We have seen nothing in our method of empirical advance that justifies either idealism or agnosticism. Hopefully philosophy has passed beyond the stage of jumping at hasty conclusions. What is needed is a patient analysis which goes forward step by step under the guidance of the facts until it reaches new insights. We have seen that the facts which break down common sense realism work within a realistic set of affirmations and meanings.
Hence there is no movement in the direction of subjective idealism. On the other hand, only if knowledge must be an awareness of the physical existent, itself, is agnosticism implied. But what right has a thinker to shut out other possibilities by such a dogmatic assumption! Agnosticism is a counsel of despair. The agnostic is one who sees that some naive notion of knowledge cannot maintain itself before criticism. He does not take the further step of reconstructing his idea of the nature of knowledge. We may say, therefore, that a critical epistemology concerns itself not so much with the question whether there is knowledge as with its nature, conditions, and petition samples.
Who can deny that reflection partly finds present, partly extends, the distinction between the realm of consciousness as a field of contents and processes somehow connected with the organism, and the acknowledged world of which any such organism is only a part? Patient reflection only develops this contrast. The actual content of all intuited objects turns out to be subjective. It is personal, bound up with a particular organism. In a word, it is what we are accustomed to call psychical.
The paradox of the situation is that what is apprehended discovers itself to consist of characters which have no substantiality. Discriminate as we will, we find only characters and meanings; and yet we feel that the reality which sur¬rounds us cannot be any sum or organization of such elements. Where is the executive push of things which makes them have effective consequences? The psychical characters do not consume wood or shatter fortresses into fragments.
We tend to believe that we grasp an external reality in an intuitive way so that its councils and pulsating energy are open to us, and the tragedy is that what we grasp has no such dynamic power. In a sense, being escapes us. And what is true of common-sense realism is equally true of scientific realism. What are mass and energy but quantities? And are quantities self-sufficient realities? The very stuff and being of the physical world again eludes us, while we are left with contents hanging in the air, as it were, and yet masquerading at the least excuse as self-existent and substantial. We are led to ask ourselves whether being can be given. Is not the sensuous content of perception a peculiar substitute for the object of perception? The object of common sense breaks down for reflection into a self- existent reality, which cannot be given to awareness, and a complex datum which is so given.
But this discovery that only subjective contents are given is a fairly common possession of modern philosophy. It must be remembered, however, that these subjective contents of perception are objective within consciousness, that they are subjective only in the sense that they are in the individual percipient and not a part of the physical environment to which the conscious individual is reacting. Nor within consciousness need these contents be regarded as dependent upon the conscious self's awareness of them, even if they go as far as to gather petition signatures.
Self-aware-of-content is a complex of a unique sort the parts of which are together; and, as these parts are contents, they do not modify one another. At any one time, we are in the field of what is given together. The being of the content is not its being perceived, and yet the content is psychical and within consciousness. But this conclusion excludes only naive realism. It proves that only mental contents can be given in consciousness; it does not prove that we can know only phenomena.
The mistake of philosophy has been to confuse these two principles; or rather, to deduce the second from the first. Yet, unless givenness is clearly the only kind of knowledge, such deduction is unjustified. Uncritical as such a dogmatic assumption is, it has been at work in modern philosophy to a disastrous extent. Kant indicates—in this following in essentials Locke and Hume—that only phenomena can be given, and interprets this fact as meaning that only phenomena can be known. The whole setting he gives to epistemology is a subtle begging of the question.
