Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/130

and the same thing; we are, that is to say, confronted with the problem of a new relation no less inexplicable than the first, and so on ad infinitum. The relation cannot be identified with the things related, and, taken by itself, is nothing.^[1] No less contradictory are space,^[2] time,^[3] movement,^[4] activity,^[5] causality,^[6] etc., because when these concepts are resolved into various combinations of qualities and relations, the difficulties set forth above will arise afresh. The fundamental concepts of the special sciences are then mere appearances due to faulty perspective, which must be eliminated by rising to a higher experience embracing all possible appearances transfigured to a greater or less degree in an integral harmonious system; these illusions, however, are possessed of a certain degree of reality; there is no such thing as a truth which is entirely true, just as there is no such thing as an error which is entirely false; we can only speak of a greater or lesser degree of truth; error is partial truth, it is false only because it is one-sided and incomplete. All appearances are real in some way or other, and to some extent, and the right modifications and transformations (supplementation and arrangement, addition, qualification) may bring them too into the system of the Absolute.^[7] In like manner every finite truth, like every fact, must be to a certain extent unreal and false, and the unlimited nature of the unknown renders it impossible to determine with certainty in the last analysis the proportion of error contained therein. If our knowledge were a system, we could determine the position of each thing in the whole, and gauge accurately the proportion of truth and error contained therein, but the nature of our knowledge renders such a system out of the question.^[8] Thought originates in the separation of the what, the ideal meaning, the predicate, from the that, immediately felt existence, the subject; error, falseness, lies in uniting a what and a that which do not correspond to each other. In the harmony of the whole, each what will find its proper that, and every illusion

1. Op. cit. p. 20 ff.
2. Op. cit. p. 35 ff.
3. Op. cit. p. 39 ff.
4. Op. cit. p. 44 ff.
5. Op. cit. p. 62 ff.
6. Op. cit. p. 54 ff.
7. “Error is truth, it is partial truth that is false only because partial and left incomplete” (op. cit. p. 192). “Error is truth when it is supplemented” (op. cit. p. 195).
8. Op. cit. p. 54.