upon his head.’ But if that is a sufficient basis in politics, it can hardly be admitted to be so in the theory of knowledge. And when an idealist speaks of ‘the judgement by which we sustain the world,’ however adequate may be his explanation of such language, it is apt to excite a suspicion that his theories, if they were completely carried out, would lead to the individual being regarded as his own universe and his own God. This suspicion, perhaps as much as any other reason, is what drives many to accept some via media, in which the subject and the object are represented as in some way acting and reacting on each other—some such view as is implied in the metaphor of ‘impression by,’ or ‘contact with’ reality, and to substitute it for an organic conception of the relations between the mind and its object. Such a suspicion the idealist is bound to remove, if he expects his theories to be accepted; yet he must do so, of course, without compromising his fundamental conception of the relativity of the intelligible world to the intelligence.
Now, so far as this difficulty arises out of the Berkeleian theory that the mind has primarily to do only with its own ideas, it may be met by the considerations already suggested. As the consciousness of the self is correlative with the consciousness of the not-self, no conception of either can be satisfactory which does not recognize a principle of unity, which manifests itself in both, which underlies all their difference and opposition, and which must, therefore, be regarded as capable of reconciling them. When, therefore, we speak of the object as manifesting itself in, and to the subject, determining his perceptions, thoughts and desires, and when, on the other hand, we speak of the subject as constructing his world in knowledge, and making it in action the means of his own self-realization, we are using language that represents two aspects of the truth, which are apparently opposed, but each of which has a relative validity; and it is important that we should not allow either of these forms of expression to exclude the other. To say that the mind goes beyond itself to become conscious of the world, or to say that the object goes beyond itself to awake consciousness of itself in us, are two extreme ways of putting the fact of knowledge, which have opposite merits and opposite defects. And, in like manner, in regard to our practical life, to say that we are always determined by objects, or to say we are always determined by ourselves, is to utter half-truths. Neither of these statements is quite adequate; nor can we reach the whole truth merely by putting them together, and saying that we are partly determined from without and partly from within. For, if we accepted this reciprocal determination of
