to this fact. Now the thing-in-itself is necessarily transcendent, i.e., it is not given in empirical reality, which is always phenomenal, i.e., is in consciousness. Empirical reality, however, is not on the same level with consciousness. In the latter, we directly know ultimate reality, but not the whole of reality. Again, while our bodies and the external world constitute a system of phenomena constructed in consciousness, we are none the less bound to refer them to a reality other than the consciousness in which they appear, and to suppose that they somehow represent that inaccessible reality, 'manifest' that reality in the consciousness in which they appear. From this position it might seem that the issue would be either agnosticism or an attempt to construct an objective, or absolute idealism. But Professor Read does not follow either of these paths. He argues for the hypothesis that consciousness is universally present in nature, or, as he also puts it, that reality is universally conscious. In reaching this view one is after all, he holds, but trying to build up a conceptual system of consciousness which will connect and complete the fragmentary contents of introspection, and is following the analogy of science as it constructs its conceptual world from the perceptual data of experience. At the same time, although reality is by this hypothesis universally conscious, its being cannot be fully expressed by consciousness, and as to the remainder of its being it is transcendent. Now the difficulty at once presents itself as to how any meaning whatever can be given to being in so far as it is transcendent. Professor Read frankly acknowledges the difficulty but thinks that we can transfer to this shadowy concept certain characteristics which are universally found in consciousness, and also, though with less certainty, certain universal relations of empirical reality. When, however, he undertook to put positive meaning into the concept of transcendent being in this way, it had seemed to the present reviewer that he was unwarrantably carrying over terms which acquire their whole significance in consciousness and in phenomena, and that it was not shown that, when the conditions of consciousness and of phenomena were left behind, these borrowed terms had any meaning.[1] In an appendix, in discussing this question, Professor Read, if I have caught his meaning, explains that transcendent being is not so transcendent as many of his phrases seem to imply. Consciousness, we discover, is not something that accompanies or is correlated with the changes in transcendent being, but is rather, and simply, the activity of that being itself. Transcendent
- ↑ And if, and in so far as, the conditions of consciousness and of phenomena are supposed to hold of transcendent being, it would seem to lose its transcendent character.
