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upon the background of the concept, of which it represents only the first stirrings in the individual mind.

I shall bring these differences to a point. Mr. Hobhouse says, "We maintain that apprehension is a distinct factor postulated as a condition by judgments of perception, and that its content is a distinct part within the more complex whole which judgment asserts" (p. 28). I have replied first that this merely reopens a controversy which ought by this time to be taken as closed; and, secondly, that it gives no logical rationale of the movement we call thought. I should therefore propose to amend the above statement by maintaining that the starting-point is not "a distinct part within the more complex whole which the judgment asserts," but an indeterminate complex within which judgment moves as the process whereby its contents are first resolved into relative simplicity and then reassimilated as parts or elements of a determinate whole.

1 Mr. Hobhouse himself, in his chapters on "Ideas" (chaps. vi. and vii.), seems so to take it.

I

II.

THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE.

PROPOSE to discuss three questions in this paper,

the first two very shortly, the third at greater length. First, under what form ought we to conceive of the goal or ideal of knowledge? Secondly, how does this ideal operate in actual experience? And thirdly, what is its relation to ultimate reality?

I.

What in general outline is the nature of the ideal which we set before ourselves in knowledge? In attempting an answer to this question I may begin by referring to the contents of the previous paper. I there tried to show that the beginnings of knowledge must be looked for in a concept or form of apprehension which, like the undifferentiated continuum of the psychologist, may be said to contain in itself the possibility of all differences, but to hold them as yet in solution, awaiting the distinguishing, crystallising action of the logical judgment to give them at once a separate place and coherent connexion in the whole. Following this suggestion, we may describe the end of knowledge as a concept or mode of apprehending the world in which, as in the developed organism, the processes of differentiation and integration have been brought to completion in a fully articulated system of coherent judgments.

This, if you like, is a metaphor, but it points to the two most important characteristics which logic must recognise as belonging to fully developed knowledge— all-inclusiveness and self-consistency. We seek in the first place to know all that is to be known about a thing—or about the world. The original subjectconcept becomes differentiated in a number of predicateconcepts. Or, to express the same thing in terms of judgment, the judgment which predicates mere existence of a something to be known is extended into a system of judgments which tell us what is to be known. about it. But, secondly, we seek to understand what we have learned, to connect one predicate-concept with another. Ordinary experience brings with it the conviction, not only of its own poverty as compared with the infinite riches of the world, but of its own inward discordancy as compared with a vision of harmony and ultimate transparency—a transparency which for logic must consist in the consistency and coherence of the judgments which we are forced to make upon reality as it comes before us in ordinary sense-perception and in the processes of scientific investigation. Knowledge may thus be said to aim in the first place at its own expansion. It seeks to embrace reality in all its parts or details. It aims in the second place at explanation. It seeks to understand the relation of the parts to one another, and to the whole to which they belong. Its ideal may thus be schematised as a whole of clear and distinct parts related to one another in such a way that the mind can pass from any one along the lines of judgment and inference to any other, with the result that the whole is seen to be reflected into every part, and every part to contain the whole.

Whether the world can ever thus be reduced to

complete transparency is a question with which we need not trouble ourselves at present; it is sufficient to note not only that all science proceeds upon the assumption that it can, but that those sciences which are most advanced, and which as "deductive" are commonly taken as the types of completeness and certainty, really do to a certain extent exhibit these characteristics. Thus geometry aims in the first place at exhausting and in the second place at proving the interconnexion of the properties of the figures with which it deals, and it would not be difficult to throw the knowledge we derive from it as to any particular figure, e.g. the triangle, into a form which would exhibit the properties of the figure as such and of each of the separate species of it (if it has species) as necessary deductions from its own nature and as thus inherently related to one another through their common relation to the whole whose properties they

are.

II.

Without stopping to dwell upon this, we may go on to notice in the second place the mode in which the ideal under these two aspects of all-embraciveness and complete consistency operates in actual experience.

The question deserves more careful consideration than I can here afford to give it, but I must not pass it wholly over. The answer in general is that it operates like any other ideal. The dynamical efficiency of an idea, that which transforms it from a mere idea in the mind into an end or an ideal, is the felt discord between it and the actually existing fact. In his little book on the Psychology of the Moral Self, Dr. Bosanquet

1 For fuller details see the excellent sections in HOBHOUSE's Theory of Knowledge, part iii. chap. vi. init.

has some observations on the question how our ideas can include not only facts but purposes, which may assist us here. He points out that they can become purposes by being recognised as only conditionally true. A purpose is always relative to actual facts; an ideal is always based upon some reality. It stands to that reality as an appercipient group (e.g. the group corresponding to a penknife) does to the actual presentation (e.g. the penknife in my desk). The ideal is only realised when the actual thing comes up to the idea of it. My penknife is rather a broken-down affair; until I have it cleaned up and sharpened my idea is only conditionally true. Facing the penknife as it is, there is the idea of what the penknife ought to be ready when the contrast becomes too painful to rise into an actual purpose to take it to the cutler or replace it with a new one. Before turning to the question before us we may notice that while the above mode of expression is undoubtedly the right one from the point of view of psychology, from the point of view of teleology we may prefer to reverse it. Here we have to recognise that the ideal is the truth of the actual. The source of dissatisfaction, and therefore of action, is that the actual is not true. It fails of truth and reality because it falls short of the features that the persistent idea or appercipient system contains. The reality of the knife is its suitability to its purpose; so far as it is unsuitable it fails to be a knife. In taking it to the cutler's I restore this reality to it.

Applying this to the ideal of knowledge, the actual fact here, of course, is a concept or group of concepts; the persistent idea is the idea of these concepts rendered internally harmonious in the manner we have described. This ideal asserts itself against the actual, forcing us

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