SOURCE: “The Epistemology of Ed. V. Hartmann,” in Mind, Vol. 18, No. 5, January, 1893, pp. 188-207.

[In the following essay, Caldwell presents an overview of Hartmann's epistemology.]

In a former paper¹ I sought to study the consequences of Schopenhauer's Criticism of Kant's Epistemology. The most important of them, I think, are: the rejection of the doctrine of Subjective Idealism both as regards the form and the matter of knowledge, and the rejection of the thing-in-itself as anything save a conception of the mind. This paper will seek to clear the ground a little further in the same direction by considering the Epistemological problem as seen under the forms of the hypotheses of Realism and Idealism. In particular, I shall seek to consider the statement Hartmann gives of the problem of Epistemology and his treatment of the various solutions which he holds can be given of it. His theory is at once a criticism of some recent chapters in the history of Kantism and itself a chapter in that history.

Curious though it may seem to us in England who have had Berkeley ‘always with us,’ Hartmann, like Schopenhauer begins from Subjective Idealism as the outcome of Kant, or, more strictly, he finds the problem of Epistemology in the Subjective Idealism which is to be traced through various exponents of Kantism like Schopenhauer, Lange, Vaihinger, and even Helmholtz, to the Critique of Pure Reason, the ‘fons et origo’ of all Nineteenth Century Philosophy. To calling Kant a Subjective Idealist, Hartmann would hardly commit himself; he seems to have on the whole an eminently sound reluctance to label Kant's Philosophy at all, and thinks of Kant as in the main a transition between the common-sense view of the world and the completely metaphysical—the founder, we might say, of a sort of Transfigured Realism, a realism into which metaphysical as well as physical entities enter as constants. Kant, Hartmann says, is after all more concerned with Epistemology than with Metaphysic—an opinion which explains the putting aside, as Hartmann does, of the metaphysical systems of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer in a purely Epistemological investigation (his metaphysical indebtedness to the three latter in particular Hartmann estimates elsewhere); and indeed the stupendous speculative edifices which were reared on the principle of Kant withdrew, by their very proportions, attention from the merely Epistemological work of Kant in which of late years an interest has been taken in its connexion with Physical Science. Though concerned in the main with Hartmann's Epistemology, I shall not scruple to lay my pen on the loophole through which he runs his Metaphysic into his Epistemology.

Hartmann's two principal Epistemological writings are the Kritische Grundlegung des Transcendentalen Realismus and the Grundproblem der Erkenntisstheorie. The Grundlegung, after a careful introduction in which the object of the writer and his terminology are set forth with admirable exactness, starts from what Hartmann regards to be the cardinal question of Epistemology and then considers critically in order the answers given by forms of Idealism and Realism to it. The Grundproblem is more didactic than investigative; it is a supplement to the Grundlegung, being what Hartmann in Hegelian phraseology calls a phenomenological presentation of the problem of Epistemology under the light of different theories. The result of both writings is to show that neither ‘Naive Realism’ nor any form of Idealism but only ‘Transcendental Realism’ is adequate to the complete explanation of knowledge. In them both Hartmann writes an eminently clear and measured style, and by appropriate outlines and résumés greatly facilitates the reader's apprehension. The vigorous and careful reasoning of the Grundlegung it is a pleasure to follow.

I have said that Hartmann starts from the difficulty raised by the Idealist about the nature of knowledge. The Grundlegung starts from the alleged fact that we really only know what is immanent in our consciousness; in fact, Hartmann says that he only writes for those who have learned this first lesson in philosophy, and requests those who have not learned it to turn their attention at once to the study of Berkeley and of modern Psycho-Physics. The confirmation of Idealism that Schopenhauer found in Kant, Hartmann does not find; he censures Schopenhauer for thinking that Kant's proofs of the subjectivity of Space and Time were adequate, and gives elsewhere himself a refutation of these proofs. It becomes of course part of his own theory to vindicate the objectivity of the categories, and indeed the fact that we do apply the categories to reality constitutes a permanent reason for trying to get out of the subjectivity of knowledge. I mention this here at the outset, for if we want to follow Hartmann's reasoning at all, we must not pull him up at the inconsistency which any one who accepts the Idealistic account of consciousness is guilty of in letting slip even one hint or one word about objects ‘outside’ consciousness. Transcendental Realism is the theory of knowledge which, while recognising the fact that all conscious knowledge is immanent and subjective, yet provides us with a knowledge of things-in-themselves, and this in face of the logical difficulties which seem to render it impossible to do so. It is called ‘Transcendental’ in opposition to ‘Naive’ Realism, because it teaches us that the things that are real are not the objects of our consciousness (these being only subjective) but certain transcendent objects or objects outside consciousness, and because we may therefore regard the perceptions we find existing in our consciousness to have in Kantian language ‘transcendental’ significance, i.e., a reference to really existing things over and above consciousness. It is called Transcendental ‘Realism’ in opposition to Transcendental ‘Idealism,’ which in view of the fact that all knowledge is immanent and subjective despairs of all knowledge of things-in-themselves. Lastly, ‘Transcendental’ Realism differs from ‘Naive’ Realism in holding that our knowledge of things-in-themselves is not direct but indirect.

I. If we ask Hartmann for his proofs that our only immediate knowledge is our consciousness-content, the changes in our psychical states, we find that he appeals at once for one thing to the facts of Science. He cannot, like Berkeley or Hume, ‘send a man to his senses,’ to learn the truth about knowledge, for the appeal to consciousness is in his eyes the basis of “Naive Realism,” which is altogether a false theory of the matter. The hypothesis of Naive Realism Hartmann summarises² in the following five positions: (1) What is perceived is the things themselves, not for example only their effect, and still less mere representations of imagination; (2) What is perceived in things is really so in the things as it is perceived, which does not prevent much being in things which is not perceived; (3) What work on each other are the things themselves, and this Causality of things is itself Object of Perception; (4) Things are as they are perceived, even when they are not perceived, it being perhaps possible that in the meantime a change takes place in them through sufficient cause; Perception accordingly shows us things as they are in themselves, apart from all Perception, i.e., the perceived things are things-in-themselves; (5) While things-in-themselves are perceived by all percipients, the objects of Perception are for all percipients one and the same; this one single world of things-in-themselves constitutes as common object of Perception the means of connexion, the causal link, and the means of communication between the thoughts and strivings of the different subjects of consciousness. Hartmann thus finds his cardinal fact of Epistemology to be in contradiction with the immediate testimony of consciousness, and does not hesitate to proclaim the Common-sense view of the relation of knowledge and reality to be untenable and contradictory on the strength of the scientific refutation of Naive Realism. It has always been a small thing to metaphysicians that common-sense should seem full of contradictions, their assumption being that correct theory is one thing and practice quite another, and that in fact Common-sense can and does get on without theory or, in the case in point, with a wrong theory. Now the difficulty of interpreting common-sense beliefs is notorious, and indeed one is led to think that it would be impossible to formulate these beliefs if we had not an objective measure of them in actions. Psychologically in the Perception of reality belief and action are two sides of the one act of the organic self; we may therefore measure the beliefs of common-sense as to reality in the actions of common-sense, if one may so speak. Mr. Spencer somewhere practically says that philosophers have never really doubted the reality of knowledge or perception, but have only often thought that they do so for certain reasons. It is even so; only one must remember that to philosophers the reasons in question were not merely reasons but facts—facts prior to the generally received facts of perception. But surely the best way of studying the facts of perception is to study them in their entirety, i.e., as aspects of an organic function of percipient beings. Hartmann, for example, recognises the fact that the knowledge of the senses is evidently not an end in itself, but is rather a means to the maintenance and furtherance of life functions.

By giving up the particular isolated sensation as not a datum, an original datum of experience in the sense it was too long thought to have been, we have come to regard perceptions as the more or less complex functional apprehension on the part of an organic being of that sphere of reality into immediate relation with which it is thrown by appropriate physical or natural process. It is wrong to think of perception as purely a quasi-psychical movement (if such may well exist); without the organic reaction or adjustment to stimulus there is no Perception, as, e.g., in the strained ear or bent head or contraction of the pupil incident to the falling of light on the eye. It is thus not only warrantable but necessary to seek for the beliefs of common-sense as to the perception of reality in the actions which are not only called forth by perception, but which help to constitute it. We shall in the end, I think, see that instead of asking for a justification of the objectivity of perception from the point of view of what is immanent to consciousness, it would be more natural and more correct to ask for the justification of the introspective standpoint which philosophers have adopted in regard to perception. The real matter to be explained in Perception is not David Hume's sturdy doubts about his actions in crossing a thronged thoroughfare but these actions themselves. Our beliefs about reality are the ideas that regulate the movements of our bodies, and there is thus indeed a presumption against the existence of contradictory beliefs in common-sense in the fact that such beliefs would in general (as they do in the case of illusions in particular) nullify or defeat action. That our perceptual experiences are consistent with each other is sufficient ground for holding that the perceptual world is at least a reality: our perceptions at least accomplish the definite end of regulating action. Science accepts the perceptual world as a fact demanding explanation along with the belief of common-sense in that world—that there is a world of things in space and time acting and reacting on each other. But, says Hartmann, our spatial-temporal perceptions of position and movement are the only ones that are in things the same as they are in the mind; that is, our perceptions of position and movement are like real positions and real movements, while our specialised perceptions are not like anything in things not the same—colour, e.g., is only in the mind, and so on. But what can be meant by this? Science does not deny that there exists, on the testimony of the great majority of people, a colour world and a heet world, and so on. Is Commonsense really committed to any more than this about its specialised perceptions or its perceptions in general?

Let us seek to discover—quite generally—the broadest and simplest fact about Perception as above set forth. Hartmann says he objects to the recourse for the explanation of psychological facts to consciousness of which he himself has no experience, that of lower animals, say. It is, however, impossible to restrict either Psychology or Epistemology to the use of the Subjective method only. To use an illustration of Hartmann's own, the ordinary man thinks he has as immediate a hold upon reality as the polyp has in closing round its booty. Is this not true? The part that Association or Suggestion plays in Perception is of course too well recognised to be lost sight of; but is not Perception immediate as well as mediate? and immediate indeed in some regards at the very moment it is mediate in others? Every perceiving being is a natural mechanism, a part of nature, and has the immediate sense of the reality of the medium in which it dwells, whatever that may be. Perception in short cannot be said to be only perception of what is immanent in consciousness, for perception is always the sense of existence in a world, in a whole world, in which self and not-self—whether the distinction be implicit or explicit—are correlated parts. In Perception spatial distinctions exist; it cannot itself therefore be a mere ‘within’. A medusa which is a mere swimming bell can have no doubt of the reality of the watery world in which it lives and moves, for the movements of contraction and diffusion which are its perceptions make it feel itself a part of an unlimited world in which also movement takes place. In a word, if Perception imply movement, as it seems always to do—apprehensive or reactionary movement—the percipient has in movement an actual living relation to the large whole of which its body forms a part. I grant the psychological position that reality in the end means relation to my movements and impulses, but the converse is surely also true that felt movements and impulses in me mean the immediate sense of a world present to me which conditions and limits my movements. Movement is not a merely spiritual phenomenon; indeed it can hardly be called such at all, being physically or materially conditioned. In its movements in response to physical stimuli, each percipient has the immediate sense of a real world which affects it thus or thus—for that is perhaps all sense-perception says. In this diffuse organic sense of reality there is no inference whatever, for there is no break in the development of the life of the organism itself; a cell too is itself a differentiation of physical reality, and thus we can never think of reality as something outside it.

The organic or imperfectly localised sense of reality is the type of perception; it alone in strictness ought to be called Naive Realism, because the world of which it is the sense hardly contains any definite qualities except perhaps that of change or transition (so-called Common-sense is hardly naive, for it implies a use of the understanding). Strictly speaking, Perception or Immediate Knowledge only informs us of a that and hardly of a what: the simplest perceptions are nothing but the reflex sense of a quasi-reality. Unconsciously an organism constructs by its earliest perceptual reactions a medium or background on which to project its subsequent perceptual data. The whole significance of perception consists in the relation of the different perceptual data or qualia or continua—for these are the elemental facts of Perception—to each other, as Berkeley brought out. Naive Realism does not need to be able to figure to itself where its perceptions are, whether they are in the mind or in the object, and does not stand or fall by the decision of any such question. A being with only one eye might be so absorbed in the perception of a colour that the colour would seem to be spread over its whole knowable sphere and to be thus, in fact, its sole world for the time. The significance of the specialised perceptions lies wholly, not in being in a certain place or out of it, but in being significant of the primary fields of experience.

II. The five propositions in which Hartmann states³ the scientific refutation of Naive Realism are intended to be antithetical to the five positions in which that theory was summarised. (1) What we perceive is not things-in-themselves, but only their effect on our senses; things-in-themselves are from their very nature incapable of being perceived. The whole strength of this sentence rests on the supposition of the existence of the isolated sensation as a primary datum of consciousness: in that sense, however, the isolated sensation is a fiction. There is a fact corresponding to the isolated sensation in Perception, but it is only one of a whole circle of facts: Science is bound to consider the localised perception in reference to the development of the highly specialised sensibility which makes it possible, that is, as a modification of the immediate crude sense of reality which an organism that adapts itself to its environment has as an original and persistent perception. To say that a perception exists in the mind is to say that it has been put there in the course of a whole neural and psychical development; a localised perception cannot therefore be regarded as a first thing out of which or out of a number of things similar to it the world is constructed. The question, in fact, “Is or is not my perception (red colouring) like the things I believe I see with my eyes?” never arises to the merely percipient mind. It is not that the ‘common man’ is never occupied with such subtleties as the possible physical counterparts to his sensations, but that distinctions in the psychical content are never to be thought of except as the progressive and parallel accompaniments to other distinctions which are by a continual process drawn in the content of the physical world; indeed the psychical distinctions are drawn later than distinctions in the physical world, which too at the outset we only know in the most general way possible; and, further, the distinction of our perceptions into specialised perceptions is never probably a fait accompli so much as an act of our total available consciousness, which too at the outside limits of its sphere—if we allow ourselves to think of the matter thus—shades into the mere confused bodily sense of reality to which I have referred above. With the rejection of ‘things’ as not entering as units into our simplest consciousness, follows the rejection of the still more complicated expression ‘things-in-themselves’. (2) What is perceived can never be attributed to things-in-themselves just as it is perceived, with the exception of the special determinations of position and movement; in all other qualities things and perceptions are completely dissimilar. This too countenances the view that Perception is at some moment in time a definite reckoning up with reality when things get back from the mind with interest what they have poured previously in upon it, becoming credited with very much they did not give (‘red’ IN the orange and so on); so far it raises an imaginary difficulty. The significance of perception lies, it is true, in its suggestiveness, but that we are not forced to settle calculatively and deliberately; it is found in the movement of action and reaction which underlies and constitutes all perception in connecting it as an organic process with physical process in general; my body as a physical thing in perception adopts a certain relation to physical things which affect it. Common-sense is never able really to interpret its experiences on their theoretical as differing from their practical side; in seeking to do so it is liable both to fallacies of observation and interpretation. To Science the facts which common-sense attests are simply the conditions of problems. The fact of Perception is all that Common-sense is responsible for, i.e., that a world of things exists, and not what kind of a world. Perceptual knowledge is true of reality, but how that reality is constituted is not matter of perceptual but of inferential knowledge. As a fact of experience, as a fact of nature, one perceptional continuum is as real as another: that colour exists is matter of fact just as much as that movement exists; and this is all that Perception teaches if we will persist in interpreting our perceptions theoretically and not practically—perception gives us, as we say, the matter of knowledge—that is all. It is often implied, for example, that the tangible perceptions of objects are more real than our other perceptions; they are not; tangible perceptions have primarily a practical significance just like other perceptions; what I feel to be two may be really one, or what I feel to be one a thousand; what is felt smooth may be quite irregular in texture; movement supposed to be upwards may be movement downwards, &c., &c. All perceptions theoretically regarded state only problems. (3) It is the things-in-themselves which work upon each other, and not the perceptions; the causal action of things upon each other can only be perceived as it is limited to a causal working upon our senses. This means, I suppose, that we cannot know the real causal working of things because we only know the effects their workings produce upon our senses. But does this say any more than that we can only know of causality what we perceive? As I have given up the doctrine that Perception is subjective, it is no disproof of the reality of our causal perceptions to say that they remain only perceptions—of effects, of say change. The common-sense belief that things are centres of force which influences even our statement of dynamical laws is not so much utterly erroneous as imperfect knowledge. But Naive Realism does not stand or fall with the rightness or wrongness of any theory of causality it may have—I should prefer to say it had none. (4) Things-in-themselves are, apart from causally conditioned change, constant and their existence is continued, while perceptions on the other hand are ‘intermittent’ and their existence discontinuous. As to this, firstly, the only material things-in-themselves that are constant are the chemical substances of which the world is composed, whatever they may ultimately be shown to be, and I don't suppose Hartmann refers to these here. Ordinary things, it may be said, undergo just as many changes and modifications as do the psychical states of the percipient. As long as the percipient or his brain exists, his knowledge is true of the things that exist as long as he or it does; more than this need not here be said. (5) The world of things-in-themselves is for all subjects one and the same, but the perceptions out of which, and the operations of thought through which they are deduced, are in every subject of consciousness numerically different, even when they are similar as to content. This objection resolves itself into the last. We may, if we choose, think of a psychical energy which pervades all psychical subjects and remains a constant in the universe just as we think of a physical energy pervading all the ‘things’ in the physical world which are constituted out of large aggregates, persist for a time and then go to form other aggregates. I pass to a few words on the Physiological refutation of Naive Realism.

The physiological refutation of Naive Realism is intended to be corroborative of the above five positions of Physical Science. It says that what we perceive is only the world of our consciousness, that the world of things-in-themselves⁴ cannot penetrate into consciousness because their effects on the mind undergo innumerable physiological transformations before they reach the brain, the organ of consciousness, and because when they do reach it, the complicated excessively rapid buzzing dance of brain molecules has no similarity with the restful, only gradually changing consciousness-content of the percipient, and that in short the world of consciousness and the world of being are two completely heterogeneous and different worlds. I cannot see that all this throws any further doubt on the reality of our knowledge of the real, although it may be said to introduce new terms into the problem. All that the facts of Science do is to place before us the assemblage of conditions which as matters of fact must be realised in order that the perception of reality which the percipient has may be possible; they do not for one moment render the affirmation of the percipient that he perceives, let us say—something, questionable. In strictness it is not the fact which is perceived that is in the percipient, but only his interpretation of it. That the frog through whose nerve or muscle I send an electric shock feels something I, the observer, know to be fact; what he does feel is probably a universe of tingling movement, and that universe, though only in him, is a real fact and a fact which I, who see more than he at the moment does, must explain. Common-sense, as Spinoza often reminds us, knows nothing of the infinitude of causes which determine its movements; but this does not destroy the fact that the perceived world whatever it may for the time be is a real world and a whole world containing more or less explicitly distinctions in itself (of course only relatively real and relatively whole, though not necessarily known as such). The objection that the diffuseness and intensity and quality make up my perception and that these are de facto only in me, is after a certain point only verbal; my perception means the world I am at the moment perceiving. When I am told then that colour is only in me, which in the absence of the refracting media of the eye would have no existence, I reply, firstly, that indeed the colour continuum (supposing it for the moment to be such) is not a reality which I find existing apart from other continua or realities and that therefore it is literally true that ‘colour’ is an abstraction and only “in my head”; but, secondly, that the colour world when I allow myself explicitly to think of it or perceive it (if possible) by itself is a world containing distinctions in itself, and that for my part I could conceive of the experiences of a seeing being as something perfectly definite and real; and that, thirdly, to suggest even the absence of the refracting media from colour is to suggest that a phenomenon could be possibly something after the half of it had been taken away. The world we know is a world in which psychic or nervous process is attendant on physical process and the perception of the one conditioned by the perception of the other: there is no real warrant for regarding either the psychical or the physical process as the sole reality: ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ processes are related as the terms x and y in the equation (f) x = (f) y. The warrant I have for predicating my perceptual knowledge of reality is nothing less than the fact that my knowledge itself is a phase of reality, one of the facts in the sum of the facts which make up the world. I may even say that ‘physical’ process (the word is misleading: in a sense all processes are physical, i.e. natural, i.e. real, facts) becomes in beings constituted like myself ‘neural’ process and psychical process, only I must never think of any real process as more real than any other process. As there is no psychical process without ‘physical’ process, it is totally erroneous to say that perception is ‘only in me’—“only in” too is a contradictio-in-adjecto.

Hartmann sums up his doctrine about Perception in five propositions which constitute the antitheses proper to the theses of “Naive Realism,” the real “Philosophical Refutation of Naive Realism”. (1) What is perceived is one's own consciousness-content, that is, changes in one's psychical condition. The answer to this is that the psychical is only possible through organic movement which is the physical basis of perception of the real world, one thing in which may be the “self”. (2) Whether there are things-in-themselves is a question lying outside the region of experience. Things-in-themselves may mean two things: (a) ‘things’ in the ordinary sense of the word, (b) the last structural elements of which the world is composed. The second of these meanings does not exist for sense-perception. (3) Whether our intuition and thought forms are applicable or not to things-in-themselves if we are to suppose such, lies outside the region of experience. This is a totally new point, which will recur below. Meantime, if it were true—which it is not—that I only know what is ‘within’ my consciousness I could never raise the question here formulated. (4) The world for me is my subjective appearance world, which builds itself up out of my sensations and my unconscious and conscious intellectual functions. The first clause confuses the world with my interpretation of it (the ‘world’ is always the screen on which my subjective world exists); the second erroneously takes ‘sensations’ to be the elements out of which experience is built up and further introduces a new term into the problem—unconscious—of which below. (5) Whether there are or are not other worlds outside my subjective appearance world, lies outside the sphere of experience. This only means that the world has many aspects a few of which only are known to me.

I seem then to have found by reflexion on Hartmann's examination of Common-sense that the positions of Naive Realism, of Common-sense Perception and of Psycho-physics, have all of them a basis in fact, and so far from being discrepant accounts of knowledge are really consistent and complementary: Naive Realism would stand for the simplest form of Perceptual knowledge wherever and whenever it is to be found; Common-sense for the imperfect knowledge of reality, which is developed and systematised by Science; Science helps to show how intimately knowledge is connected with reality by treating knowledge as itself a phenomenon of reality determined by an assemblage of conditions. The difficulty as to the relation of the ‘psychical’ to the ‘material’ elements entering into experience has been largely created by an imperfect analysis of the facts of perception. On the doctrine that Perception is of the real and that the existence of perceptions means the existence of perceptual continua, the question of the relation between the psychical and the physical becomes the relation between that form of reality which we call sense-appearance and the ‘physical’ system in general; psychical reality is itself a form of reality which like physical energy has many subordinate forms such as volitions, perceptions, &c., persisting in that conception of reality which has been found convenient for the purposes of Psychology: we might say that the world is a texture of continua or strata of different kinds which cross and run parallel to and dip into each other, the relation of these different strata or trends of reality to each other being the problem of knowledge in general. Even minds must be treated objectively—say, as objects which are also subjects. Thus in the end the relation of knowledge to reality becomes the question of the relation of one kind of reality to another, for all reality is related and knowledge as we have seen is a form of reality. Of course we come at last in face of a dualism: that is there are more kinds of reality than one. To the idealist then who holds that we cannot know things, because, as Schopenhauer says, “Between us and things there always comes the intellect,” we answer that we can know reality because intellect or mind is one of the things we can observe.

If I try to recount somewhat I may say: (1) Hartmann in his examination of Common-sense has been desirous to credit it with a theory; whether Common-sense has a theory or not seems to me extremely questionable. The fact that Common-sense takes its intuitions to be all original and immediate is of course to be traced to its ignorance, but out of this presumption can be disengaged the truth that knowledge is of the real. (2) Hartmann has tended to think of Common-sense under the light of the astonishment the common man feels when told of the facts of Science about his perceptions, i.e., of Common-sense as making assertions against negations rather than as the basis of positive conduct: what the common man says to the teaching of science is of course not of the slightest importance; he is quite unable to interpret the facts the scientist brings before him. (3) Hartmann tends to think that in his doctrine of the subjectivity or immanency of perception he has laid his finger on the elements out of which experience is built up. The immanent perception means the localised perception, and that is rather a last stage than a first stage in knowledge. (4) There is no inconsistency between Common-sensism and the truth about the simplest form of knowledge.

III. I repeat here that if it is true that knowledge is only of the immanent and the subjective, by no conceivable rational process could the idea of things-in-themselves either in a positive or in a negative sense enter into the mind—and this apart from the fact that ‘only immanent’ or ‘only subjective’ is a self-contradictory conception. The idea of things-in-themselves represents what we might call the cardinal and structural fallacy of Idealism. I do not wish, however, so much to inquire how exactly Hartmann starting from the Idealistic hypothesis comes to the conception of things-in-themselves as to indicate how his examination of the forms of Idealism (which has a distinct value on its own account) is a step in the progress of his own thought. He of course would naturally say, as Schopenhauer substantially says, that knowledge must evidently be determined or accounted for by some transcendent or other, seeing that it is immanent and does not determine or account for itself. It is obvious that in this position two points of view are implied: firstly, that of the introspective Solipsist; and, secondly, that of the observer of knowledge as a process in some brain or other. Fichte in opposition to both Schopenhauer and Hartmann is the consequent Idealist; holding that knowledge contained all distinctions in itself, he refused to explain knowledge by anything outside itself and postulated therefore the subject which returns upon itself by the force of its own self-activity. The idea that determines this step of his is that our knowledge of individual things and ourselves is only to be explained out of a prior all-inclusive knowledge in which the distinction of self and not-self meant no rift or absolute division, but was not therefore unreal but rather implicitly real; this prior knowledge he might have found in the fact of the primitive confused knowledge of Perception without going into the cloud-land of the movements of a subject which signify for us nothing that we can definitely verify. Hartmann has a good deal to say about Kant's attempts to get a thing-in-itself. He says rather aptly at one place that the æsthetic of Kant reduced all reality to appearance (Erscheinung), but that the Logic goes a step further and reduces that remnant of reality, the appearance, to a still more problematical reality, mere semblance or show which is possibly illusory (Schein); this of course in view of the things-in-themselves behind the scenes. I do not wish here to say what the things-in-themselves in Kant are; it is enough to remember that in Kant himself there is the material for either an Idealistic or a Realistic interpretation of these entities (whatever they are). On the hypothesis that Kant is in general an Idealist, Hartmann finds, what most critics do find, that any attempt to make out a verifiable position or rôle for things-in-themselves is in conception inconsistent and illogical, and with infinite care selects and examines and finally rejects a number of striking passages in which Kant makes an attempt to reach a transcendent. He further distinguishes Consequent Transcendental Idealism, which rules out of court any positive assertions about things-in-themselves, from Inconsequent Transcendental Idealism, which, while recognising the ruling about the knowledge of things-in-themselves, yet makes exceptions in certain directions, and allows of a kind of knowledge of things-in-themselves. The three most important forms of Inconsequent Transcendental Idealism are Solipsism, Immaterial Spiritualism, and Monadology; each of these Hartmann admirably weighs and finds ‘wanting’. The result which we are left with is therefore that on the principle of Idealism (Berkeleyan say, or Kantian) there is no knowledge of the transcendent, of things-in-themselves, nor can we explain why we should be haunted with this spectre of our defeat: the world becomes not merely a Hirngespenst which has, say, the reality of a consistent dream, but a changing spectre, a will-o'-the-wisp which only mocks us with illusion (i.e., Erscheinung becomes Schein). Hartmann summarises his criticism of Kant by saying that Kant instead of having succeeded, as he thought he had and as he intended in establishing the possibility of experience, has actually demonstrated the impossibility of experience. Let us write these words about the Idealistic hypothesis and we shall say the truth without being burdened with scruples about fairness of interpretation. Idealism began by the laudable attempt to show how knowledge of things was possible because reality in fact was quasi-mental in signs or appearances for our help only; but carried out into a system it makes knowledge lose itself in illusionism, in Pyrrhonism. One cannot praise too highly Hartmann's criticism of the Idealistic hypothesis; he calls it of course Transcendental Idealism, denoting by that the fact that it remains set fast in difficulties about what is ‘outside the mind’. Perhaps it may be said that others have done this work as well as Hartmann; but the value of Hartmann's execution is not alone in its perfect sureness and definiteness, but in its also being the work of one who is himself a professed metaphysician. But now at once we come upon what is more difficult to think intelligibly than even the Idealistic hypothesis itself—the further attempt that Hartmann makes to get to a transcendent on the presupposition of the Idealistic version of the cardinal fact of knowledge. Instead of revising his ‘first principles’ as we might have expected he would, Hartmann goes further or attempts to go further on the same lines. Like Schopenhauer he thinks that in the Idealistic pathway we may and can strike into a second or quite other way of reaching the thing-in-itself; he says it is part of Schopenhauer's signal merit to have recognised the truth that a way other than the way of conscious knowledge might lead us to the goal of the Jenseits. This leads me to the Epistemological (as distinguished from the Metaphysical) aspect of “Transcendental Realism”.

IV. Transcendental Realism.Transcendental Idealism having failed in Hartmann's language to construct for us a bridge between the immanent and the transcendent we have to test the bridge which Hartmann believes Transcendental Realism builds between these two poles of thought and reality. I find myself unable to describe the theory any further without speaking of the proofs of it as an hypothesis: to say what these are is a matter of extreme difficulty—not that the proofs are not formulated with the persistent care which characterises Hartmann's work, but that it is difficult to read a real meaning into these proofs. If it can be shown, says Hartmann, that Transcendental Realism is the only hypothesis that accounts for the facts of knowledge and experience, there is a presupposition in favour of its truth: this might be called the Indirect Deductive proof. An Inductive proof of the hypothesis would exist if one could show: (1) certain facts on which it is based to begin with; and (2) that an inductive examination of the facts of experience leads to its principles. We shall immediately see that the Inductive proof is also only indirect. Hartmann has recourse to both these methods of proof; and is fair enough to recognise distinctly that in the end Transcendental Realism remains a hypothesis; holding, however, that the amount by which his hypothesis falls short of certainty could be represented by an infinitesimally small fraction 1/α, he feels himself entitled to build a metaphysical system upon it. The indirect deductive proof he regards as given in his proof of the inadequacy of ‘Naive Realism’ and ‘Transcendental Idealism’ as explanations of knowledge. The material of the inductive proof is touched on in the Grundproblem, but is to be found in extenso in his other writings, chiefly in the Philosophie des Unbewussten, Hartmann's chef d'œuvre and earliest work.

After the rejection of Naive Realism as a completely untenable theory there remain the two forms of Transcendentalism (the only true Philosophy according to Hartmann): Transcendental Idealism and Transcendental Realism: either things-in-themselves are merely hypothetical or they are real entities. Three positions, says Hartmann, are possible in reference to these two theories: (1) the sceptical non liquet; (2) the assumption of Transcendental Idealism; (3) the assumption of Transcendental Realism. As I have indicated what Transcendental Idealism is, I shall at this point indicate also what Transcendental Realism positively means to Hartmann, in order that we may see between what theories our choice exactly lies. Hartmann, still influenced by the Idealistic postulate that what I immediately know is in myself, talks of being “in earnest” with the problem of getting to reality—to things-in-themselves; in short, what he does is definitely and shortly this. In spite of all he says and knows about the impossibility of making, on the principles of Kant, a transcendent application of the principle of Causality, he finds in Causality a rope which pulls him out of the sea of Illusionism into which Transcendental Idealism has thrown him. But first he gives a ‘dressing’ to the Causal Principle to make it suit his purpose [we are reminded of Kant's dressing of the table of judgments]: we must not, he says, construe Cause in the narrow sense of a mere connexion of presentations among each other, but rather as the law of a conjunction of existent things in general (Gesetz einer Verknüpfung von Seienden überhaupt). This of course is a remarkably fine conception of Causality, but it begs Hartmann's point for him: he can now talk of having a tie between things in the mind and transcendent things (the ‘transcendent’ properly should not be a ‘thing’ or ‘things’), one end of which [i.e., the immanent] we have in our hands. Certainly there is a cause for our affections, or rather as Hartmann admirably suggests: our affections must be determined in relation to all other things; they must, but a “transcendent” cause does not show us how; it only states the law of connexion in general as fact. Still the cause of our affection is to Hartmann the transcendent, and we want to know what further knowledge we have of the transcendent. With the attribution to it of the category of cause the other categories follow as all applicable. Hartmann shows how each of the following categories apply: unity, plurality, substance, existence, necessity, space, time (in connexion with the two latter, as I said, he carefully refutes the arguments of Kant in the æsthetic). Again, things-in-themselves are metaphysical realities, and Hartmann insists that his Philosophy is not only an Epistemology but a Metaphysic: he wants to describe things-in-themselves then as metaphysical entities. Indirect Deduction gives him the start: the transcendent cannot be ‘object’; an object in itself is, on Idealistic principles, a contradiction: “it is a contradiction that I should be able to think something which is not my thought”; even with Kant's intuitus originarius we could not know things-in-themselves, the things in that case would still be only our representations: “only as elevated above the contradictions, first wrought by consciousness of subject and object, could it [the intuit. orig.] think the Absolute”. Hartmann reiterates the cardinal articles of Idealism: “It is matter of indifference whether, with the materialist, one takes the other side of the conscious representation to be eternal matter, or Berkeley … personal God, or with Kant an unthinkable x, or Idea, or Will, … in all this, the fundamental Epistemological truth [i. e., that knowledge is of the immanent] is not in the least affected”; and yet we have to remember that “He who acknowledges the argument that ‘What I can think is my thought, so what is not my thought is to me unthinkable’ is irretrievably lost in Illusionism”.⁵

Out of this maze then every sortie from which is a cul de sac Hartmann saves himself by a leap similar to Schopenhauer, into another genre of fact altogether; he avoids Mysticism, that grave of knowledge, by assuming that the transcendent must be partly unlike consciousness and partly like it: “thought and yet not my thought”; “an ideality and yet not an ideality in my actual, present consciousness”; “a content like to my consciousness, and yet not that itself”. In defiance of the rubric of Idealism he says: “Consciousness⁶ reproduces through reflexion a thought-presentate, saying to itself that this presentate is not its present thought” (!). An intelligible meaning the sentence only acquires on the ground of the idealistic postulate. To what strait has the so-called a priori or ideal deduction of the real been reduced! At last the transcendent is pinned down as the “unconscious”—an excessively subtle double-thought; the ‘unconscious’ seems to fulfil the conditions just formulated; sweeping together Panlogismus and Panthelismus, Hartmann says that transcendent causality (the thing-in-itself) is an⁷ “efficacious, unconscious, ideal happening” (Kraftvolles unbewusst ideales Geschehen). One cannot but ask oneself whether these four words mean so very much more than the measurable energy of the physicist. How Hartmann reconciles the unconscious with the plurality he attributes to things-in-themselves is the question of the consistency of his metaphysic, which does not concern me here. His Epistemology however seems to me to lead either into an unknowable something or to collapse on “the given,” or the common-sense and the “common sunshine” he despises; I should prefer to pin him down to the latter (as simply matter for scientific investigation) for I reject in toto the roundabout way to reality through the porch of Subjective Idealism—ideas are only themselves facts to be determined in the ordinary way. As Schopenhauer says, “All knowledge is of itself and originally Perception”; the function of Thought or indirect knowing is not to create reality on its own account but to enable us to interpret the different spheres of reality immediately given to us in Perception by distinguishing between them and enabling us to abstract one of these spheres for special and further examination.

I return to the two alternative forms of Transcendentalism. Must we choose between them? Not surely if Transcendentalism itself is an unreal alternative to, let us say, Realism. I have tried to show already that Naive Realism and Common-sensism have not a contradictory or a false, but only an incomplete knowledge of reality. There remains the Realism of Science; is that an account of Knowledge and experience which needs to be corrected by say Transcendentalism? Science explains psychical realities by reference to their physiological and physical and chemical conditions; that is it explains as it always does a specific set of conditions by reference to a more general set of conditions—here, what is in my brain by reference to what is outside my brain or by treating my brain as simply a part of reality. Is there any objection to this? and does not Hartmann do the same only in a different way? One plane of reality is by Hartmann and by the scientist explained by reference to other planes of reality supposed, not to be more real (that cannot be: all planes of reality are equally real) but to be better known or more easily observable. Now, practically what Transcendentalism really expresses is the fact that no one plane of reality can be regarded as really ultimate, but only as relatively so: we may always go from one kind of reality into another which may, according to the state of human knowledge at the time, be better known; in a word, we may go infinitely far in our study of the real. The tendency to regard one plane of reality as ultimate is one which the scientist and the metaphysician have in common; the tendency is only a tendency and will never reach a goal; it is only an expression of the fact that there is progress in knowledge and that new planes of reality are always being disclosed. An ultimate plane of reality would be the Thing-in-itself; but the Thing-in-itself will never be reached by us, as reality must be for us twofold in order that knowledge may exist; there is no Thing-in-itself: all things and planes of reality are RELATED. The scientist who explains psychical energy by chemical processes has of course not destroyed the fact of psychical energy, just as the idealist has not destroyed the reality of things by insisting that he must go through some purely psychical processes before he can know things. Idealism is the philosopher's idolon, just as materialism is the scientist's: over and against both stands the Transcendentalist who tells them that reality is not measured by only one of its planes. But Transcendentalism cannot be dogmatic; it only expresses the fact of transition in knowledge and reality, just as Idealism and Naturalism draw attention to certain facts in experience: all three are aspects of Realism in the broad sense. Scientific Realism, and Transcendentalism are not incompatible. Hartmann's Transcendentalism was invented to get over or out of the “abstraction” of Idealism; there is a better way of getting out of Idealism than by this salto mortale: one should refuse to go into it; it is impossible to fly in face of fact and logic. Idealism is a false, an incomplete analysis of Perception.

Hartmann's assumptions have been: (1) The real is the transcendent. He thought this because he started from the idea that the ‘given’ real was the immanent. The given real is not the immanent, consequently the real is not the transcendent in the sense he took it to be. The real of course in Mr. Spencer's phraseology ‘transfigures’ itself. This is all that Transcendental Realism can really mean—Transfigured Realism. (2) Metaphysic is monistic, while Science is dualistic. But the fact remains that we are always in face of a dualism in at least two planes of reality. The unity of experience is the world itself as a whole: of what really “transcends” experience we have no knowledge. All the reality we know, spiritual and material, is IN experience. (3) That the isolated sensation is a fact. The isolated sensation is the localised perception; localised perception is accompanied by a sphere of relatively obscurer perception; the sense of the real is general; therefore the isolated perception is not a fact of experience, nor is the isolated sensation.

The results of our investigation in general are: (1) Dogmatic Idealism is an idolon specus; so therefore is the Transcendentalism invented to get rid of it. (2) Commonsensism is only an imperfect and not a contradictory account of reality; it needs only to be supplemented by the scientific. (3) Realism in the broad sense is not antithetical to, but inclusive of, Idealism. The Epistemological form of Scepticism is the product of the Idealistic hypothesis. That scepticism is the illusionism wrought by the impossible thesis that knowledge is a process which destroys itself: “We cannot know things because between us and things there comes the mind” means that we can never know things because in order to know them we have got first to know them, i.e., to falsify them.

Notes

1. Cf. MIND, O.S., vol. xvi. p. 355.

2. Grundprob. der Erketissnntheorie, s. 14.

3. Grundprob. Erkennt., p. 23.

4. Grundprob. der Erkennt., p. 34.

5. Grundlea des Tr. R., s. 91.

6. Ibid., s. 91.

7. Ibid., s. 92.