Elements of metaphysicsTaylor, A. E. (Alfred Edward)
Philosophy
Elements of metaphysics
Taylor, A. E. (Alfred Edward)
Metaphysics
(4) We need not say much on the element of truth which Subjectivism
preserves in a distorted form. We have seen that, as against Realism,
Subjectivism is right in maintaining the indissoluble unity of real
being with experience, though it twists this truth into an absurdity by
first identifying experience with my own limited and imperfect
experience and then giving a false psychological interpretation of the
nature of that experience itself. How a reality can be independent of
presentation in _my_ experience and yet be in its very nature dependent
upon experience for its existence and character, has already been
sufficiently illustrated. But we may perhaps say that even in the
identification of experience with my own experience there is an
underlying substratum of genuine philosophic truth. For, as we have more
than once insisted, there is manifestly a great deal more in my own
experience than what is at any time present as the object of conscious
cognition. Or, as Mr. Bradley is fond of putting it, there is always
more _in_ my mind than _before_ it. I am never fully aware at any moment
even of the full nature of my own purposes and feelings. This is why the
deceitfulness of my own heart has become a common-place of religious
self-examination as well as of worldly wisdom.
Again, every increase of insight into our own real feelings and purposes
involves increased insight into the feelings and purposes of the other
feeling beings with whom we stand in the various relations of social
intercourse.[53] Hence it might fairly be contended that fully to know
your own meaning, fully to understand what you want, would imply
complete insight into the structure of the whole world of reality,—in
fact, that self-knowledge and knowledge of the universe must ultimately
be the same thing. The systematic unity of the whole world of experience
may be so complete that there is nothing in it anywhere which does not
correspond to some element in the experience of every one of its
members. Each member may, like the monads of Leibnitz, represent the
whole system though at very different levels of coherency and from very
different points of view. But such a conception, though it would concede
to Subjectivism that whatever forms a part of the system of real being
somehow falls within my individual experience, would take as the
foundation of its assertion that very distinction between what is
implicitly present _in_ my experience and what is explicitly _before_ it
which Subjectivism consistently ignores. Whether the doctrine as thus
re-stated can be affirmed as more than a fascinating possibility, we
shall be better able to judge when we have discussed in our next chapter
the systematic unity of Reality.
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