CHAPTER II. The Metaphysical Criterion and the Metaphysical Method

THE METAPHYSICAL CRITERION AND THE METAPHYSICAL METHOD

§ 1. In the principle that “Reality is not self-contradictory” we have a universal and certain criterion of reality which is not merely negative, but implies the positive assertion that reality is a consistent system. § 2. The validity of this criterion is not affected by the suggestion that it may be merely a Logical Law; § 3. Nor by the raising of doubt whether all our knowledge is not merely “relative,” a doubt which is itself meaningless. § 4. As to the material of the system, it is experience or immediate psychical fact. § 5. It must be actual experience, not mere “possibilities” of experience; but actual experience must not be identified with “sensation.” § 6. Nor must we assume that experience consists of subjects and their states; nor again, that it is a mere succession of “states of consciousness.” § 7. The differentia of matter of experience is its immediacy, i.e. its combination in a single whole of the two aspects of existence and content. §8. This union of existence and content is broken up in reflective knowledge or thought, but may be restored at a higher level. § 9. Experience further always appears to be implicitly complex in respect of its content. § 10. An adequate apprehension of reality would only be possible in the form of a complete or “pure” experience, at once all-inclusive, systematic, and direct. The problem of Metaphysics is to ascertain what would be the general or formal character of such an experience, and how far the various provinces of our human experience and knowledge approximate to it. The knowledge Metaphysics can give us of the ultimate nature of reality as it would be present in a complete experience, though imperfect, is final as far as it goes. § 11. As to the method of Metaphysics, it must be analytical, critical, non-empirical, and non-inductive. It may also be called a priori if we carefully avoid confusing the a priori with the psychologically primitive. Why our method cannot be the Hegelian Dialectic 18