eventually described, with perfect consistency, as the unknown and unknowable; and on the other side of the chasm we have a subjective modification, which is as a veil between us and the object rather than a revelation of its real nature. Because we began by denying any real relatedness between nature and mind, we end with the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge. Relatedness means continuity of process and truth of result-knowledge and reality as complementary elements of one system. Relativity, in the current sense of the term, means a finished world of fact complete in itself, but subsequently brought into contact with (what would almost seem to be) some extra-mundane creature in whom it produces certain effects. But these effects, being conditioned mainly by the creature's curious constitution, must be held to reveal rather the nature of the creature than the nature of the world which started the process of which they are the outcome.

The vitality of the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge— which is as much as to say the truth it contains-is entirely derived from its polemic against a wrongly-stated Realism, and against the copy-theory of truth, which our present-day pragmatists have made the object of their attack. The copy-theory, on the basis of the traditional philosophical dualism, defends what it calls the correspondence' of knowledge with reality. In that correspondence it finds its definition of truth. It is easy, of course, to put a sense upon the phrase which would remove any objection to such a definition; but correspondence, for the copy-theory, means such a relation as obtains between a picture and the object which it represents. In some such way the independent world of things, with their qualities and relations, is supposed to be reproduced in the knowing mind. We witness in Locke and Berkeley the break-down of this theory. Locke still clings to the theory in the case of the primary qualities : their patterns' do really exist in the things quite apart from

VI

LOCKE AND BERKELEY

117 our knowledge of them. But he abandons it in the case of the secondary qualities; the latter exhibit only such correspondence or conformity as exists between a cause and its effect. They are true in so far as they are the effects which things, in virtue of modifications of their primary qualities, are fitted to produce in us. They are the effects which God has arranged that things should produce, when acting on our sensibility.1 Berkeley's philosophy is a criticism of this compromise. The primary qualities are as much ideas of sense, he argues, as the secondary: where the secondary are, there the primary are also, namely, in the mind. The notion of an idea being 'like' some original in a non-mental world is transparently absurd, inasmuch as the comparison required to ascertain such likeness is inherently impossible; an idea can only be like an idea. Our whole sense-experience, therefore, is treated by Berkeley, as Locke treated the secondary qualities, namely, as a series of effects produced in the individual mind-produced, however, not as Locke assumed by an independent world of material substances, but by the immediate causation of the divine will. There is therefore no relation between knowledge and an external or trans-subjective reality which it has in some fashion to copy or represent. Knowledge is entirely an internal experience, and our sense-ideas and their relations of concomitance and sequence, being taken as the immediate inspiration of the Almighty, are themselves the only originals we require. Berkeley's world, apart from his theistic postulate, is, in fact, in William James's phrase, ' a world of pure experience', in which one part points cognitively to other parts, but which does not point as a whole to any extra-experiential world on which it rests or which it somehow renders to us. Conclusive as a criticism of the ordinary correspondence-theory, Berkeleianism is vitiated by the fact that it takes as its startingpoint and basis the fundamental tenet of representationism, 1 Essay, II. 30. 2.

the presupposition that the primary or direct object of knowledge is a state of our own mind. And if this is the very reverse of the truth, it follows that what is true in Berkeley's way of putting things must be re-stated in a form which will not conflict with the realism of our common-sense beliefs. Berkeley is always elaborately anxious to persuade us that he is in agreement with the vulgar', but neither he nor any of his interpreters or successors has succeeded in convincing the world that this is really the case.

The Kantian theory is in some respects a return to the position of Locke. There are, of course, too many strands in Kant's doctrine to admit of its being presented as a consistent whole; but if we take it as it originally shaped itself in his own mind, we find a strong reassertion of the reference in knowledge to real things. This is at once an initial assumption and, in the face of misunderstanding and challenge, an explicit polemic against subjective idealism of the Berkeleian stamp. Kant resembles Locke also in starting with the acceptance of the representative theory of knowledge, the view, that is to say, that we are primarily limited to a knowledge of our own states. In his own words, we know 'only the mode in which our senses are affected by an unknown something. As Hutchison Stirling puts it, the scratch only knows itself; it knows nothing of the thorn. But whereas Locke applied this causal method of interpretation only to the secondary qualities, the primary qualities are also treated by Kant as subjective for a different reason, seeing that he regards space, and consequently the geometrical or space-filling qualities of bodies, as a contribution of the mind in the act of knowing. But if both primary and

1 Prolegomena, section 32. 'It is incomprehensible', he explains elsewhere (Prolegomena, section 9), 'how the perception of a present object should give me a knowledge of that object as it is in itself, seeing that its properties cannot migrate or wander over (hinüberwandern) into my presentative faculty.'

2 Textbook to Kant, p. 353.

VI

KANT'S PHENOMENALISM

119

secondary qualities are thus subjective constructions, the real object which we set out to know remains on the farther side of knowledge as an unattainable Beyond the abstraction of an unknowable thing-in-itself. This is the aspect of the Kantian theory of knowledge which made his doctrine one of the fountain-heads of modern agnosticism. In consequence of our ignorance of this real background, our knowledge is throughout a knowledge only of phenomena. The world of experience, whether of ordinary life or as science builds it up, is either a quasi-Berkeleian world of sense-ideas, connected together by the rational bonds of the categories instead of by the associational forces of custom; or it is the distorted vision of a reality, the fact of whose existence is an immediate certainty present in all our experience, but whose nature that experience is essentially impotent to reveal. Reality on this view is the ultimate subject of predication, but all our predicates only draw more systematically round us the veil of our own subjectivity.

Popular philosophy may be said to oscillate between an agnostic relativism based on such considerations, and a semiLockian view apparently sanctioned by the teaching of physical science and physiological psychology. We come back in such thinking to the old distinction between the primary qualities, as constituting the real nature of the objective fact, and the secondary, as subjective effects dependent upon the specific constitution of our organs of sense and nervous structure generally. We return, in short, to the conception of the physical scheme of moving particles or ethereal vibrations of varying amplitudes and speeds as the self-subsisting world, and all the rest as passing appearances to finite subjects. But this is practically to adopt the fundamental presupposition of materialism.

The crux of the philosophical question thus becomes the objectivity of the secondary qualities-whether, or in what

cess.

sense, they are to be taken as objective determinations of reality. In one sense, of course, every one would admit their objectivity, in so far as they have in each case their physical counterpart, in the shape of some specific arrangement of molecules or some specific form of motion. But, according to the popular scientific view which we are considering, that molecular mechanism gives us the truth of nature. It is nature as an objective system; whereas our translation of the mechanism into terms of sensation is a subjective proThe results of that process may be of much interest to us, because of the feeling-tone of the secondary qualities and their intimate connexion with the higher emotional life; but they are not, as such—as colour, for example, or as sound-predicable of nature in the same way in which the physical properties are. There is a fine chapter in Lotze's Mikrokosmos,1 in which he enters an eloquent protest against the stereotyped error of supposing that we come nearer the truth of reality when we abstract in this way from the conditions under which it is revealed to us-when we seek that truth not in the appearance of the world as it offers itself to the knowing mind, but in the stage-mechanism which effectuates this result. Instead of setting up the external as the goal to which all the efforts of our sensation are to be directed, why should we not rather look upon the sensuous splendour of light and sound as the end which all these dispositions of the external world, whose obscurity we deplore, are designed to realize? What pleases us in a drama that we see developed before us on the stage is the poetical Idea and its inherent beauty; no one would expect to enhance this enjoyment or discern a profounder truth if he could indulge in an examination of the machinery that effects the changes of scenery and illumination. . The course of the universe is such a drama; its essential truth is the meaning set forth so as to be intelligible to the spirit. The other in

1 Book III, chap. iv, 'Life in Matter'.

1