The transition from Psychology to Epistemology, Mr. Seth contends, is natural and inevitable. I have the belief in an objective world, and I must justify my belief. This latter problem, indeed, cannot be shirked, were it only that there always are unpleasant people who persist in raising difficulties, and asking how the individual subject, shut up within the circle of his own ideas, manages to get out of himself. "The office of the theory of knowledge must, in the main, be negative or indirect, ruling out certain solutions as inadmissible rather than itself supplying us with a ready-made solution."[1] Epistemology, however, it is held, only prepares the way for a new branch of philosophy. Granting that we have somehow passed beyond our subjective states to the objective world, we have still to ask: "What is the ultimate nature of the reality which reveals itself alike in the consciousness which knows and the world which is known?" From psychology the subject has learned the reality of his own mental states; epistemology has shown him that his natural belief in other men and things cannot be overthrown by scepticism; and now metaphysic seeks to determine the ultimate ground or essence of these two forms of reality. Thus our progress from psychology to epistemology, and from epistemology to metaphysic, is so simple and natural that it almost looks like the logical transition from premises to conclusion.
One has almost a guilty feeling in even venturing to suggest a doubt of the value of so neat and symmetrical a scheme; but, for my part, I do not see my way to accept it, until I have been convinced that the basis of the whole structure is sound. That basis, obviously, is the assumption that by no possibility can the conscious subject have a knowledge of anything but his own mental states. Not only does that assumption seem to me incapable of proof, but, so far as I can see, it makes all real progress in the solution of philosophical problems an impossibility. In my opinion, a subject confined to his own mental states is a subject that never existed and never could exist; yet, upon this product of a false abstraction, Mr.
- ↑ Hegelianism and Personality, p. 32; 2d edition, p. 34.
