and indivisible, however much we may be in the habit of speaking of different kinds of 'truths,' because we have to content ourselves with very partial and one-sided statements, to which we give the name that properly belongs only to the fullness of perfect knowledge in which every part or aspect of reality is seen at once in relation to the whole, in which there can be no appearance of a gap between thought cut off from reality and reality cut off from thought.[1] Such perfect knowledge is to us only an ideal; but it must be recognized as conditioning all sound logical theories, however much we provisionally adopt the metaphors (metaphors that soon get mixed) of ordinary speech about a parallelism between thought and things, about thought mirroring existence, etc.
To put these results together—a logic that takes itself seriously and deals, therefore, with the problem of epistemology, leaves us with, at least, the following principles as a starting-point for metaphysical speculation:
I. There can be no knowledge except for a conscious subject, which can hold together the different sensations, images, ideas, etc., in a unity and so make a cosmos, an orderly and intelligible system out of the primitive 'blur' of feeling. (I have said hardly anything on this point in the present article, because it is generally conceded as a truth, at least for epistemology.)
II. Subject and object are distinguished in knowledge: in knowledge we have got beyond the primitive 'blur' in which they are not yet differentiated. But the distinction cannot be an absolute one; else our very theory of knowledge makes knowledge impossible. The distinction is a distinction within the unity of knowledge (or of 'thought' or of 'experience'
- ↑ Prof. J. Watson, in his article in this Review, Vol. II, No. 5, has dealt so fully and clearly with theological difficulties to which Epistemological Realism leads that I feel it would be superfluous to say more on the subject. As an illustration of a very common way of speaking about 'truths,' I may refer to the Sunday-evening prayer of an old Scotchman, in which he said, "May the truths this day spoken, so far as agreeable to Thy Mind and Will, etc."—as if there were certain 'truths' that the Almighty did not accept, and might not like to have mentioned in public.
