II.—THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE.
By Edmund Montgomery.
i.
Happily, investigators of mind are at present generally agreed that, in our philosophical inquiries, we have to start from the data of individual consciousness, as alone immediately cognisable. The question is: What underlies the wide-spread display and endless train of conscious occurrences that, for each of us, make up the world we know? And what is the real meaning of it all?
Genuine Transcendentalism answers: The essence of our being consists in a spiritual organisation or subject, autonomously weaving steady experience out of the ever-changing conscious phenomena; and it all means the more or less adequate understanding of that which eternally and unalterably subsists in a universal consciousness.
Genuine Naturalism answers: The true subject and bearer of the conscious display is that abiding something of ours, which we perceive as our living organisation; and its conscious affections signify to us the recognition of our own relations to the entire economy of sense-compelling influences which we call the world.
Could more diametrically opposite conceptions of human existence and its aims well be framed—psychologically, metaphysically, and ethically? Yet this is actually what we find ourselves driven to by the present developments of our philosophy. We have unambiguously to decide for one or the other of these extreme views. Consistent thinking can discover no compromise. Our being is either wholly natural, or wholly spiritual. It is either a purely intelligible principle, apprehending and elaborating the conscious phenomena and, consequently, in possession of all there is immediately extant. Or it is, on the contrary, that integrant part of nature appearing to us as our living body, and experiencing our world of feeling and thought as affection of its own. It must certainly be either the one or the other. In no way can our veritable being be both together: a spiritual subject constituting experience by dint of its own power, and also an organic subject experiencing its naturally constituted functions. Experience is either exclusively organic, or exclusively hyper-organic.
