We grant that we can know God only so far as his activities reveal him, and so far as our minds and hearts are receptive of his revelation. The appropriate faculties must be exercised--not the mathematical, the logical, or the prudential, but the ethical and the religious. It is the merit of Ritschl that he recognizes the practical in distinction from the speculative reason; his error is in not recognizing that, when we do thus use the proper powers of knowing, we gain not merely subjective but also objective truth, and come in contact not simply with God's activities but also with God himself. Normal religious judgments, though dependent upon subjective conditions, are not simply "judgments of worth" or "value-judgments,"--they give us the knowledge of "things in themselves." Edward Caird says of his brother John Caird (Fund. Ideas of Christianity, Introd. cxxi)--"The conviction that God can be known and is known, and that, in the deepest sense, all our knowledge is knowledge of him, was the corner-stone of his theology."
Ritschl's phenomenalism is allied to the positivism of Comte, who regarded all so-called knowledge of other than phenomenal objects as purely negative. The phrase "Positive Philosophy" implies indeed that all knowledge of mind is negative; see Comte, Pos. Philosophy, Martineau's translation, 26, 28, 33--"In order to observe, your intellect must pause from activity--yet it is this very activity you want to observe. If you cannot effect the pause, you cannot observe; if you do effect it, there is nothing to observe." This view is refuted by the two facts; (1) consciousness, and (2) memory; for consciousness is the knowing of the self side by side with the knowing of its thoughts, and memory is the knowing of the self side by side with the knowing of its past; see Martineau, Essays Philos. and Theol., 1:24-40, 207-212. By phenomena we mean "facts, in distinction from their ground, principle, or law"; "neither phenomena nor qualities, as such, are perceived, but objects, percepts, or beings; and it is by an after-thought or reflex process that these are connected as qualities and are referred to as substances"; see Porter, Human Intellect, 51, 238, 520, 619-637, 640-645.