Bowne, B. P. (1908). The problem of knowledge. In B. P. Bowne, The N. W. Harris Lectures for 1907. Personalism (pp. 54-110). Boston, MA, US: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/11613-002
How is experience possible? This is the question with which Kant inaugurated a new era in philosophy. Before his time there had been two views respecting the origin of knowledge. Since we do have an articulate experience, it is plain that the question of the origin of knowledge is subordinate to the deeper question respecting the origin of experience itself. If it should turn out that experience is a product of our rational nature, the folly of seeking to deduce reason from experience would be manifest. Hence the epochal significance of the question, How is experience possible? Between Hume and Kant the old sense empiricism is deprived of all visible means of rational support. It now belongs to the family of superstitions. Knowledge of course cannot be defined except in terms of itself, neither can it be deduced from that which is not knowledge. In some sense, then, there is no answer to the question, How is knowledge possible? for there is nothing deeper or other than knowledge by which to explain it. For us the real can never be primarily anything but the contents of experience and whatever we may infer from them. Back of experience we find no truly real of the noumenal type, but we infer or affirm a cause which is founding and maintaining the order of experience. To ask whether this order be true is really meaningless, unless we suppose some absolute system of impersonal reality back of experience; and this notion is baseless. When this is seen the only permissible question becomes this: Does our experience exhaust the possibilities of experience and consciousness? From a theistic standpoint the universe itself is no proper static existence, but only the divine thought finding realization through the divine will, and that thought for us must find expression in the order of our experience. But it is quite credible that our present experience does not exhaust the contents of that thought and so does not exhaust the possibilities of experience. We may dispense with the extra-mental universe of unreflecting thought. That view arises from confounding extra-human with extra-mental. We equally dispense with the unknowables of agnostic systems. These systems have a crudely realistic foundation and a self-destructive logic. We also set aside those anticlimactic notions of transfigured realism which attempts to define reality apart from intelligence and ends by presenting us with a set of barren and worthless abstractions as the truly real, while the whole system of living experience is excluded from reality altogether. We remain where we began, in the world of personal experience, and with the strengthened conviction that this world can never be explained on any impersonal plane. The world of experience exists for us only through a rational spiritual principle by which we reproduce it for our thought, and it has its existence apart from us only through a rational spiritual principle on which it depends, and the rational nature of which it expresses. This is our second step toward personalism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)