the essential nature of this method, we are able to discern the
specific difficulties or perplexities arising in the attempt to carry
it out systematically, and thus to note with precision the special
problems presented to Kant at the outset of his philosophic
reflections.
Consider, first, the application of the method on its psychological
side, as it appears in Locke. Starting with the assumption of
conscious experience as the content or filling-in of the individual
mind, Locke proceeds to explain its genesis and nature by reference to
the real universe of things and its mechanical operation upon the
mind. The result of the interaction of mind, i.e. the individual mind,
and the system of things, is conscious experience, consisting of
ideas, which may be variously compounded, divided, compared, or dealt
with by the subjective faculties or powers with which the entity,
Mind, is supposed to be endowed. Matter of fact and matter of
knowledge are thus at a stroke dissevered. The very notion of relation
between mind and things leads at once to the counter notion of the
absolute restriction of mind to its own subjective nature. That Locke
was unable to reconcile these opposed notions is not surprising; that
the difficulties and obscurities of the Essay arise from the
impossibility of reconciling them is evident on the slightest
consideration of the main positions of that work. Of these
difficulties the philosophies of Berkeley and Hume are systematic
treatments. In Berkeley we find the resolute determination to accept
only the one notion, that of mind as restricted to its own conscious
experience, and to attempt by this means to explain the nature of the
external reality to which obscure reference is made. Any success in
the attempt is due only to the fact that Berkeley introduces alongside
of his individualist notion a totally new conception, that of mind
itself as not in the same way one of the matters of conscious
experience, but as capable of reflection upon the whole of experience
and of reference to the supreme mind as the ground of all reality. It
is only in Hume that we have definitely and completely the evolution
of the individualist notion as groundwork of a theory of knowledge;
and it is in his writings, therefore, that we may expect to find the
fundamental difficulty of that notion clearly apparent. It is not a
little remarkable that we should find in Hume, not only the sceptical
dissolution of all fixity of cognition, which is the inevitable result
of the individualist method, but also the clearest consciousness of
the very root of the difficulty. The systematic application of the
doctrine that conscious experience consists only of isolated objects
of knowledge, impressions or ideas, leads Hume to distinguish between
truths reached by analysis and truths which involve real connexion of
the objects of knowledge.
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