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GEORGE BURCH
edge. Neither can ideas exist objectively, for ideas must be ideated, and ideating is not knowing, so the theory of objective idealism is false." The objects of perception, of introspection, and of thought are equally subjective and consequently illusory. The illusory must not be thought of as an appearance of the real. Reality does not appear, and appearances do not reveal reality. There is no real relation between appearance and reality. Reality is the ground of appearances, but this is not a relation between them. Appearances may be related to appearances, and reality to reality, but the only relation of appearance to reality is that of false identity (to be taken for reality when it is not). We cannot, therefore, argue from our false, subjective, illusory knowledge of appearances to any true, objective, certain knowledge of reality. Our actual experience, however, is not completely false, subjective, and illusory. Experience, however false, contains a true element, and when we eliminate the false part (everything which can be doubted), the indubitable residue is true. This residue, the ground of appearance, is never the object, which is always dubitable, but the subject, which is indubitable. When we dissociate from our intuition of the self all those elements which belong to the not-self, nothing remains to be intuited, and the self will be seen as pure intuition, with no distinction between being and knowledge. It is nowise determined by our knowledge of it and so nowise subjective but purely objective. The object is always subjective, but the subject is always objective.
The cosmological argument, based on an analysis of the phenomenal world itself, infers its unreality from its transiency
18 "We therefore rule out a rational intuition in the sense that thought can think something and the same can become fact, quite as objective as anything real could be. Such a possibility, if it could be realized, would result in a dream-like world of mere appearances, not in a reality which could be said to be intuited in our sense of the term. Reality must pre-exist the intuition of it and not be a product of the same." ("Rational Intuition," Philosophical Quarterly (July 1955), p. 111.)
18 "An idea is, as and when we think it. It is only in thinking the idea that we give a body or substance to it. It is otherwise with reality." (Ibid., p. 116.)
20 The subject is the knower, not to be confused with the content of consciousness, which is an empirical object.
