254 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



It may be true and undeniable that everything to every 

 individual soul comes back to its own sensations and 

 subjective experience, but the fact that there are many 

 other individual souls claiming similar, though not 

 identical, experiences, raises the problem : How do we 

 in practice get out of the narrow limits of our own self 

 and, as it were, regard ourselves from outside as one 

 among many equals ? Fichte did not linger to discover 

 or even to suggest how this transition from a purely 

 subjective to an objective point of view was actually 

 attained in the history of the individual soul, still less 

 did he form any theory how, alongside of the common 

 stock of ideas, individual life and individual conceptions 



thinking individual mind would 

 apply with equal force to the exist- 

 ence of other individual minds 

 external to an individual mind. 

 Fichte, on the other side, overcame 

 the difficulty by taking the term 

 mind as meaning the universal or 

 general mind, of which individual 

 minds were only examples. But 

 Berkeley seems to be nearer to the 

 more recent psychological view, in- 

 asmuch as he admits that we know 

 as little of the essence of the indi- 

 vidual mind as we know of external 

 matter. It is to him merely a 

 point of reference, a unifying prin- 

 ciple manifesting its existence in the 

 use of the word "I," and as he finds 

 this unity in subjective experience 

 so he is likewise in search and con- 

 vinced of the existence of such a 

 spiritual unity in the external or 

 general order of things which with- 

 out it is inconceivable. Nor does it 

 seem to him that a knowledge of 

 the Supreme Unity or the Deity is 

 less possible than our knowledge of 

 other men, or of our own self, as in 

 all the three cases what we do know 

 is merely phenomenal. " Nor, 



Berkeley might say, is this sight of 

 God which we have daily, a sight of 

 an unknowable Something. We 

 find through inner experience what 

 conscious life is, though we have 

 no sense of phenomenal knowledge 

 of the ' I ' or the ' You. ' We can 

 attribute this, can we not, to God 

 as well as to our fellow- men ? . . . 

 So ' God ' is more than a meaning- 

 less name — more than the unknow- 

 able behind the sense-symbolism of 

 nature. God means the eternally 

 sustaining spirit — the active con- 

 scious reason of the universe. Of 

 God's existence we have the same 

 sort of proof as we have of the 

 existence of other conscious agents 

 like ourselves when we say we ' see ' 

 them. Of course we never see and 

 never can see another human spirit 

 even when his body, as a phenomenal 

 thing, is present to our senses ; we 

 can only perceive the visible and 

 tangible appearances behind which 

 reason obliges us to recognise an 

 invisible, individual spirit, &c." 

 ( ' Berkeley, ' by A. Campbell Fraser, 

 "Blackwood's Philosophical Class- 

 ics," 1881, p. 165). 



