FALSE RELATIVISMS.

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The relativity involved in our sense per

ception of material reality (i 18, 121, 126) suggests the analogous

question as to whether there is also a relativity involved in in

tellectual thought, i.e. in conception and judgment, or knowledge

proper. There is one obvious sense, already indicated (126) in

which whatever is known intellectually must be relative to the

knower : in the sense, namely, that in order to be known it must

be manifested, or set in relation, or cognitively united, to the

intellect ; and that it can be known only in the measure in which

it is so manifested.

But sensist philosophers maintain that intellectual cognition

is of the same order as sense awareness (83-85); that, therefore,

just as the domain beyond sense consciousness is transformed by

a subjective factor in perception, so that we perceive it otherwise

than it is independently of conscious perception, so too this

domain, having been transformed by the subjective factor in the

process of conception, is conceived and judged intellectually,

otherwise than it is really and extramentally ; and that the ne

cessity which characterizes our abstract judgments of the ideal

order is a merely subjective, psychological necessity, wholly re

lative to, and produced by, the tie facto constitution of our minds

(40-44) : the upshot of which would be that all our intellectual

knowledge is relative in the sense that it can attain only to

subjectively wrought mental appearances of reality, and not at

208

RELATIVIST THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 209

all to reality as it is. This is the Positivist form of Relativism,

as propounded by Comte, Mill, Spencer, Huxley, etc. 1

Then, too, Kant and his followers have given such an account

of the way in which objects arise in consciousness, and of the

mental conditions under which they are perceived by sense and

interpreted by intellect, that all objects of knowledge are made

out to be mental products of subjective factors which so modify

the extramental reality given in our cognitive processes that this

reality cannot be known as it really is. If, therefore, our mental

constitution and forms were different from what they are the

known product would be likewise different from what it is : which

is relativism in the sceptical or subjectivist sense over again. a

We, on the other hand, have repeatedly emphasized the fact

(43, 44) that while sense data are partially dependent, for the

qualities they reveal to consciousness, on the subjective factor

which is the perceiver s own organic constitution, and are relative

to this latter, so that e.g. sugar could conceivably taste bitter, or

snow appear red, if our organic constitution as sentient beings

were other than it is, on the other hand certain objects of intellect

viz. abstract relations between objective concepts abstracted

from sense data, are necessarily such as we judge them to be,

e.g. " the whole is greater than its part," " two and two are four,"

etc., not for our intellects alone, or relatively to our intellects

merely, or because our intellects are so constituted, but absolutely

and for all conceivable intellects (44). In other words, we have

contended that through abstract intellectual conception and

interpretation of concrete sense data, and intellectual inference

from such data, we can attain to a knowledge which, as far as it

goes and as far as it is true, attains to what reality is absolutely,

i.e. not merely to how reality appears to our intellects, or to how

it is relatively to the actual constitution of our intellects, but to

what it is in itself, and what it must therefore be for all intellects. 3

1 Cf. JEANNIKRE, Op. tit,, p. 316. * Ibid., p. 317.

* Of course if there be other orders of finite intellects, besides the human intel

lect, e.g. purely spiritual intelligences, we can conceive their manner of apprehend

ing reality only after the analogy of the human intellect : just as we can conceive

the Divine Knowledge of reality only negatively and analogically by eliminating

the imperfections of our own human mode of understanding (74). Pure spiritual

intelligences would not have knowledge by abstract conception from data coming

through organic sense channels, or by analytic and synthetic processes of judgment,

or by discursive reasoning, but by some more perfect, more direct and intuitive,

apprehension of the real (p. 15, n. 3). Their conceptions of reality, if we can so speak

of them, would not be abstractive elaborations like ours. We have no positive con-

VOL. II. 14

2 1 o THEOR Y OF KNO W LEDGE

Now this contention is quite compatible with holding that

the reason why we judge material reality to have such and such

qualities is partly because our bodily sense organs (which are a

part of material reality) are so constituted as to reveal these

qualities to our intellects ; and with holding that if we had bodily

sense organs otherwise constituted (or if material reality, of which

they are portion, were otherwise constituted) we should ap

prehend material reality as having other qualities. Moreover,

the contention is not independent of the assumption that all

human intellects are similarly constituted, are of the same general

order : the reason why men generally employ the same processes,

and make use of the same ultimate concepts, in their interpreta

tion of reality, is not only because the realities which are objects

of intellectual knowledge manifests themselves similarly to all

human intellects, but because the realities which are subjects of

this knowledge, vis. human intellects themselves, are of the same

order, or uniform in all men. 1 But the contention that intel

lectual knowledge can attain (inadequately of course) to the nature

of reality as it is extramentally, does imply that this latter, as

it manifests itself to, and is interpreted by, intellect, is not

"moulded," "metamorphosed," " transformed," in the very pro-

ception of the nature of the purely spiritual cognitive processes whereby they would

(intellectually) apprehend material reality with its spatial extension, solidity, shape,

number, and other sense qualities ; or by which they would apprehend our human

conceptions and interpretations of material reality. What we mean, therefore, by

saying that our necessary judgments are necessarily true for all intelligences is that

such judgments so faithfully represent the nature of realitv that by no intelligence,

not even the Divine Intelligence, could reality be so apprehended as that our know

ledge of it would appear false, that e.g. two and t\vo would not be four, or the whole

not be greater than its part.

1 Nevertheless the ultimate reason why any individual man assents to immediately

evident facts and principles, such as " I exist," " The whole is greater than its part,"

etc., as revealing to him the existence and nature of reality, is not because he finds

all other men forming them and assenting to them (which would involve a vicious

circle), but because he is conscious that reality forces these interpretations of itself

upon his intellect, and because reflection shows him that there are on the side of his

intellect no subjective factors the influence of which would cause his intellect to re

present the reality otherwise than it is extramentally. If an individual man happens

to have any sense faculty the organic structure and function of which are abnormal,

so that, e.g. a field of poppies appears to him as green, he can, by reflection on

his experiences, and comparison of them with those of other men, discover the defect

and make allowance for it. If, however, the exercise of his intellectual faculty of

interpretation and reflection is through any cause impeded, and therefore abnormal,

so that he forms and asserts judgments that are manifestly self-contradictory or false,

as, e.g. that he is dead, or that he is a snake, or that his head is larger than his

body, he has obviously lost the power of exercising aright his intellectual faculty

of judgment and reflection, and is, as we say, "mentally deranged," a " victim ol

delusions," " insane" (cf. rig, 122, 126, supra).

RELATIVIST THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 211

cess of intellectual cognition, by any mental factors of which

intellect is unaware, and for the influence of which, therefore, it

cannot make allowance. 1

This contention we have already vindicated, not by maintain

ing that the intellect passively and intuitively mirrors reality,

for it does not ; or by denying that it has specific modes or

processes of cognition wherein it necessarily constructs purely

subjective logical entities, entia rationis, and apprehends the

real only through their instrumentality, for it has such modes

(conception, abstraction, generalization, judgment, comparison,

inference), and it does construct such purely subjective entities

(abstractness, universality, and logical relations of all sorts) ;

but by showing, on the one hand, that through the exercise of

its power of reflective introspection on its own cognitive processes

it can and does discriminate between the real which is given it

to interpret, and its own subjective products, the various logical

relations whereby it carries on this interpretation, so that these

subjective, " constructive " or " constitutive " factors of intellectual

cognition do not unconsciously fuse with, and transform or trans

figure, the extramental reality which is given to intellect and

which intellect interprets by means of them ; and by showing,

on the other hand, as against Kantism, that the various thought-

objects which intellect comes into possession of through conscious

experience, i.e. the (ultimate) empirical concepts or categories,

and their intellectually apprehended differences, are furnished to

consciousness not by an unconscious, subjective elaboration-

process gratuitously ascribed to factors of the real or transcen

dental intellect, and supposed to be wrought upon a "given,"

extramental, and therefore transcendental and unknowable non-

self reality, but that they are furnished by, and are manifestations

of, this extramental reality itself.

1 Cf. Ontology, 3, p. 45; 36, p. 140 n. ; 37, pp. 145-6; 89, pp. 339-4?

93, pp. 355-6. " It is true . . . that if the reality, or realities, which form the

materials of our knowledge, were metamorphosed in the process of our

knowing them, our knowledge of them would be deceptive and misleading; nay,

more, it is even true that though they were not de facto so metamorphosed, still,

if they might be, without our being aware of the metamorphosis, our knowledge

would by this possibility be rendered entirely suspect mere unreliable guesswork.

But, then, we may fairly ask, have Kant s disciples any ground whatsoever for such

a suspicion any more than Descartes had for his suspicion that he might have

been the sport of some malicious sprite rather than the creature of an All- Wise

Creator ? " Art. " Appearance and Reality," Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Nov.

1908, p. 476.

14*

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