ESSAYS 299 



realm of spiritual substance. The causal link between the sensible object 

 and the idea aroused by it in the human mind is thus severed or annulled : 

 extension, figure or motion, he declares, cannot cause sensations.* 



This causal connection between perceived objects and mental percep- 

 tions of them frequently presents itself as the neck of representationalism 

 to its opponents. Sever it, deny that the mind responds to causal influ- 

 ences from outer reality by producing mental copies or symbolic represen- 

 tations of things, and the representationalistic plunge towards scepticism, 

 promoted by its insistence on the duality implied in the independent exis- 

 tence of physical things outside the mind and their representative exis- 

 tence within it, ceases to trouble thought. Lossky redistributes causality 

 differently from Berkeley : he does not, by banishing it from the external 

 world, support the opinion that one " idea " cannot be the cause of another ,2 

 which is the Berkleyan equivalent for a non-causal physical world. He 

 affirms that " every part of reality is so constituted that, if some aspects are 

 given, other aspects are necessarily conjoined therewith in organic connec- 

 tion " ; that " the explanation of the necessity involved in judgment will 

 be found in the necessity involved in reality itself, in the organic functional 

 relation between the various aspects of reality"; that there are necessary 

 connections between the elements of the world which are causal in form.^ 

 But, like Berkeley, he so conceives, or attempts to conceive, the process of per- 

 ception or knowing as to expel causal connection between known and knower. 

 " Relations of causality . . . are already given in each separate act of 

 perception," but " the subject's knowledge of an object is a fact that differs 

 profoundly from other facts . . ." ; and it is epistemologically disastrous to 

 refer experience to the " causal action of the not-self upon the self." * 



The causal nexus between perceived objects and percipient minds cannot 

 be peremptorily severed without any other efifect on their plexus of rela- 

 tions. A sharp separation between the self and the not-self, Lossky r^- 

 marks, is naturally associated with their causal interaction, and contributes 

 to epistemological disaster .^ The not-self stands in outemess from the 

 self, in a relation to it of transcendence, to direct its causal action upon it. 

 The causal nexus breaks away and dissolves as Berkeley extracts outemess 

 from objects by transforming them into " ideas." A reduced outemess 

 still remains : " the things perceived by sense may be termed external, 

 with regard to their origin — in that they are not generated from within 

 the mind itself, but imprinted by a spirit distinct from that which 

 perceives them." ^ The transcendent relation has, however, become a 

 more immanent relation as the physical outemess is exchanged for the 

 innemess of " idea." " I am not for changing things into ideas," says 

 Philonous, " but rather for ideas into things — immediate objects of per- 

 ception, not appearances but the real things themselves." ' The same 

 conjunction of annulment of causal connection between self and not-self 

 with a drawing of the sensible object within the knowing process, is repeated, 

 though it is repeated differently, in Lossky. There is the same motive — 

 to substitute real apprehension for knowledge confined to appearances ; 

 there is the same method — to bring the object from the outemess of tran- 

 scendency within the range of intuition by its immanency in knowledge. 



" Identity of knowledge and the object known is only possible if the 

 known object, in all the completeness of its reality, is present in the process 



1 Principles of Human Knowledge, §§ 25, 26. 



2 The Theory of Vision or Visual Language, § 13. 



' The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge (Duddington's trans.), pp. 263-4. 



* Ibid., pp. 18, 20, 104. ^ Ibid., p. 20. 



« Principles of Human Knowledge, § 90. 



' Third Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous. 



