154 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



Kantian system, but observe, meanwhile, that the Critical 

 philosophy yielded a theory of knowledge as at once relative 

 and objective. Knowledge not only was but was meant to 

 be a mind-structure, and the mind-structure was resolved 

 into a number of elementary functions working in systematic 

 co-ordination, not merely to connect one empirical result 

 with another, as in simple common-sense psychology, but 

 in the very tissue of experience itself. 



The natural outcome of this conception was to enlarge 

 the borders of the mind-world and make it co-extensive 

 with reality. The operation of ( things in themselves,' 

 inconsistent as it was with the general postulates of know- 

 ledge, was eliminated, and the objectivity of critical 

 thought was vindicated, because outside the world of mind 

 nothing could exist. But the more the world was identi- 

 fied with the mind-structure the clearer it became that that 

 structure passed through phases of development. Limita- 

 tion, error and evil could not be denied, and on the general 

 presuppositions involved they could only be identified 

 with some partial phase of the mind-world. Accordingly, 

 the thought-categories are now exhibited as a development 

 ascending from what we may call an inorganic stage in 

 which partial truths are so held as to conflict with and 

 destroy one another, to a comprehensive synthesis devoid 

 of internal contradiction and complete in itself. Objective 

 truth is now in the whole seen as a whole, or, more accu- 

 rately, in that final vision the antithesis of subject and 

 object is overcome. 



The idealistic solution was based on a one-sided inter- 

 pretation of the problem to be solved, for, in fact, the 

 reference of cognition to its object implies a duality which 

 could only be destroyed by annihilating cognition itself 

 as many mystical modes of expression show clearly enough. 

 Weighted with this one-sidedness, the monistic interpre- 

 tation becomes involved in insuperable difficulties as to 

 the nature of error, of evil, and even of individuality. 

 But it forwarded the general movement of thought, especi- 

 ally in the form of the Hegelian dialectic, by conceiving the 

 Kantian mind-structure as a development, by emphasising 

 the relative and partial nature of the categories, and by 



