60 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



human experience, to be impossible. We shall see an illustration of this in their 

 futile attempts to explain and justify men s belief in the Uniformity of Physical 

 Causation. The Positivism which endeavours to interpret all human ex 

 perience as a process ruled by mechanical necessity has for its obverse side 

 Agnosticism that is, a declaration of inability to assign any ultimate rational 

 ground that will explain human experience as a whole. This, like all 

 scepticism, is really an abandonment of the principle of sufficient reason ; for 

 it says, in effect, &quot; We believe certain things, but, ultimately, we do not and 

 cannot know why we believe them &quot;. The empiricist so interprets experience 

 as to end in agnosticism about the suprasensible, and in inconsistency about 

 what he calls the &quot; scientific laws or generalizations &quot; of sense phenomena. 

 In his attempt to account for the reliability of those generalizations, their 

 stability, their characteristic of necessity, he really explains this away, and 

 leaves no rational ground for human certitude (cf. 219, 224). 



Another extreme and erroneous interpretation of the principle of sufficient 

 reason, another narrow view about the &quot; intelligibility &quot; of experience, and the 

 possibility of &quot; explaining &quot; the latter, is that of Hegelian Idealism. This is 

 the very antithesis to Empiticism. The latter fails to account for the &quot; must&quot; 

 the element of necessity, which characterizes, in varying degrees, our judg 

 ments about reality ; the former errs by attributing the same absolute intel 

 lectual necessity to all our judgments about reality. In a word, it claims that 

 the world as a whole is &quot; intelligible &quot; and capable of &quot; rational explanation &quot; 

 only on the assumption that it is one vast self-contained and self-explain 

 ing system of ideas, or thought-relations, which reveal themselves to in 

 dividual minds as endowed with the same metaphysical necessity which 

 characterizes our abstract judgments about the possible essences of things. 

 This, too, is an assumption which unduly narrows the scope of &quot; explanation &quot; 

 and the sphere of what is &quot; knowable &quot; or &quot; intelligible &quot;. If we reduce the 

 reality of things, in this fashion, to a mental fabrication of thought-relations, 

 if we make reality a theory? a mere mental constitution? a &quot;determina 

 tion &quot; of things &quot; by each other as constituents of one order, a determination 

 which only exists for thought &quot; ; if we say : &quot; It is not that there is first the 

 reality of things, 1 and then a theory about it. The reality is a theory &quot; ; 3 if, 

 we contend that &quot; mere feelings . . . except as related to each other through 

 relation to thought, are not facts at all,&quot; 3 that it is only by thinking them we 

 make them real and give them a nature : 4 are we not setting up a mental 

 creation, a system of abstract thought-relations, in the place of reality, and 

 ignoring the claims of that sense experience which certainly puts us into con 

 tact with reality ? 



This Idealistic Monism misinterprets reality. Nor is the postulate involved 

 in it a necessary one : the postulate that all reality is one great mental or 

 intellectual system, one great thought or idea, unfolding itself in individual 

 minds according to necessary laws of logical thought ; for, surely, we can make 



1 But surely there is some reality in the &quot; things &quot; themselves ? Surely reality 

 does not lie exclusively in any &quot; determination &quot; of relations established by thought 

 between those &quot; things &quot; ? 



3 GREEN, Philosophical Works, vol. ii., p. 269; apud WELTON, ii., p. 2. 



3 ibid., pp. 385-86. 



4 C/. HERSCHEL, Nat. Phil., ioq\apnd WELTON, ibid. 



