ Knowledge in such creatures exists simply in a practical reference. Consciousness would be a useless luxury unless as putting them in relation to the surrounding world and enabling them to adapt their actions to its varying stimuli. In point of fact, this practical consciousness, so far as we can judge, accompanies animal life from the outset. At least we cannot even imagine a consciousness without the objective reference; i.e. without a felt distinction between the feeling subject and an object which it feels — something different, of whose presence to it it is aware. ”

“ He draws no distinction between the existence of the thing in itself and its existence for him in the moment of perception. The appearance is the reality. "The vulgar," as Hume says, "confound perceptions and objects, and attribute a distinct continued existence to the very things they feel or see." [3] "'Tis certain," he says again, "that almost all mankind, and even philosophers themselves, for the greatest part of their lives, take their perceptions to be their only objects, and suppose that the very being, which is intimately present to the mind, is the real body or material existence. ”

“ For even if we possessed that knowledge of trans-subjective realities which Kantianism denies, we should still be dealing only with phenomena in the metaphysical sense with the particular existences of the universe, not with the essence or universal of which they are the expression. When such a serious ambiguity is discovered lurking in a term which is so freely bandied about as "phenomena," it may well be doubted whether the controversialists are always clear as to the sense in which they mean it to be taken. ”

“ But, without insisting at the outset on this refinement, let us take the general or typical case, in which the knowledge is knowledge of beings other than ourselves, a knowledge of the facts of the world around us. Here the very function of knowledge, as ordinarily understood, is to disclose to one being the nature of beings and things with which he is in relation, but which are different; i.e. numerically and existentially distinct from himself. One being or individual cannot go out of himself, so far as his being or existence is concerned. ”

“ If they have not gone to this extreme length, the possibility of real knowledge has been an ever present difficulty to modern thought, — a difficulty that has seemed to grow greater instead of less in the hands of successive thinkers, till it may be said since the time of Hume and Kant to have been the main subject of philosophical debate. Now, it can scarcely be doubted that in this respect philosophy has largely created the difficulties which it finds so hard to surmount, but at the same time we cannot wonder at or regret the time and labor expended on this question ”

“ No theorist takes the particular mental state as independent and self-sufficient; he cannot avoid referring it beyond itself. But if he is a subjective idealist, say like Mill, he will try to avoid the acknowledgment that this reference of present consciousness beyond itself carries us beyond consciousness altogether. He will explain it as a reference of a particular mental state to a permanent law of connection between mental states, and thus convey the impression that the reality to which the subjective consciousness refers is still in a manner within that consciousness. ”

“ From Locke and Kant as centres the epistemological speculations of modern philosophy may be conveniently viewed. Now, unquestionably, the transcendence of the real does give scepticism its opportunity. Scepticism takes up its position in the gap thus apparently made between the ideal and the real, and asks how we know that we know the real things, what assurance have we that the world of real things is as it appears to us to be, nay, in the last resort, what assurance have we that there is a world of real things at all. ”

“ The English neo-Hegelians convey the impression that in order to reach a metaphysical, or, as they call it, a spiritual, Idealism, it is at least necessary to deny the reality of " things-in-themselves." Metaphysically they mean by this, as I perfectly well understand, that the external world is not to be taken as an independent fact, existing, so to speak, on its own account, and having only accidental relations with the rest of the universe. The universe is once for all a whole, and the external world, as the Hegelians put it, is essentially related to intelligence ”

“ Psychology, assuming the existence of a subject or medium of consciousness, seeks to explain, mainly by the help of association or processes practically similar, how out of the come-and-go of conscious states, there are evolved such subjective facts as perceptions, the belief in an independent real world, and the idea of the Ego or subject himself. ”

“ If it is not an illusion altogether, it is a knowledge of realities which are trans-subjective or extra-conscious; i.e. which exist beyond and independently of the consciousness of the individual knowing them. But all through the modern period philosophers have been turning the subjectivity of knowledge against its objectivity, and in the last resort converting the very notion of knowledge into an argument against the possibility of knowledge. ”

“ As already indicated, the best general psychological equivalent is states of consciousness, mental states, psychical functions.
In accordance with what has been said, Epistemology may be intelligibly described as dealing with the relation of knowledge to reality. Of course, if we take reality in the widest sense, our cognitive states are also part of reality; they also are. The wildest fancy that flits through the mind exists in its own way, fills out its own moment of time, and takes its individual place in the fact-continuum which constitutes the universe. ”

“ It might easily be shown that epistemological Idealism inevitably conducts us in consistency to scepticism of the Humian or an essentially similar type. Where a so-called Idealism fails to reach this goal, it is in virtue of the realistic elements which it inconsistently adopts into its system. Such a line of argument would form a convincing proof from history of the distinction on which I am insisting between epistemology and metaphysics. For scepticism is, of course, so far from being allied to metaphysical Idealism that it would rather require to be bracketed with materialism. ”