his inner judgment, he affirms what is true, not only thinking the object, but recognizing what he naturally thinks. Hence there is a true affirmation and a true negation, and these relate to the form as much as to the matter of thought, so that the question regarding the form and matter of thought and their relation to each other has nothing to do with the question whether man does or does not possess the truth. It was modern philosophers, and especially Germans, that confounded these two utterly distinct questions.

"(4) It is, therefore, false to say that we must unite the matter to the form of thought, in order to possess the truth, or, as Hegel puts it, in order that thought may become a real cognition. By the addition of matter to form, the quantity of human knowledge is certainly increased, but its quality is not thereby changed so that, from being false, it becomes true. Knowledge may be more or less great, more or less materiated; but this has nothing whatever to do with its truth. The question, therefore, regarding the truth of knowledge does not depend upon the matter of knowledge, but upon pronouncing true judgment with respect both to the form and the matter of knowledge.

"(5) To call the form united to the matter real cognition is an abuse of terms. Every human cognition is real, even that which is merely formal; for, although the object of cognition may be a pure idea, still the act of thought which terminates in it is real, as much as the intelligent subject that performs it.

"In all the passage quoted from Hegel, therefore, there is only this much of truth, that the absolute anoetics are wrong in considering the matter of thought, the reality, as a world that stands by itself, utterly apart from, and independent of, thought. . . . But this error was not well observed by Hegel, who, in observing it, fell into the opposite one. In fact, although we may prove that the real world cannot exist without a mind, the consequence drawn from this fact by Hegel does not follow, viz., that there is an absolute interdependence between external reality and the human mind. This interdependence cer

tainly exists, if we speak of the world in so far as it is actually known by man; but man, when he thinks the world, thinks it as existing absolutely, and therefore as independent of the thought of him who thinks it. At the same time, through a higher reflection, he sees that this world cannot exist really without being thought by some mind, for the reason that the act of being upon which it depends is eternal, éssentially intelligible, and therefore from all eternity the object of an intelligence.*

"Let us now give a sample of the other way in which Hegel tries to inculcate his system.

"He sets out with a sensistic prejudice. Indeed, at the bottom of all those philosophies, which seem so speculative, there always lurks sensism, or even materialism, as we shall see. 'We have,' he says, '. . . already alluded to the ancient belief, according to which the real in objects ... does not present itself immediately in conscious

but must be reflected upon, in order to give the real nature of the object.'† 'By reflection something is changed in the way in which the content originally is in feeling, intuition, and perception. It is, therefore, only by means of a change that the true nature of the object comes into consciousness.' 'Inasmuch as the real nature of things becomes apparent only in reflection, and this reflection is my activity, it follows that this nature is the product of my spirit as a thinking subject, of me according to my simple universality, as the absolutely self-present Ego-or of my freedom.' §

* See an excellent article, entitled Mr. Spencer on the Independence of Matter, by Prof. T. H. Green, in the Contemporary Review for March, 1878.

"Es ist . . . der alte Glaube angeführt werden, dass was das Wahrhafte an Gegenständen . . . sich nicht unmittelbar im Bewusstsein einfinde. sondern dass man erst darüber nachdenken müsse, um zur wahrhaften Beschaffenheit des Gegenstandes zu gelangen" (Encyclopædie, § 21).

"Durch das Nachdenken wird an der Art wie der Inhalt zunächst in der Empfindung, Anschauung, Vorstellung ist, etwas verändert; es ist somit nur vermittelst einer Veränderung, dass die wahre Natur des Gegenstandes zum Bewusstsein kommt " (Ibid., § 22).

§ "Indem im Nachdenken ebensosehr die wahrhafte Natur zum Vorschein kommt als diess Denken meine Thatigkeit ist, so ist jene ebensosehr das Erzeugniss meines Geistes und zwar als denkenden Subjekts, Meiner nach meiner einfachen Allgemeinheit, als des schlechthin bei sich seyenden Ichs oder meiner Freiheit" (Ibid., § 23).

"This is the way in which Hegel pretends to demonstrate that the matter and reality of things issue from the forms of things or from ideas. We believe every man who understands what an important matter and what a paradox are involved in this thesis, will demand, before accepting it, a demonstration a little less flimsy, and, I would almost say, a little less slippery than this. If we analyze it, we shall see that it is vitiated in a hundred places.

"(1) It has for its foundation sensism, a sensism received as a prejudice, accepted as true without even the semblance of proof. Indeed, Hegel lays it down as something beyond question, that the object is given in sensation and in perception; that is, in sense-perception, as is shown by the context. Such, indeed, is the prejudice of sensism. . . . If it be admitted that sense gives us the object, then feeling is transformed into thinking; for this is the essential difference between feeling and thinking, that the former has not an object, but only a term, whereas the latter has an object sensation is a modification, a mode of being of the sentient subject; the idea is an object entirely different from the thinking subject, never a modification, never a mode of its being.

"(2) Hence Hegel wrongly gives the name of reflection to what is only intellective perception, whereby real being is apprehended as the term of initial or ideal being. This perception, which presents real things to thought, is an immediate operation, for the simple reason that sense has no prior object, and merely adds an element to the object of perception. Reflection, on Reflection, on the contrary, is mediate, because it supposes the object as already given, and does not itself construct that object. From this error Hegel falls into another, which is even an absurdity. It is this: Nothing immediate can be true, and all truth is mediated.

"(3) Hence, in the same way, it is altogether false, with a vulgar and sensistic falseness, to say that reflection produces a modification in the object previously given in sensation. It is doubly false: First, because, since, as we said above, the object is not given in sensation (the

object is merely ideal, being intuited by the mind, and therefore does not enter into sensation), reflection cannot modify it. The truth, on the contrary, is that there is intellective perception, which does not indeed modify it, but constitutes it for man, perception being that act of the intelligence whereby real things are immediately known, as we have already seen. Second, because neither perception nor reflection modifies or changes objects in any way. . . .

"(4) Even supposing that Hegelian reflection did modify objects, it is a purely gratuitous inference that he draws therefrom, when he says, 'By reflection something. is changed in the way in which the content originally is in feeling. . . . It is, therefore, only by means of a change that the true nature of the object comes into consciousness.' If the object is already in sensation, and is afterwards modified in reflection, how does our philosopher know that the true nature of the object results from this modification and is not already given in sensation? What proof does he adduce? How does he justify this predilection for reflection? He offers us no intrinsic reason. But this man, who in everything else sets such small store by common sense and the ancient philosophers, and who boasts himself content with few judges, is, nevertheless, here content to have recourse to the authority of common sense and of the ancient logicians—interpreted, to be sure, in his own fashion. He assures us that it is admitted by common sense that, in order to know the true nature of things, we must elaborate the data and transform them by thought; that ancient philosophy recognized the agreement between ideas and things, and concluded that things are in themselves as they are conceived in thought. Hence, concludes our philosopher, thought is the truth of things, objective truth. That common sense, together with ancient philosophy, admits the agreement between ideas and things, is most true; but it does not, in the smallest degree, follow that thought produces things. If, instead of the equivocal, or, more correctly, subjective word thought, we put idea (and Hegel himself uses the two promiscuously, thereby rendering his whole reasoning confused), we too

shall be willing to admit that the idea is the objective truth of things. But this does not mean that the subjective thought of man produces objective truth, that is, the idea. On the contrary, the idea is itself given to the human subject to contemplate as an object, and hence it cannot be a production of thought, which does not exist without it or before it, that is, does not exist without its natural object. Hence the object, which is ideal being, is united to real things as a principle to its terms, and these are not without that principle; but terminated being, that is, being with its terms, is before human thought and independent of it, and is not by any means, as Hegel holds, a production of it. It is thus that we must interpret common sense and ancient philosophy, and not make them talk vagaries, as Hegel always does. As to pretending that common sense admits that, in order to know the true nature of things, thought must elaborate and transform their data,' this is equivocal talk, which may be true, but not in the sense in which Hegel means it. The phrase 'to know the true nature of things' either means the same thing as 'to know the nature of things,' and then the word true is superfluous, or else it means to know the inner nature of things more profoundly,' and then the word true is, to say the least, equivocal, because we may know little or much of a thing, and, in either case, the knowledge may be true; for surely the nature of a thing may be known in different degrees, more or less implicitly, and yet the knowledge may be always true. If, however, in order to know the nature of a thing more profoundly, we must more thoroughly elaborate that thing and transform the data of thought, as Hegel says, this does not mean that we must necessarily recognize as false the knowledge which we had before, but merely that, if into the knowledge which we had before there has entered any error through our wills, that error is dropped and then other explicit determinations are added to the thing. But the whole of this operation is always performed by means of the idea of being, from the womb of which is drawn all that before was virtual, and of new sensible experiences, which show