236 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



To justify this assumption would require a complete dis- 

 sertation on the theory of knowledge, but the heads of 

 argument admit of a rapid summary. In the first place then 

 our knowledge of reality is denied, so far as external reality 

 is concerned, on the basis of an analysis of cognition in 

 general or of perception in particular. The result of 

 this denial is to limit knowledge to a world which the mind 

 makes for itself, whether it be for each the world of his 

 own mind, or whether it be a world in which, in some 

 fashion, all conscious beings have a share. Either view 

 may be combined with an affirmation or with a denial of 

 a further ' real ' world which is beyond perception. In the 

 latter case, the theory may be considered not so much as 

 a denial of the knowledge of reality as rather an assertion 

 that all reality exists within the sphere of consciousness. 

 It may be noted, however, that in this view as appeared 

 at an early stage in the Humian criticism of Berkeley 

 knowledge of the conscious subject in any sense except 

 that of the knowledge of its passing states is liable to 

 objections similar to those which apply to knowledge of 

 a material order. What has to be said here, however, is 

 that the criticism on which the whole body of these con- 

 ceptions is founded is an error, traceable to one or other 

 of three main fallacies. The first is that prominent in 

 Berkeley, that in perceiving ft is the perception which is 

 our objett. This is, in essence, a confusion between the 

 asserting of a thing and the thing asserted, or between the 

 evidence of a fact and the fact evidenced. The second is 

 that prominent in Kant, that the order which is in the world 

 is not found there by the mind but introduced there by its 

 fundamental forms of sensibility and categories of under- 

 standing. This is based in part on an incorrect analysis 

 of immediate apprehension, from which all orderly rela- 

 tions are abstracted, and the remainder is erroneously 

 supposed to be what is actually c given ' : in part, on an 

 untenable view of necessity, which is supposed to be an 

 attribute of mental operations instead of being a character- 

 istic discernible in real relations. Thirdly, there is an 

 argument of a more general kind diffused throughout 

 most forms of idealistic writing, that knowledge is relative 



