the other, and a chasm is made between them. The knower is practically extruded from the real universe; he is treated as if he did not belong to it, as if he came to inspect it like a stranger from afar. His forms of thought come thus to be regarded as an alien product with no inherent fitness to express the nature of things. Things are rather conceived as in themselves independent of these forms, so that the forms, when applied, are treated as an unauthorized gloss, a distorting medium. A little reflection, however, tells us that to conceive matters thus is to convert the necessary duality or opposition which knowledge involves into a real or metaphysical dualism for which there is no kind of warrant. We are the victims of metaphor, if we allow ourselves to think of the individual knower as standing outside of the universe in this way, or if we imagine a real chasm or gulf between him and the objects he knows. The knower is in the world which he comes to know; and the forms of his thought, so far from being an alien growth or an imported product, are themselves a function of the whole. As M. Fouillée puts it, "consciousness, so far from being outside reality, is the immediate presence of reality to itself and the inward unrolling of its riches."[1] When this is once grasped, the idea of thought as 'a kind of necessary evil' ceases to have even a superficial plausibility.
For I desire to repeat here, what was indicated in the first of these articles, that the epistemological Realism, the transcendency, the duality, of which so much has been said, are not to be taken in the metaphysical reference just alluded to. The two substances "separated by the whole diameter of being,"[2] which modern philosophy inherited from Descartes, I take to be no better than an invention of the enemy. It was the most unfortunate error of the Scottish philosophers that they identified the epistemological and the metaphysical position. Their re-assertion, as against Hume, of the necessary trans-subjective reference in knowledge was unfortunately supposed by them to be equivalent to a re-instatement of the abstract opposition between mind and matter as two absolutely heterogeneous substances. But, if matter is defined as the precise (metaphysical) opposite of mind,—if we start with the presupposition that they have nothing in common, that the one just is what the other is not—the growth of the subjective nightmare is perfectly intelligible. There is no reason why we should expect the
