[Footnote B: _Death in the Desert_.]
man takes, and rightly takes, the title of being "First, last, and best
of things."

"Since if man prove the sole existent thing
Where these combine, whatever their degree,
However weak the might or will or love,
So they be found there, put in evidence--
He is as surely higher in the scale
Than any might with neither love nor will,
As life, apparent in the poorest midge,
Is marvellous beyond dead Atlas' self,
Given to the nobler midge for resting-place!
Thus, man proves best and highest--God, in fine."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Death in the Desert_.]

To any one capable of spiritually discerning things, there can be no
difficulty in regarding goodness, however limited and mated with
weakness, as infinitely above all natural power. Divinity will be known
to consist, not in any senseless might, however majestic and miraculous,
but in moral or spiritual perfection. If God were indifferent to the
evil of the world, acquiesced in it without reason, and let it ripen
into all manner of wretchedness, then man, in condemning the world,
though without power to remove the least of its miseries, would be
higher than God. But we have still to account for the possibility of
man's assuming an attitude implied in the consciousness that, while he
is without power, God is without pity, and in the despair which springs
from his hate of evil. How comes it that human nature rises above its
origin, and is able--nay, obliged--to condemn the evil which God
permits? Is man finite in power, a mere implement of a mocking will so
far as knowledge goes, the plaything of remorseless forces, and yet
author and first source of something in himself which invests him with a
dignity that God Himself cannot share? Is the moral consciousness which,
by its very nature, must bear witness against the Power, although it
cannot arrest its pitiless course, or remove the least evil,

"Man's own work, his birth of heart and brain,
His native grace, no alien gift at all?"

We are thus caught between the horns of a final dilemma. Either the pity
and love, which make man revolt against all suffering, are man's own
creation; or else God, who made man's heart to love, has given to man
something higher than He owns Himself. But both of these alternatives
are impossible.

"Here's the touch that breaks the bubble."

The first alternative is impossible, because man is by definition
powerless, a mere link in the endless chain of causes, incapable of
changing the least part of the scheme of things which he condemns, and
therefore much more unable to initiate, or to bring into a loveless
world abandoned to blind power, the noble might of love.

"Will of man create?
No more than this my hand, which strewed the beans
Produced them also from its finger-tips."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

All that man is and has is a mere loan; his love no less than his finite
intellect and limited power, has had its origin elsewhere.

"Back goes creation to its source, source prime
And ultimate, the single and the sole."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

The argument ends by bringing us back

"To the starting-point,--
Man's impotency, God's omnipotence,
These stop my answer."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

I shall not pause at present to examine the value of this new form of
the old argument, "_Ex contingentia mundi_." But I may point out in
passing, that the reference of human love to a divine creative source is
accomplished by means of the idea of cause, one of the categories of the
thought which Browning has aspersed. And it is a little difficult to
show why, if we are constrained to doubt our thought, when by the aid of
causality it establishes a connection between finite and finite, we
should regard it as worthy of trust when it connects the finite and the
infinite. In fact, it is all too evident that the poet assumes or denies
the possibility of knowledge, according as it helps or hinders his
ethical doctrine.

But, if we grant the ascent from the finite to the infinite and regard
man's love as a divine gift--which it may well be although the poet's
argument is invalid--then a new light is thrown upon the being who gave
man this power to love. The "necessity," "the mere power," which alone
could be discerned by observation of the irresistible movement of the
world's events, acquires a new character. Prior to this discovery of
love in man as the work of God--

"Head praises, but heart refrains
From loving's acknowledgment.
Whole losses outweigh half-gains:
Earth's good is with evil blent:
Good struggles but evil reigns."[A]

[Footnote A: _Reverie_--_Asolando_.]

But love in man is a suggestion of a love without; a proof, in fact,
that God is love, for man's love is God's love in man. The source of the
pity that man shows, and of the apparent evils in the world which excite
it, is the same. The power which called man into being, itself rises up
in man against the wrongs in the world. The voice of the moral
consciousness, approving the good, condemning evil, and striving to
annul it, is the voice of God, and has, therefore, supreme authority. We
do wrong, therefore, in thinking that it is the weakness of man which is
matched against the might of evil in the world, and that we are fighting
a losing battle. It is an incomplete, abstract, untrue view of the facts
of life which puts God as irresistible Power in the outer world, and
forgets that the same irresistible Power works, under the higher form of
love, in the human heart.

"Is not God now i' the world His power first made?
Is not His love at issue still with sin,
Visibly when a wrong is done on earth?
Love, wrong, and pain, what see I else around?"[B]

[Footnote B: _A Death in the Desert_.]

In this way, therefore, the poet argues back from the moral
consciousness of man to the goodness of God. And he finds the ultimate
proof of this goodness in the very pessimism and scepticism and despair,
that come with the view of the apparently infinite waste in the world
and the endless miseries of humanity. The source of this despair,
namely, the recognition of evil and wrong, is just the Godhood in man.
There is no way of accounting for the fact that "Man hates what is and
loves what should be," except by "blending the quality of man with the
quality of God." And "the quality of God" is the fundamental fact in
man's history. Love is the last reality the poet always reaches. Beneath
the pessimism is love: without love of the good there were no
recognition of evil, no condemnation of it, and no despair.

But the difficulty still remains as to the permission of evil, even
though it should prove in the end to be merely apparent.

"Wherefore should any evil hap to man--
From ache of flesh to agony of soul--
Since God's All-mercy mates All-potency?
Nay, why permits He evil to Himself--
Man's sin, accounted such? Suppose a world
Purged of all pain, with fit inhabitant--
Man pure of evil in thought, word, and deed--
Were it not well? Then, wherefore otherwise?"[A]

[Footnote A: _Mihrab Shah_.]

The poet finds an answer to this difficulty in the very nature of moral
goodness, which, as we have seen, he regards as a progressive
realization of an infinitely high ideal. The demand for a world purged
of all pain and sin is really, he teaches us, a demand for a sphere
where

"Time brings
No hope, no fear: as to-day, shall be
To-morrow: advance or retreat need we
At our stand-still through eternity?"[A]

[Footnote A: _Rephan_--_Asolando_.]

What were there to "bless or curse, in such a uniform universe,"

"Where weak and strong,
The wise and the foolish, right and wrong,
Are merged alike in a neutral Best."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

There is a better way of life, thinks Browning, than such a state of
stagnation.

"Why should I speak? You divine the test.
When the trouble grew in my pregnant breast
A voice said, So would'st thou strive, not rest,

"Burn and not smoulder, win by worth,
Not rest content with a wealth that's dearth,
Thou art past Rephan, thy place be Earth."[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]

The discontent of man, the consciousness of sin, evil, pain, is a symbol
of promotion. The peace of the state of nature has been broken for him;
and, although the first consequence be

"Brow-furrowed old age, youth's hollow cheek,--
Diseased in the body, sick in soul,
Pinched poverty, satiate wealth,--your whole
Array of despairs,"[D]

[Footnote D: _Ibid_.]

still, without them, the best is impossible. They are the conditions of
the moral life, which is essentially progressive. They are the
consequences of the fact that man has been "startled up"

"by an Infinite
Discovered above and below me--height
And depth alike to attract my flight,

"Repel my descent: by hate taught love.
Oh, gain were indeed to see above
Supremacy ever--to move, remove,

"Not reach--aspire yet never attain
To the object aimed at."[A]

[Footnote A: _Rephan_--_Asolando_.]

He who places rest above effort, Rephan above the earth, places a
natural good above a moral good, stagnation above progress. The demand
for the absolute extinction of evil betrays ignorance of the nature of
the highest good. For right and wrong are relative. "Type need
antitype." The fact that goodness is best, and that goodness is not a
stagnant state but a progress, a gradual realization, though never
complete, of an infinite ideal, of the perfection of God by a finite
being, necessarily implies the consciousness of sin and evil. As a moral
agent man must set what should be above what is. If he is to aspire and
attain, the actual present must seem to him inadequate, imperfect,
wrong, a state to be abolished in favour of a better. And therefore it
follows that

"Though wrong were right
Could we but know--still wrong must needs seem wrong
To do right's service, prove men weak or strong,
Choosers of evil or good."[B]

[Footnote B: _Francis Furini_.]

The apparent existence of evil is the condition of goodness. And yet it
must only be apparent. For if evil be regarded as veritably evil, it
must remain so for all that man can do; he cannot annihilate any fact
nor change its nature, and all effort would, therefore, be futile. And,
on the other hand, if evil were known as unreal, then there were no need
of moral effort, no quarrel with the present and therefore no
aspiration, and no achievement. That which is man's highest and
best,--namely, a moral life which is a progress--would thus be
impossible, and his existence would be bereft of all meaning and
purpose. And if the highest is impossible then all is wrong, "the goal
being a ruin, so is all the rest."

The hypothesis of the moral life as progressive is essential to
Browning.

But if this hypothesis be granted, then all difficulties disappear. The
conception of the endless acquirement of goodness at once postulates the
consciousness of evil, and the consciousness of it as existing in order
to be overcome. Hence the consciousness of it as illusion comes nearest
to the truth. And such a conception is essentially implied by the idea
of morality. To speculative reason, however, it is impossible, as the
poet believes, that evil should thus be at the same time regarded as
both real and unreal. Knowledge leads to despair on every side; for,
whether it takes the evil in the world as seeming or actual, it
stultifies effort, and proves that moral progress, which is best of all
things, is impossible. But the moral consciousness derives its vitality
from this contradiction. It is the meeting-point and conflict of actual
and ideal; and its testimony is indisputable, however inconsistent it
may be with that of knowledge. Acknowledging absolute ignorance of the
outer world, the poet has still a retreat within himself, safe from all
doubt. He has in his own inner experience irrefragable proof

"How things outside, fact or feigning, teach
What good is and what evil--just the same,
Be feigning or be fact the teacher."[A]

[Footnote A: _Francis Furini_.]

The consciousness of being taught goodness by interaction with the
outside unknown is sufficient; it is "a point of vantage" whence he will
not be moved by any contradictions that the intellect may conjure up
against it. And this process of learning goodness, this gradual
realization by man of an ideal infinitely high and absolute in worth,
throws back a light which illumines all the pain and strife and despair,
and shows them all to be steps in the endless "love-way." The
consciousness of evil is thus at once the effect and the condition of
goodness. The unrealized, though ever-realizing good, which brings
despair, is the best fact in man's history; and it should rightly bring,
not despair, but endless joy.




CHAPTER IX.

A CRITICISM OF BROWNING'S VIEW OF THE FAILURE OF KNOWLEDGE.


"Der Mensch, da er Geist ist, darf und soll sich selbst
des hoechsten wuerdig achten, von der Groesse und Macht
seines Geistes kann er nicht gross genug denken; und mit
diesem Glauben wird nichts so sproede und hart seyn, das
sich ihm nicht eroeffnete. Das zuerst verborgene und
verschlossene Wesen des Universums hat keine Kraft, die
dem Muthe des Erkennens Widerstand leisten koennte: es muss
sich vor ihm aufthun, und seinen Reichthum und seine
Tiefen ihm vor Augen legen und zum Genusse geben."[A]

[Footnote A: _Hegel's Inaugural Address at Heidelberg_.]

Before entering upon a criticism of Browning's theory, as represented in
the last chapter, it may be well to give a brief summary of it.

The most interesting feature of Browning's proof of his optimistic faith
is his appeal from the intelligence to the moral consciousness. To show
theoretically that evil is merely phenomenal is, in his view, both
impossible and undesirable. It is impossible, because the human
intellect is incapable of knowing anything as it really is, or of
pronouncing upon the ultimate nature of any phenomenon. It is
undesirable, because a theoretical proof of the evanescence of evil
would itself give rise to the greatest of all evils. The best thing in
the world is moral character. Man exists in order to grow better, and
the world exists in order to help him. But moral growth is possible only
through conflict against evil, or what seems to be evil; hence, to
disprove the existence of evil would be to take away the possibility of
learning goodness, to stultify all human effort, and to deprive the
world of its meaning.

But, if an optimistic doctrine cannot be reached by way of speculative
thought, if the intellect of man cannot see the good in things evil, his
moral consciousness guarantees that all is for the best, and that "the
good is all in all." For, in distinguishing between good and evil, the
moral consciousness sets up an ideal over against the actual. It
conceives of a scheme of goodness which is not realized in the world,
and it condemns the world as it is. Man, as moral being, is so
constituted that he cannot but regard the evil in the world as something
to be annulled. If he had only the power, there would be no pain, no
sorrow, no weakness, no failure, no death. Is man, then, better than the
Power which made the world and let woe gain entrance into it? No!
answers the poet; for man himself is part of that world and the product
of that Power. The Power that made the world also made the moral
consciousness which condemns the world; if it is the source of the evil
in the world, it is also the source of that love in man, which, by
self-expenditure, seeks to remedy it. If the external world is merely an
expression of a remorseless Power, whence comes the love which is the
principle of the moral life in man? The same Power brings the antidote
as well as the bane. And, further, the bane exists for the sake of the
antidote, the wrong for the sake of the remedy. The evil in the world is
means to a higher good, and the only means possible; for it calls into
activity the divine element in man, and thereby contributes to its
realization in his character. It gives the necessary opportunity for the
exercise of love.

Hence, evil cannot be regarded as ultimately real. It is real only as a
stage in growth, as means to an end; and the means necessarily perishes,
or is absorbed in, the attainment of the end. It has no significance
except by reference to that end. From this point of view, evil is the
resistance which makes progress possible, the negative which gives
meaning to the positive, the darkness that makes day beautiful. This
must not, however, be taken to mean that evil is nothing. It is
resistance; it is negative; it does oppose the good; although its
opposition is finally overcome. If it did not, if evil were unreal,
there would be no possibility of calling forth the moral potency of man,
and the moral life would be a figment. But these two conditions of the
moral life--on the one hand, that the evil of the world must be capable
of being overcome and is there for the purpose of being overcome, and
that it is unreal except as a means to the good; and, on the other hand,
that evil must be actually opposed to the good, if the good is to have
any meaning,--cannot, Browning thinks, be reconciled with each other. It
is manifest that the intellect of man cannot, at the same time, regard
evil as both real and unreal. It must assert the one and deny the other;
or else we must regard its testimony as altogether untrustworthy. But
the first alternative is destructive of the moral consciousness. Moral
life is alike impossible whether we deny or assert the real existence of
evil. The latter alternative stultifies knowledge, and leaves all the
deeper concerns of life--the existence of good and evil, the reality of
the distinction between them, the existence of God, the moral governance
of the world, the destiny of man--in a state of absolute uncertainty. We
must reject the testimony either of the heart or of the head.

Browning, as we have seen, unhesitatingly adopts the latter alternative.
He remains loyal to the deliverances of his moral consciousness and
accepts as equally valid, beliefs which the intellect finds to be
self-contradictory: holding that knowledge on such matters is
impossible. And he rejects this knowledge, not only because our thoughts
are self-contradictory in themselves, but because the failure of a
speculative solution of these problems is necessary to morality. Clear,
convincing, demonstrative knowledge would destroy morality; and the fact
that the power to attain such knowledge has been withheld from us is to
be regarded rather as an indication of the beneficence of God, who has
not held even ignorance to be too great a price for man to pay for
goodness.

Knowledge is not the fit atmosphere for morality. It is faith and not
reason, hope and trust but not certainty, that lend vigour to the good
life. We may believe, and rejoice in the belief, that the absolute good
is fulfilling itself in all things, and that even the miseries of life
are really its refracted rays--the light that gains in splendour by
being broken. But we must not, and, indeed, cannot ascend from faith to
knowledge. The heart may trust, and must trust, if it faithfully listens
to its own natural voice; but reason must not demonstrate. Ignorance on
the side of intellect, faith on the side of the emotions; distrust of
knowledge, absolute confidence in love; such is the condition of man's
highest welfare: it is only thus that the purpose of his life, and of
the world which is his instrument, can be achieved.

No final estimate of the value of this theory of morals and religion can
be made, without examining its philosophical presuppositions. Nor is
such an examination in any way unfair; for it is obvious that Browning
explicitly offers us a philosophical doctrine. He appeals to argument
and not to artistic intuition; he offers a definite theory to which he
claims attention, not on account of any poetic beauty that may lie
within it, but on the ground that it is a true exposition of the moral
nature of man. Kant's _Metaphysic of Ethics_ is not more metaphysical in
intention than the poet's later utterances on the problems of morality.
In _La Saisiaz_, in _Ferishtah's Fancies_, in the _Parleyings_, and,
though less explicitly, in _Asolando_, _Fifine at the Fair_, and _Red
Cotton Nightcap Country_, Browning definitely states, and endeavours to
demonstrate a theory of knowledge, a theory of the relation of knowledge
to morality, and a theory of the nature of evil; and he discusses the
arguments for the immortality of the soul. In these poems his artistic
instinct avails him, not as in his earlier ones, for the discovery of
truth by way of intuition, but for the adornment of doctrines already
derived from a metaphysical repository. His art is no longer free, no
longer its own end, but coerced into an alien service. It has become
illustrative and argumentative, and in being made to subserve
speculative purposes, it has ceased to be creative. Browning has
appealed to philosophy, and philosophy must try his cause.

Such, then, is Browning's theory; and I need make no further apology for
discussing at some length the validity of the division which it involves
between the intellectual and the moral life of man. Is it possible to
combine the weakness of man's intelligence with the strength of his
moral and religious life, and to find in the former the condition of the
latter? Does human knowledge fail, as the poet considers it to fail? Is
the intelligence of man absolutely incapable of arriving at knowledge of
things as they are? If it does, if man cannot know the truth, can he
attain goodness? These are the questions that must now be answered.

It is one of the characteristics of recent thought that it distrusts its
own activity: the ancient philosophical "Scepticism" has been revived
and strengthened. Side by side with the sense of the triumphant progress
of natural science, there is a conviction, shared even by scientific
investigators themselves, as well as by religious teachers and by many
students of philosophy, that our knowledge has only limited and relative
value, and that it always stops short of the true nature of things. The
reason of this general conviction lies in the fact that thought has
become aware of its own activity; men realize more clearly than they did
in former times that the apparent constitution of things depends
directly on the character of the intelligence which apprehends them.

This relativity of things to thought has, not unnaturally, suggested the
idea that the objects of our knowledge are different from objects as
they are. "That the real nature of things is very different from what we
make of them, that thought and thing are divorced, that there is a
fundamental antithesis between them," is, as Hegel said, "the hinge on
which modern philosophy turns." Educated opinion in our day has lost its
naive trust in itself. "The natural belief of man, it is true, ever
gives the lie" to the doctrine that we do not know things. "In common
life," adds Hegel, "we reflect without particularly noting that this is
the process of arriving at the truth, and we think without hesitation
and in the firm belief that thought coincides with things."[A] But, as
soon as attention is directed to the process of thinking, and to the way
in which the process affects our consciousness of the object, it is at
once concluded that thought will never reach reality, that things are
not given to us as they are, but distorted by the medium of sense and
our intelligence, through which they pass. The doctrine of the
relativity of knowledge is thus very generally regarded as equivalent to
the doctrine that there is no true knowledge whatsoever. We know only
phenomena, or appearances; and it is these, and not veritable facts,
that we systematize into sciences. "We can arrange the appearances--the
shadows of our cave--and that, for the practical purposes of the cave,
is all that we require."[B] Not even "earth's least atom" can ever be
known to us as it really is; it is for us, at the best,

[Footnote A: Wallace's _Translation of Hegel's Logic_, p. 36.]

[Footnote B: Caird's _Comte_.]

"An atom with some certain properties
Known about, thought of as occasion needs."[C]

[Footnote C: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

In this general distrust of knowledge, however, there are, as might be
expected, many different degrees. Its origin in modern times was, no
doubt, the doctrine of Kant. "This divorce of thing and thought," says
Hegel, "is mainly the work of the critical philosophy and runs counter
to the conviction of all previous ages." And the completeness of the
divorce corresponds, with tolerable accuracy, to the degree in which the
critical philosophy has been understood; for Kant's writings, like those
of all great thinkers, are capable of many interpretations, varying in
depth with the intelligence of the interpreters.

The most common and general form of this view of the limitation of the
human intelligence is that which places the objects of religious faith
beyond the reach of human knowledge. We find traces of it in much of the
popular theology of our day. The great facts of religion are often
spoken of as lying in an extra-natural sphere, beyond experience, into
which men cannot enter by the native right of reason. It is asserted
that the finite cannot know the infinite, that the nature of God is
unknowable--except by means of a supernatural interference, which gives
to men a new power of spiritual discernment, and "reveals" to them
things which are "above reason," although not contrary to it. The
theologian often shields certain of his doctrines from criticism, on the
ground, as he contends, that there are facts which we must believe, but
which it would be presumptuous for us to pretend to understand or to
demonstrate. They are the proper objects of "faith."

But this view of the weakness of the intelligence when applied to
supersensuous facts, is held along with an undisturbed conviction of the
validity of our knowledge of ordinary objects. It is believed, in a
word, that there are two kinds of realities,--natural and supernatural;
and that the former is knowable and the latter not.

It requires, however, no great degree of intellectual acumen to discover
that this denial of the validity of our knowledge of these matters
involves its denial in all its applications. The ordinary knowledge of
natural objects, which we begin by regarding as valid, or, rather, whose
validity is taken for granted without being questioned, depends upon our
ideas of these supersensible objects. In other words, those fundamental
difficulties which pious opinion discovers in the region of theology,
and which, as is thought, fling the human intellect back upon itself
into a consciousness of frailty and finitude, are found to lurk beneath
our ordinary knowledge. Whenever, for instance, we endeavour to know any
object, we find that we are led back along the line of its conditions to
that which unconditionally determines it. For we cannot find the reason
for a particular object in a particular object. We are driven back
endlessly from one to another along the chain of causes; and we can
neither discover the first link nor do without it. The first link must
be a cause of itself, and experience yields none such. Such a cause
would be the unconditioned, and the unconditioned we cannot know. The
final result of thinking is thus to lead us to an unknown; and, in
consequence, all our seeming knowledge is seen to have no intelligible
basis, and, therefore, to be merely hypothetical. If we cannot know God,
we cannot know anything.

This view is held by the Positivists, and the most popular English
exponent of it is, perhaps, Mr. Herbert Spencer. Its characteristic is
its repudition of both theology and metaphysics as pseudo-sciences, and
its high esteem for science. That esteem is not disturbed by the
confession that "noumenal causes,"--that is, the actual reality of
things,--are unknown; for we can still lay claim to valid knowledge of
the laws of phenomena. Having acknowledged that natural things as known
are merely phenomena, positivism treats them in all respects as if they
were realities; and it rejoices in the triumphant progress of the
natural sciences as if it were a veritable growth of knowledge. It does
not take to heart the phenomenal nature of known objects. But, having
paid its formal compliments to the doctrine of the relativity of all
knowledge, it neglects it altogether.

Those who understand Kant better carry his scepticism further, and they
complete the divorce between man's knowledge and reality. The process of
knowing, they hold, instead of leading us towards facts, as it was so
long supposed to do, takes us away from them: _i.e._, if either
"towards" or "away from" can have any meaning when applied to two realms
which are absolutely severed from one another. Knowledge is always
concerned with the relations between things; with their likeness, or
unlikeness, their laws, or connections; but these are universals, and
things are individuals. Science knows the laws of things, but not the
things; it reveals how one object affects another, how it is connected
with it; but what are the things themselves, which are connected, it
does not know. The laws are mere forms of thought, "bloodless
categories," and not facts. They may somehow be regarded as explaining
facts, but they must not be identified with the facts. Knowledge is the
sphere of man's thoughts, and is made up of ideas; real things are in
another sphere, which man's thoughts cannot reach. We must distinguish
more clearly than has hitherto been done, between logic as the science
of knowledge, and metaphysics as a science which pretends to reveal the
real nature of things. In a word, we can know thoughts or universals,
but not things or particular existences. "When existence is in question
it is the individual, not the universal, that is real; and the real
individual is not a composite of species and accidents, but is
individual to the inmost fibre of its being." Each object keeps its own
real being to itself. Its inmost secret, its reality, is something that
cannot appear in knowledge. We can only know its manifestations; but
these manifestations are not its reality, nor connected with it. These
belong to the sphere of knowledge, they are parts in a system of
abstract thoughts; they do not exist in that system, or no-system, of
individual realities, each of which, in its veritable being, is itself
only, and connected with nought beside.

Now, this view of the absolute impossibility of knowing any reality, on
account of the fundamental difference between things and our thoughts
about things, contains a better promise of a true view both of reality
and of knowledge, than any of the previously mentioned half-hearted
theories. It forces us explicitly either to regard every effort to know
as futile, or else to regard it as futile _on this theory of it_. In
other words, we must either give up knowledge or else give up the
account of knowledge advanced by these philosophers. Hitherto, however,
every philosophy that has set itself against the possibility of the
knowledge of reality has had to give way. It has failed to shake the
faith of mankind in its own intellectual endowment, or to arrest, even
for a moment, the attempt by thinking to know things as they are. The
view held by Berkeley, that knowledge is merely subjective, because the
essence of things consists in their being perceived by the individual,
and that they are nothing but his ideas, was refuted by Kant, when he
showed that the very illusion of seeming knowledge was impossible on
that theory. And this later view, which represents knowledge as merely
subjective, on the ground that it is the product of the activity of the
thought of mankind, working according to universal laws, is capable of
being refuted in the same manner. The only difference between the
Berkeleian and this modern speculative theory is that, on the former
view, each individual constructed his own subjective entities or
illusions; while, on the latter, all men, by reason of the universality
of the laws of thought governing their minds, create the same illusion,
the same subjective scheme of ideas. Instead of each having his own
private unreality, as the product of his perceiving activity, they have
all the same, or at least a similar, phantom-world of ideas, as the
result of their thinking. But, in both cases alike, the reality of the
world without is out of reach, and knowledge is a purely subjective
apprehension of a world within. Thoughts are quite different from
things, and no effort of human reason can reveal any community between
them.

Now, there are certain difficulties which, so far as I know, those who
hold this view have scarcely attempted to meet. The first of these lies
in the obvious fact, that all men at all times consider that this very
process of thinking, which the theory condemns as futile, is the only
way we have of finding out what the reality of things is. Why do we
reflect and think, except in order to pass beyond the illusions of
sensuous appearances to the knowledge of things as they are? Nay, why do
these philosophers themselves reflect, when reflection, instead of
leading to truth, which is knowledge of reality, leads only to ideas,
which, being universal, cannot represent the realities that are said to
be "individual."

The second is, that the knowledge of "the laws" of things gives to us
practical command over them; although, according to this view, laws are
not things, nor any part of the reality of things, nor even true
representations of things. Our authority over things seems to grow _pari
passu_ with our knowledge. The natural sciences seem to prove by their
practical efficiency, that they are not building up a world of
apparitions, like the real world; but gradually getting inside nature,
learning more and more to wield her powers, and to make them the
instruments of the purposes of man, and the means of his welfare. To
common-sense,--which frequently "divines" truths that it cannot prove,
and, like ballast in a ship, has often given steadiness to human
progress although it is only a dead weight,--the assertion that man
knows nothing is as incredible as that he knows all things. If it is
replied, that the "things" which we seem to dominate by the means of
knowledge are themselves only phenomena, the question arises, what then
are the real things to which they are opposed? What right has any
philosophy to say that there is any reality which no one can in any
sense know? The knowledge that such reality is, is surely a relation
between that reality and consciousness, and, if so, the assertion of an
unknowable reality is self-contradictory. For the conception of it is
the conception of something that is, and at the same time is not, out of
relation to consciousness.

To say what kind of thing reality is, is a still more remarkable feat,
if reality is unknowable. Reality, being beyond knowledge, why is it
called particular or individual, rather than universal? How is it known
that the true being of things is different from ideas? Surely both of
the terms must be regarded as known to some extent, if they are called
like or unlike, contrasted or compared, opposed or identified.

But, lastly, this theory has to account for the fact that it constitutes
what is not only unreal, but impossible, into the criterion of what is
actual. If knowledge of reality is altogether different from human
knowledge, how does it come to be its criterion? That knowledge is
inadequate or imperfect can be known, only by contrasting it with its
own proper ideal, whatever that may be. A criticism by reference to a
foreign or irrelevant criterion, or the condemnation of a theory as
imperfect because it does not realize an impossible end, is
unreasonable. All true criticism of an object implies a reference to a
more perfect state of itself.

We must, then, regard the knowledge of objects as they are, which is
opposed to human knowledge, as, only a completer and fuller form of that
knowledge; or else we must cease to contrast it with our human
knowledge, as valid with invalid, true with phenomenal. Either knowledge
of reality is complete knowledge, or else it is a chimera. And, in
either case, the sharp distinction between the real and the phenomenal
vanishes; and what remains, is not a reality outside of consciousness,
or different from ideas, but a reality related to consciousness, or, in
other words, a knowable reality. "The distinction of objects into
phenomena and noumena, _i.e._, into things that for us exist, and things
that for us do not exist, is an Irish bull in philosophy," said Heine.
To speak of reality as unknowable, or to speak of anything as
unknowable, is to utter a direct self-contradiction; it is to negate in
the predicate what is asserted in the subject. It is a still more
strange perversion to erect this knowable emptiness into a criterion of
knowledge, and to call the latter phenomenal by reference to it.

These difficulties are so fundamental and so obvious, that the theory of
the phenomenal nature of human knowledge, which, being interpreted,
means that we know nothing, could scarcely maintain its hold, were it
not confused with another fact of human experience, that is apparently
inconsistent with the doctrine that man can know the truth. Side by side
with the faith of ordinary consciousness, that in order to know anything
we must think, or, in other words, that knowledge shows us what things
really are, there is a conviction, strengthened by constant experience,
that we never know things fully. Every investigation into the nature of
an object soon brings us to an enigma, a something more we do not know.
Failing to know this something more, we generally consider that we have
fallen short of reaching the reality of the object. We recognize, as it
has been expressed, that we have been brought to a stand, and we
therefore conclude that we are also brought to the end. We arrive at
what we do not know, and we pronounce that unknown to be unknowable;
that is, we regard it as something different in nature from what we do
know. So far as I can see, the attitude of ordinary thought in regard to
this matter might be fairly represented by saying, that it always begins
by considering objects as capable of being known in their reality, or as
they are, and that experience always proves the attempt to know them as
they are to be a failure. The effort is continued although failure is
the result, and even although that failure be exaggerated and
universalized into that despair of knowledge which we have described. We
are thus confronted with what seems to be a contradiction; a trust and
distrust in knowledge. It can only be solved by doing full justice to
both of the conflicting elements; and then, if possible, by showing that
they are elements, and not the complete, concrete fact, except when held
together.

From one point of view, it is undeniable that in every object of
perception, we come upon problems that we cannot solve. Science at its
best, and even when dealing with the simplest of things, is forced to