PHILOSOPHY 794
e may view know-ledge as mere subjective function, but it
has its full "meaning only as it is taken to represent what we may call objective fact, or is such as is named (in different circumstances) real valid, true. As mere subjective function, which it is to the psychologist, it is best spoken of by an unambiguous name, and for this there seems none better than Intellection. We may then say that psychology is occupied with the natural function of Intellection, seeking to discover its laws and distinguishing its various modes (perception, representative imagination, conception, &c.) according to the various circumstances in which the laws are found at work. Philosophy, on the other hand, is theory of Knowledge (as that which is known)." "Psychology and Philosophy," Mind, 1883, pp. 15, 16. The confusion of these two points of view has led, and still leads, to serious philosophical misconception. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, in the English school since Hume, psychology superseded properly philosophical inquiry. The infusion of epistemological matter into the numerous analyses of the human mind rendered the sub stitution plausible and left men satisfied. And we find even a thinker with a wider horizon like Sir W. Hamilton encouraging the confusion by speaking of " psychology or metaphysics, l while his lectures on metaphysics are mainly taken up Avith what belongs in the strictest sense to psychology proper, with an occasional excursus (as in the theory of perception) into epistemology. That this con fusion is on the way to be obviated for the future is largely due to the Kantian impulse which has been strongly felt of late in English thought, and which has acted in this matter on many who could not, by any laxity of termino logy, be numbered as Kantians or Neo-Kantians. The distinction between psychology and theory of knowledge was first clearly made by Kant, who repeatedly insisted that the Critique of Pure Reason was not to be taken as a psychological inquiry. He defined his problem as the quid juris or the question of the validity of knowledge, not its qiwl facti or the laws of the empirical genesis and evolution of intellection (to use Professor Robertson s phraseology). Since Kant philosophy has chiefly taken the form of theory of knowledge or of a criticism of experience. Not, indeed, a preliminary criticism of our faculties or conceptions such as Kant himself proposed to institute, in order to determine the limits of their application ; such a criticism ab extra of the nature of our experience is essentially a thing im possible. The only criticism which can be applied in such a case is the immanent criticism which the conceptions or categories exercise upon one another. The organized criti cism of these conceptions is really nothing more than the full explication of what they mean and of what experience in its full nature or notion is. This constitutes the theory of knowledge, and lays down, in Kantian language, the con ditions of the possibility of experience. These condition ; are the conditions of knowledge as such, of self-conscious ness in general, or, as it may be put, of objective conscious ness. The inquiry is, therefore, logical or transcendental in its nature, and does not entangle us in any decision as to the conditions of the genesis of such consciousness in the individual. When we inquire into subjective conditions we are thinking of facts causing other facts. But the logical or transcendental conditions are not causes or ever factors of knowledge ; they are the statement of its idea Hence the dispute at the present time between evolutionist and transcendentalist rests, in general, on an ignoratu elenchi ; for the history of the genesis of an idea (the his torical or genetic method) does not contain an answer to though it may throw light on the philosophic questior of its truth or validity. Speaking of this transcenderita consciousness, Kant goes so far as to say that it is no 1 It i.s true that he afterwards modifies this misleading identification by introducing the distinction between empirical psychology or th phenomenology of mind and inferential psychology or ontology, i.e. metaphysics proper. But he continues to use the terms " philosophy, "metaphysics," and "mental science" as synonymous. )f the slightest consequence "whether the idea of it be ?lear or obscure (in empirical consciousness), no, not even vhether it really exists or not. But the possibility of lie logical form of all knowledge rests on its relation to ,his apperception as a faculty or potentiality " ( MVr/v, ed. Hartenstein, iii. 578 note). Or, if we return to the distinction between epistemology and psychology, by way of illustrating the nature of the former, we may take
- he summing up of Mr Ward in a valuable article on
Psychological Principles" recently contributed to Mind (April 1883, pp. 166, 167). "Comparing psychology and epistemology, then, we may say that the former is essen tially genetic in its method, and might, if we had the power to revise our existing terminology, be called biology ; the latter, on the other hand, is essentially devoid of every thing historical, and treats, sub specie seternitatis, as Spino/a might have said, of human knowledge, conceived as the possession of mind in general." Kant s problem is not, in its wording, very different from that which Locke set before him when he resolved to "inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent," Locke s Essay is undoubtedly, in its intention, a contribution to the theory of knowledge, as any one may verify for himself by turning to the headings of the chapters in the fourth book. But, because time had not yet made the matter clear, Locke suffered himself to digress in his second book into the purely psychological question of the origin of our ideas, or, as Kant called it, the physiology of the human mind. Appearing thus, first, as the problem of perception (in Locke and his English successors), widening its scope and becoming, in Kant s hands, the question of the possibility of experience in general, epistemology may be said to have passed with Hegel into a completely articulated " logic," that claimed to be at the same time a metaphysic, or an ultimate ex pression of the nature of the real. This introduces us to the second part of the question we are seeking to determine, namely, the relation of epistemology to metaphysics. It is evident that philosophy as theory of knowledge must have for its complement philosophy as metaphysics or ontology. The question of the truth of our knowledge, and the question of the ultimate nature of what we know, are in reality two sides of the same inquiry ; and therefore our epistemological results have to be ontologically ex pressed. But it is not every thinker that can see his way with Hegel to assert in set terms the identity of thought and being. Hence the theory of knowledge becomes with some a theory of human ignorance. This is the case with Herbert Spencer s doctrine of the unknowable, which he advances as the result of epistemological considerations in the philosophical prolegomena to his system. Very similar positions were maintained by Kant and Omte ; and, under the name of "agnosticism," the theory has popu larized itself of late in the outer courts of philosophy, and on the shifting borderland of philosophy and literature. The truth is that the habit of thinking exclusively from the standpoint of the theory of knowledge tends to beget an undue subjectivity of temper. And the fact that it has become usual for men to think from this standpoint is very plainly seen in the almost universal description of philosophy as an analysis of "experience," instead of its more old-fashioned designation as an inquiry into " the nature of things." Now it is matter of universal agree ment that the problem of being must be attacked indirectly through the problem of knowledge; and _ therefore this substitution certainly marks an advance, in so far as it implies that the fact of experience, or of self-conscicus existence, is the chief fact to be dealt with. But if so, then self-consciousness must really be treated as existing,
