HKB
intervening object of our knowledge or supposed knowledge. That a thing is our object of thought is another word for its being our idea, and that means we know it.
The distinction between truth and falsehood, between reality and appearance, is not arrived at by comparing what we have before us in our mind with some inaccessible reality beyond. It is a distinction that grows up with the growth and organisation of our presentations—with their gradual systematisation and unification in one consciousness. But this consciousness which thinks, i.e. judges and reasons, is something superior to the contrast of physical and psychical: superior, i.e. in so far as it includes and surveys the antithesis, without superseding it. It is the “transcendental unity of consciousness” of Kant—his synthetic unity of apperception. It means that all ideas ultimately derive their reality from their coherence with each other in an all-embracing or infinite idea. Real in a sense ideas always are, but with an imperfect reality. Thus the education to truth is not—such a thing would be meaningless—ended by a rough and ready recommendation to compare our ideas with facts: it must teach the art which discovers facts. And the teaching may have to go through many grades or provinces: in each of which it is possible to acquire a certain virtuosoship without being necessarily an adept in another. It is through what is called the development of intellect, judgment, and reasoning that the faculty of truth-detecting or truth-selecting comes. And the common feature of all of these is, so to say, their superiority to the psychological mechanism, not in the sense of working without it and directly, but of being the organising unity or unifier and controller and judge of that mechanism. The certainty and necessity of truth and knowledge do not come from a constraint from the external thing which forces the inner idea into submission; they come from the inner necessity of conformity and coherence in the organism of experience. We in fact had better speak of ideas as experience—as felt reality: a reality however which has its degrees and perhaps even its provinces. All truth comes with the reasoned judgment, i.e. the syllogism—i.e. with the institution or discovery of relations of fact or element to fact or element, immediate or derivative, partial and less partial, up to its ideal coherence in one Idea. It is because this coherence is so imperfectly established in many human beings that their knowledge is so indistinguishable from opinion, and that they separate so loosely truth from error. They have not worked their way into a definitely articulated system, where there are no gaps, no abrupt transitions: their mental order is so loosely put together that divergences and contradictions which vex another drop off ineffectual from them.
(ii.) Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.