International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
condition of inner sensation. Thus the dualization of the sense-world
into inner and outer, psychic and physical, subjective and objective,
rests at last on the intrinsically social nature of conscious being;
rests on the twofold structure, logically dichotomous, of the
self-defining act; and we get the explanation, from the nature of
intelligence as such, why the Sense-Forms are necessarily two, and only
two. It is no accident that we experience all things sensible in Time or
in Space, or in both together; it is the natural expression of our
primally intelligent being, concerned as that is, directly and only,
with our self and its logically necessary complement, the other selves;
and so the natural order, in its two discriminated but complemental
portions, the inner and the outer, is founded in that moral order which
is given in the fundamental act of our intelligence. It is this resting
of Space upon our veritable Objects, the Other Subjects, that imparts to
it its externalizing quality, so that things in it are referred to the
testing of all minds, not to ours only, and are reckoned external
because measured by that which is alone indeed other than we.
In this way we may burst the restricting limit which so much of
philosophy, and so much more of ordinary opinion, has drawn about our
mental powers in view of this contrast Time and Space, especially with
reference to the One and the Many, and to the persuasion that plural
distinctions, at any rate, cannot belong in the region of absolute
reality. Ordinary opinion either inclines to support a philosophy that
is skeptical of either Unity or Plurality being pertinent beyond Time
and Space, and thus to hold by agnosticism, or, if it affects
affirmative metaphysics, tends to prefer monism to pluralism, when the
number-category is carried up into immutable regions: to represent the
absolutely real as One, somehow seems less contradictory of the "fitness
of things" than to represent it as Many; moreover, carrying the Many
into that supreme region, by implying the belonging there of mortals
such as we, seems shocking to customary piety, and full of extravagant
presumption. Still, nothing short of this can really satisfy our deep
demand for a moral order, a personal responsibility, nay, an adequate
logical fulfillment of our conception of a self as an _intelligence_;
while the clarification which a rational pluralism supplies for such
ingrained puzzles in the theory of knowledge as that of the source and
finality of the contrast Time and Space, to mention no others, should
afford a strong corroborative evidence in its behalf. And, as already
said, this view enables us to pass the limit which Time and Space are so
often supposed to put, hopelessly, upon our concepts of the ideal grade,
the springs of all our aspiration. To these, then, we may now pass.
* * * * *
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