218 PHILOSOPHY 



with the facts of history. It will be remembered that the first of these 

 problems was the epistemological. Certainly no little improvement 

 has been made in the psychology of cognition. We can no longer 

 repeat the mistakes of Kant, either with respect to the uncritical 

 assumptions he makes regarding the origin of knowledge in the 

 so-called "faculties" of the human mind or regarding the analysis 

 of those faculties and their interdependent relations. It is not the 

 Scottish philosophy alone which has led to the conclusion that, in the 

 word of the late Professor Adamson, " What are called acts or states 

 of consciousness are not rightly conceived of as having for their 

 objects their own modes of existence as ways in which a subject is 

 modified." And in the larger manner both science and philosophy, in 

 their negations and their affirmations, and even in their points of 

 view, have better grounds for the faith of human reason in its power 

 progressively to master the knowledge of Reality than was the case 

 a hundred years ago. Nor has the skepticism of the same era, whether 

 by shallow scoffing at repeated failures, or by pious sighs over the 

 limitations of human reason, or by critical analysis of the cognitive 

 faculties "according to well-established principles," succeeded in 

 limiting our speculative pretensions to the sphere of possible expe- 

 rience, in the Kantian meaning both of "principles" and of 

 "experience." But what both science and philosophy are com- 

 pelled to agree upon as a common underlying principle is this: The 

 proof of the most fundamental presuppositions, as well as of the 

 latest more scientifically established conclusions, of both science and 

 philosophy, is the assistance they afford in the satisfactory explana- 

 tion of the totality of racial experience. 



In the evolution of the ontological problem, as compared w r ith the 

 form in which it was left by the critical philosophy, the past century 

 has also made some notable advances. To deny this would be to dis- 

 credit the development of human knowledge so far as to say that we 

 know no more about what nature is, and man is, than was known 

 a hundred years ago. To say this, however, would not be to speak 

 truth of fact. And here we may not unnaturally grow somewhat 

 impatient with that metaphysical fallacy which places an impassable 

 gulf between Reality and Experience. No reality is, of course, 

 cognizable or believable by man which does not somehow show its 

 presence in his total experience. But no growth of experience is pos- 

 sible without involving increase of knowledge representing Reality. 

 For Reality is no absent and dead, or statical, Ding-an-Sich. Cogni- 

 tion itself is a commerce of realities. And are there not plain signs 

 that the more thoughtful men of science are becoming less averse to 

 the recognition of the truth of ontological philosophy; namely, that 

 the deeper meaning of their own studies is grasped only when they 

 recognize that they are ever face to face with what they call Energy 



