Whichever type obtained, the world would still be a universe
noetically. Its parts would be conjoined by knowledge, but in the
one case the knowledge would be absolutely unified, in the other it
would be strung along and overlapped.
The notion of one instantaneous or eternal Knower--either adjective
here means the same thing--is, as I said, the great intellectualist
achievement of our time. It has practically driven out that
conception of 'Substance' which earlier philosophers set such store
by, and by which so much unifying work used to be done--universal
substance which alone has being in and from itself, and of which all
the particulars of experience are but forms to which it gives
support. Substance has succumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the
English school. It appears now only as another name for the fact
that phenomena as they come are actually grouped and given in
coherent forms, the very forms in which we finite knowers experience
or think them together. These forms of conjunction are as much parts
of the tissue of experience as are the terms which they connect; and
it is a great pragmatic achievement for recent idealism to have made
the world hang together in these directly representable ways instead
of drawing its unity from the 'inherence' of its parts--whatever
that may mean--in an unimaginable principle behind the scenes.
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