31). "As a matter of fact, there is no such thing as this sensation or appearance represented by the judgment, 'I have a feeling'" (p. 34). "The first act of the perceptive consciousness, again, does not produce a judgment of the type, 'I have a feeling,' 'I see an appearance of white,' but of the type, 'There is a white thing'" (p. 36). "Knowledge arises, then, from a feeling in which we self-conscious subjects, as lookers on, may see the presence of a 'subject' of the feeling consciousness, and of an 'object' by which the feeling consciousness is modified; but the feeling, as felt, is neither subjective nor objective. And knowledge itself begins when a perception arises from this feeling, in which the subject and object, latent in feeling, have started into distinction from one another" (p. 37). This is the author's answer to the question, Can we know reality? "There is no bar to our knowledge of reality in the fact that knowledge takes its birth from a state of consciousness in which subject and object, mind and reality, are indistinguishably one; nor yet in the fact that the first step in the development of knowledge sets them face to face with one another as interdependent and correlative factors in experience" (p. 38). On this view, "the world we know resumes its place as real. We can start from experience as it stands. We are not forbidden to think that it is what it appears to be—the revelation of reality" (p. 39). What this reality is, is briefly suggested in the closing pages of the essay. "It is the task of philosophy to take the most typically real reality of experience, the intimate knowledge of personality, realized through the threefold faculty of personality itself, as the standard of our apprehension of experience as a whole" (p. 64). By reason of its extreme brevity, the present essay is calculated rather to whet than to satisfy the appetite of the sympathetic reader, who will look forward with considerable expectation to the further discussion of these problems which Mr. Richmond hopes soon to offer.
This work is a contribution to the æsthetics of morals. For the writer heroism is the type of all virtue, cowardice of all vice. In modern theories of ethics there is a contradiction between the one form of morality, obligation, and its manifold content; and it is as a means to the solution of that problem that the author offers this book. In the first part, which treats of the form of morality, the source of obligation is considered. This is not to be found in any heteronomous principle, either religious or metaphysical, nor yet in social compulsion. Nor does it arise from any such autonomous sources as feeling or a mysterious practical reason. The true autonomy is discovered in the theoretical reason, in the exercise of which the moral subject becomes conscious of himself and his limitations, and imposes upon himself a law.
