Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/560

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544
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. III.

inner consciousness. From the point of view of Dualism, the object, as it is in itself, is indeed unknowable, for it the object in itself declines to tell us what its inner life is. If it would speak for itself, we should know something more about it, but it remains the stubbornly silent partner. Hence, we can only speak in common about it. Where we permanently agree, we suppose that we are touching the reality, not as it is for you or for me, but for us. And it is only as existent for us, who are by hypothesis external to one another, that the object shows any persuasive and verifiable indication of existing externally to both and to all of us. Thus, the 'things-in- themselves' appear to us, on this level, as unknowable, but the categories are deduced as true for 'phenomena.'

But, once again, if what is verifiable for us has thus to conform to what Kant called the categories of our experience, still, mind you, this conformity is to the laws of our experience as communicable and social, not as private and individual. And so it is that the principles of the 'determinateness of the real,' of the distinction of primary and secondary qualities, of the permanence of substance, yes, as I hold, of Causation, get all their phenomenal and relatively a priori validity. The principle of Causation, for instance, I hold to be expressive of the fact that only the describable and conceivably reproducible event can be socially verified, and can so be regarded as truly external, while you can regard an event as describable and reproducible only in case you conceive it as in definite relations to its temporally and spatially definable conditions. Hence, the reason for the stress that I laid in the opening portion of this paper upon the important consequences that follow from saying that what is verifiably real for us must be represented in my experience, not by what I feel, but by what I communicate to you for your verification.

You are aware that the world, as Dualism conceives it, is not acceptable to the philosophical Idealist. You are aware that I myself am an Idealist. You will see, then, that this whole conception of the external world as something divided from the verifying consciousness must appear to me an essen-