For the human consciousness, our sole instrument for apprehending the world, is trinitarian. I should say we have three antennæ—Reason, Will, Emotion—wherewith to grope out into our environment, were it not that those antennæ are triune, and no knowledge of the outer world ever comes to us save with all the three factors intertwined in varying proportions. Why then should we throw away all that Will and Emotion tell us, putting asunder what God has put together? To represent the Report of the bare intellectual faculty as the Report of the whole Commission is fraudulence. Will and Emotion have too meekly contented themselves with a Minority Report. It is time they insisted on their views colouring and fusing into the Report Proper. Even Kant, having reached spiritual bankruptcy by his “Critique of Pure Reason,” apologetically called in the Practical Reason to save the situation, thereby importing into his system an absurd dualism. Kant’s Practical Reason is simply Will and Emotion restored to their proper rank as conjoint antennæ of apprehension. The effort to probe the universe with an isolated antenna was foredoomed to failure. The Practical Reason should have been called in, not after the bankruptcy as a sort of receiver to make the best of a bad estate, but before starting operations, as a partner with additional capital.
A fact, then, to be a fact, must be born into an autocosm, must be caught up not only into intellectual perception, but into emotional and volitional relations. The so-called scientific fact is thus two-thirds unborn. It is not a fact, but a facet of a fact. ’Tis only by a shorthand convention, indeed, that anything can be treated as purely an object of intellectual discrimination. Every substantive in the dictionary is a shrivelled leaf which requires the sap and greenness of a living sentence to restore it to life. This is best seen in words with more than one meaning, like “bark,” which needs to be in a sentence to show whether it is canine or marine. But every word is in the same ambiguous case, and acquires its nuance from its relations with life. The molecule or structural unit of reality being thus triune, it is obvious that the isolated presentation of the material aspect of things in the shape of words under the name of Science can never be a presentation of Truth. It is a mere abstraction from the trinitarian wholeness of experience. Full life exists in three dimensions, Art in two, and Science in one, like a solid, a superficies, and a line, and the line as little reproduces the plenitude of being as the coast-line of a map the beetling cliffs and thundering seas.