ABSTRACT
Critical realists are in the stimulating position of being forced to reanalyse many categorieswhich idealismhad too hastily thrown into the discard. In recentwritings I have tried to show that knowledge of genuinely external, or transcendent, objects is possessed by the human mind and have pointed to the mechanism which mediates such direct knowledge. Such direct knowledge, I have argued, rests upon the cognitive, or revelatory, value of discriminated contents which function within the act of cognition. The critical realist differs from the naïve realists chiefly in two ways: (1) he is aware of the mechanism making knowledge possible and not, as the naïve realist, only of the result; and (2) he is led by reflexion to revise the content of knowledge, that is, the object as thought. Such a theory of knowledge may be said to lie between naïve realism and representative realism, for it asserts, with the first, the directness of knowing and, with the second, the contents and processeswhichmediate this direct knowing. Its insight comes from amore careful study of the conditions and claims of knowing than was possible in the seventeenth century. Now, may not this alteration in theory of knowledge involve a new approach to the category of substance? Instead of rejecting substantial things-as the idealist was led to do-may we not accept them and interpret them without landing in any self-contradiction?
