nature of being, degraded to the rank of pre faith. 188. The transformation of this critical agnostic doctrine into absolute idealism is The Post- table. The metaphysical interest г. bound to avail itself of the specul Kantians Transform Kant's Mind in-general into suggestiveness with which the Kar philosophy abounds. The transform an Absolute Mind. the tion turns upon Kant's assumption that whate is constructed by the mind is on that account pr nomenon or appearance. Kant has carried al the presumption that whatever is act or content i mind is on that account not real object or thing-is itself. We have seen that this is generally at cepted as true of the relativities of sense-perce tion. But is it true of thought? The post-Kantian idealist maintains that that depends upon thought. The content of private individual think ing is in so far not real object; but it does not fol low that this is true of such thinking as is universally valid. Now Kant has deduced his categories for thought in general. There are no empirical cases of thinking except the human thinkers; but the categories are not the property of any one human individual or any group of such individuals. They are the conditions of experi ce in general, and of every possibility of exrience. The transition to absolute idealism now readily made. Thought in general becomes e absolute mind, and experience in general its ntent. The thing-in-itself drops out as having ɔ meaning. The objectivity to which it testified s provided for in the completeness and selfufficiency which is attributed to the absolute exerience. Indeed, an altogether new definition of subjective and objective replaces the old. The subective is that which is only insufficiently thought, as in the case of relativity and error; the objective is that which is completely thought. Thus the natural order is indeed phenomenal; but only because the principles of science are not the highest principles of thought, and not because nature is the fruit of thought. Thus Hegel expresses his relation to Kant as follows: According to Kant, the things that we know about are to us appearances only, and we can never know their essential nature, which belongs to another world, which we cannot approach. The true statement of the case is as follows. The things of which we have direct consciousness are mere phenomena, not for us only, but in their own nature; and the true and proper case of these things, finite as they are, is to have their existence founded not in themselves, but in the universal divine idea. This view of things, it is true, is as idealist as Kant's, but in contradistinction to the subjective idealism of the Critical Philosophy should be termed Absolute Idealism." § 189. Absolute idealism is thus reached after a long and devious course of development. The Direct Mind to the But the argument may be stated much more The Inference briefly. Plato, it will be remembered, from the Finite found that experience tends ever to Infinite Mind. transcend itself. The thinker finds himself compelled to pursue the ideal of immutable and universal truth, and must identify the ultimate being with that ideal. Similarly Hegel says: "That upward spring of the mind signifies that the being which the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth; it signifies that beyond and above that appearance, truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God." 10 The further argument of absolute idealism differs from that of Plato in that the dependence of truth upon the mind is accepted as a first principle. The ideal with which experience is informed is now the state of perfect knowledge, rather than the 'Hegel: Encyclopädie, §45, lecture note. Quoted by McTaggart: Op. cit., p. 69. 10 Hegel: Encyclopädie, §50. Quoted by McTaggart: Op. cit., p. 70. system of absolute truth. The content of the state of perfect knowledge will indeed be the system of absolute truth, but none the less content, precisely as finite knowledge is the content of a finite mind. In pursuing the truth, I who pursue, aim to realize in myself a certain highest state of knowledge. Were I to know all truth I should indeed have ceased to be the finite individual who began the quest, but the evolution would be continuous and the character of self-consciousness would never have been lost. I may say, in short, that God or being, is my perfect cognitive self. The argument for absolute idealism is a constructive interpretation of the subjectivistic contention that knowledge can never escape the circle of its own activity and states. To meet the demand for a final and standard truth, a demand which realism meets with its doctrine of a being independent of any mind, this philosophy defines a standard mind. The impossibility of defining objects in terms of relativity to a finite self, conducts dialectically to the conception of the absolute self. The sequel to my error or exclusiveness, is truth or inclusiveness. The outcome of the dialectic is determined by the symmetry of the antithesis. Thus, corrected experience implies a last correcting experience; partial cognition, complete cognition; empirical subject, transcendental subject; finite mind, an absolute mind. The follow ing statement is taken from a contemporary exponent of the philosophy: "What you and I lack, when we lament our human ignorance, is simply a certain desirable and logically possible state of mind, or type of experience; to wit, a state of mind in which we should wisely be able to say that we had fulfilled in experience what we now have merely in idea, namely, the knowledge, the immediate and felt presence, of what we now call the Absolute Reality. There is an Absolute Experience for which the conception of an absolute reality, i. e., the conception of a system of ideal truth, is fulfilled by the very contents that get presented to this experience. This Absolute Experience is related to our experience as an organic whole to its own fragments. It is an experience which finds fulfilled all that the completest thought can conceive as genuinely possible. Herein lies its definition as an Absolute. For the Absolute Experience, as for ours, there are data, contents, facts. But these data, these contents, express, for the Absolute Experience, its own meaning, its thought, its ideas. Contents beyond these that it possesses, the Absolute Experience knows to be, in genuine truth, impossible. Hence its contents are indeed particular,—a selection from the world of bare or merely conceptual possibilities, but they form a self-determined whole, than which nothing completer, more organic, more fulfilled, more transparent, or more complete in meaning, is concretely or genuinely possible. On the other hand, these contents are not foreign to those of our finite |