sciousness, but for the Absolute Thought, in which the component relations of phenomena exist to all eternity, even when empirical consciousness is not aware of their presence. So long as we feel without thinking, the world of phenomena is non-existent for us, yet we possess a certain form of existence, since, even if the relative sensations be not real facts for our consciousness, they yet exist in the consciousness of the Absolute.[1] The action of the mind does not consist in abstracting certain attributes from things as presented to us by experience, thus mutilating experience and rendering it barren; it is rather thought itself which constitutes the attributes and makes them into objects by colligating them with one another. Knowledge does not pass from the concrete to the abstract, from rich and full perception to poor and empty conception; on the contrary, it passes from the universal to the individual. The categories do not stand at the end, but at the beginning; they are not ultimate truth, but rather that which we apprehend in even the simplest perception; they are the most universal and primitive of relations, by means of which we create objects in order of progression, determining them by means of relations which grow more and more numerous and exact, until we attain individual concrete ideas possessed of a greater wealth of synthetical relations. Knowledge goes through two phases, the one spontaneous, the other reflective: in the former we pass from the universal to the individual, and interpret things according to the laws governing our mental activity without being aware that we are doing so; in the reflex phase we retrace our steps from the concrete to the abstract, defining clearly the relations existing between individual objects; these relations are, of course, not derived from experience as such, but rather from that which we ourselves have unwittingly introduced into it in the first stage of knowledge. Empiricists leave this second phase out of their reckoning, and ignore the activity of the mental principle in the spontaneous construction of the world.
- ↑ Op. cit. p. 57.
