THE GRAND RESULT OF DISSECTING PHENOMENA.

Since the days of Immanuel Kant, no philosophy, no rational theology, no ultimate science, not referring to the results of his work, has had any real basis in thought—the reason being that he saw through, and explained, the principle of universal relativity, the law of scientific idealism, and relaid the whole structure, from the corner-stone up.

Before Kant it was known well enough that "matter," however we must all accept it with our hands and eyes, has no standing, under the analysis of thought, except as a system of effects on ourselves. Hume, we remember, saw all this so clearly that he pronounced the very organs of sense, "our limbs and members," to be "not our body," but "certain impressions" to which the mind ascribes "a corporeal existence." Our limbs and members certainly are our body—the only body we have—but Hume was right in his meaning that our body is a phenomenon which has no existence but as a plexus of impressions on a principle of intelligence, possessing various modes of reception, named senses. But this principle of intelligence itself was, to Hume, not a fact to be grasped by "reason," not a principle to be known and described, but was to be taken as a "force and vivacity" unknowable beyond an instinct of it. Hume's unknowable "force and vivacity"—an improved form of Locke's "blank-tablet"—Kant analyzed in the light of its products; namely, those conjuncts of sense-effects called objects; those conjuncts of objects called species, genera, and categories; and finally those conjuncts of all things and all conditions of things, called transcendental ideas. Now, such conjuncts of various "manifolds" actually exist. They are man's percepts and concepts; they are his facts, his environment. But as percepts and concepts, and always conjuncts of "the manifold," they are formed, organized, totalized, through a principle—the principle of perception and conception itself. This is Kant's a-priori synthetical unit, common and necessary to all "things" and to all "experience."The last word of any weight, against this reduction of matter to mind, was said a few years ago by that exceptionally acute thinker, Professor Huxley, in his summary of Hume. Too able and learned, both as philosopher and scientist, to question idealism, Huxley admitted it unqualifiedly. But, not having gone beyond the British proofs of it, he defended what is commonly called "materialism" in this way:

"If we analyze the proposition that all mental phenomena are the effects or products of material phenomena, all that it means amounts to this: that whenever those states of consciousness which we call sensation, or emotion, or thought, come into existence, complete investigation will show good reason for the belief that they are preceded by those other phenomena of consciousness to which we give the names of matter and motion. All material changes appear, in the long run, to be modes of motion; but our knowledge of motion is nothing but that of a change in the place and order of our sensations; just as our knowledge of matter is restricted to those feelings of which we assume it to be the cause."

To this last posture of materialism, a competent understanding of Kant is the only reply that has ever been needed. It is simply of no consequence to the case what states of consciousness precede or follow other states of consciousness. Let it be granted (whether true or not) that "phenomena of consciousness to which we give the names of matter and motion" precede all others. What of it? Kant has proved to us that no phenomenon of consciousness—no matter, no motion, no sensation—and, beyond all these, no time and no space, in which all the rest appear—has, or can have, any existence, except as put into unity, form, and order, by the unity, form, and order of mind. If both "the synthesis of apprehension" and "the synthesis of apperception" enter into any state of consciousness named matter, to give it birth, there is no possibility that the element of intelligence can be an after-birth of the process.

All our objects, then, from a germ cell to the horizon, are constructed such through a mental principle innate in our own structure. But here it must be re-iterated and re-emphasized that whatever we, as units of mind, may embody in objects as form, the filling of them is not ours. It has a source apart. The filling of our objects comes from "the ultimate non-ego," the "background of matter." This ultimate non-ego was a heritage to Kant from British idealism. He took it for granted at his first step and held by it unchanged when he was old and exhausted. He called it the "noumenon," the "real correlate of matter," and pluralized it as "things in themselves." But he insisted, as firmly as Herbert Spencer has since done, that the "noumenon" is "unknown and unknowable."

In a certain way—vital enough, too—"things in themselves" are "unknown and unknowable." Man is a small, dependent, limited being. Let us admit at once every old proverb in the world, to the effect that "the finite cannot comprehend the infinite." Sir William Hamilton issued a tedious list of such proverbs. Let us adopt the whole of it. "The finite cannot comprehend the infinite." The very meaning of "things in themselves" is that they are withheld from us in their specific contents. But in their general nature they are related and revealed to us; and the revelation is always asserted when we name them "source of impact," the "real correlate of matter," "things in themselves," or even "the unknown and unknowable." Is there an "unknown and unknowable?" Yes, there is. But whatever is has being—must have being, or not be that which "is." So much then we know of "the unknown and unknowable"; it has being; it is a fact. But we know it negatively, as well as positively. We know what it is not, on precisely the same ground that we know what it is. Being a "noumenon," it is not a phenomenon; being a "thing in itself," it is not what things are to us. Being "the real correlate of matter," it is not matter, but is the objective background of matter.

But now: Kant had analyzed matter and found it to be a relation—a relation between finite subjective awareness and this very noumenal background now in evidence. He had found, too, that all matter—every spicule of it—is exhausted in the relation. He had found that, out of the relation, matter has no existence. By these presents, then, we know that the objective background of matter, the ultimate non-ego, is not material.

And, at this point, where are we, if we pause and think? When reduced to elements, to principles, what is there of the universe—the all of things? Just the subjective and the objective, mind and matter. Hence, that which is not matter is mind. Nothing else is left for it.

We may wriggle at this terminus as much as we like, but there is no dodging it. It may be said, for instance, that, while we know and experience nothing but mind and matter (including with matter its phenomenal vistas, space and time), we can imagine something else than either; and, during the past fifty years, this nonsense has found lodgment in some heads. Now I can imagine anything, in the meaning that I can arbitrarily produce some foolish fancy. I can imagine a white blackbird, with his tail-feathers on his head. But I cannot imagine even this self-evident contradiction as a thing of neither mind nor matter. What is an object of "imagination" in the meaning of fancy? It may be empty of matter, and so unlike the white blackbird. But no object of imagination can be empty of mind. Imagination is itself an act of mind; hence every possible product of imagination must partake of mind. If, therefore, I imagine something apart from mind and matter, it must still spring from mind, contain mind, and so not be apart from mind. The "reductio ad absurdum" can be had cheap and sure, just where it is most needed.

After Immanuel Kant had once and for good dissected the universe, it seems a pity that he declined to put his findings together, and take the last logical step of his magnificent demonstrations. As a requisite, perhaps, to his microscopic analysis of human subjectivity, he declined to generalize his own discoveries. In short, Kant's synthesis was Hegel. But Hegel we need not follow, as our short cut to him, through the solution of noumena, is worth more, as yet, than the whole German tour of "post-Kantean philosophy."

Very early in his work Kant said:

"There are two sources of human knowledge (which probably spring from a common, but to us unknown root), namely, sense and understanding. By the former, objects are given to us; by the latter, thought."

Dissecting, with Kant, the nature of "understanding," we have discovered in it the unal form of all our re-presentations—of every perceptible and conceivable objected fact. Dissecting "sense," with the same instructor, we have found it to be certain modes of mental susceptibility, its physical organs being nothing but relations between susceptible awareness and the noumenal unknown, like all the rest of "matter." Led, once more, by our Professor straight up to this noumenal unknown, where he willed to stop and turn his back on it, we have only had to look, in order to see it collapse into the self-retention of Spirit—spirit out of us, but still in itself, and thus going to make up the totality of Spiritual Being. We have thus found the "one common root" of all knowledge and all things. But we have touched, also, the apex of thought, and can now see what is meant—really and fully meant—by "absolute idealism."

Absolute Idealism is not merely a phrase; it is a grand and glorious fact. Immersed in matter, stuck in our senses, we may insist on looking at sensuous phenomena as our friend John Jasper looked at the sun, with honest contempt for Copernicus and Newton. "De earf do not move roun' de sun," exclaimed the sturdy preacher, "but de bressed sun move roun' de earf. Dere she go now: don't I see her wi' dese very eyes?" Parson Jasper did see the sun moving round the earth, and in the same way we all see the objects of our senses existing in perfect independence of ourselves. Still, as surely as astronomy has proved the delusion of taking the sun's movement from the eye, philosophy, with the aid of "practical science," has proved the delusion of taking objective re-presentations as not constructed through subjective being. The inevitable end of this proof is the dissolution of noumena as anything "material," and the inclusion of all things in Universal Spirit. Of such spirit, finite subjectivity is a function—a necessary participative reflex, through which the Universal Spirit is life, manifestation, self-evolution.