14 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



and required as their explanation, is forever hidden 

 from the senses, and is therefore without other evi- 

 dence than that of pure reason, philosophical con- 

 sensus names it a "noumenon," that is, a reality- 

 present simply to the reason. 



Upon this distinction between the phenomenal and 

 the noumenal the whole discussion hangs and turns. 

 To the proposition maintained by evolutionist phi- 

 losophy, that evolution has no application beyond 

 phenomena and can have none, historic philosophy at 

 once gives its assent and its authority.^ The dispute 

 begins, only when the school of evolution goes on to 

 place the whole of human or other living nature in the 

 realm of the phenomenal, denying to the living, even 

 as a psychic being, any noumenal reality of its own, 

 and treating even the human person as a mere form 

 in which, as in all other phenomena, the supersen- 

 sible Noumenon, one and sole, appears ; or, in other 

 words, as a mere manifestation or effect of the Nou- 

 menon, which is held by the school to be omnipres- 

 ent, immutable, immanent in all phenomena, indi- 

 visible and all-embracing, solitary and universal. 



Beyond this point of agreement among all evolu- 

 tionists, agnostic and pantheistic alike, the dispute 

 opens further, and within the evolutionist school 



^ Just as, at the same time, it condemns and discredits Positivism 

 for its attempt to ignore tiiis fundamental distinction, essential to the 

 being of philosophy and expressive of the very nature of reason. 



