Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher eBook

Henry Festing Jones
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 340 pages of information about Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher.

Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher eBook

Henry Festing Jones
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 340 pages of information about Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher.

The same holds true of reality.  The question of the reality or unreality of things cannot arise except in an intelligence.  Animals have neither illusions nor truths—­unless they are self-conscious.  The reality, which man sets over against his own inadequate knowledge, is posited by him; and it has no meaning whatsoever except in this contrast.  And to endeavour to conceive a reality which no one knows, is to assert a relative term without its correlative, which is absurd; it is to posit an ideal which is opposed to nothing actual.

In this view, so commonly held in our day, that knowledge is subjective and reality unknowable, we have another example of the falseness and inconsistency of abstract thinking.  If this error be committed, there is no fundamental gain in saying with Kant, that things are relative to the thought of all, instead of asserting, with Berkeley or Browning, that they are relative to the thought of each.  The final result is the same.  Things as known, are reduced into mere creations of thought; things as they are, are regarded as not thoughts, and as partaking in no way of the nature of thought.  And yet “reality” is virtually assumed to be given at the beginning of knowledge; for the sensations are supposed to be emanations from it, or roused in consciousness by it.  These sensations, it is said, man does not make, but receives, and receives from the concealed reality.  They flow from it, and are the manifestations of its activity.  Then, in the next moment, reality is regarded as not given in any way, but as something to be discovered by the effort of thought; for we always strive to know things, and not phantoms.  Lastly, the knowledge thus acquired being regarded as imperfect, and experience showing to us continually that every object has more in it than we know, the reality is pronounced to be unknowable, and all knowledge is regarded as failure, as acquaintance with mere phantoms.  Thus, in thought, as in morality, the ideal is present at the beginning, it is an effort after explicit realization, and its process is never complete.

Now, all these aspects of the ideal of knowledge, that is, of reality, are held by the unsophisticated intelligence of man; and abstract philosophy is not capable of finally getting rid of any one of them.  It, too, holds them alternately.  Its denial of the possibility of knowing reality is refuted by its own starting-point; for it begins with a given something, regarded as real, and its very effort to know is an attempt to know that reality by thinking.  But it forgets these facts, when it is discovered that knowledge at the best is incomplete.  It is thus tossed from assertion to denial, and from denial to assertion; from one abstract or one-sided view of reality, to the other.

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Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.