The Kantian Centennial [pp. 394-424]

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.
which it occurs or of purposes to which it can be applied. So
far as the world of sense is concerned, it may be true that wecannot know things in themselves, that we are limited to phenomena alone, and that human science can go no further than
multiply its observations, add to its inductions, and make its
definitions more precise, comprehensive, and systematic. But
should we concede all this of material things in themselves, it
does not therefore follow that more is not true of the mind's
knowledge of itself. Let it be granted that sense knowledge
gives us the phenomena only at which we gaze as they fly, that
these are formed into things as the masses of vapor are held in
form and place and color by the great forces that penetrate and
mould them into mountains and glaciers and pasture-lands and
forests and rocks, till in an instant they vanish into smoke. Let
this be granted, and still it may be none the less true that thethinking agent is known to and by itself as a thing in itself, i.e.,
a potent and permanent and identical reality, and indeed that
it must be so known in order that the contrast should even be
suspected by the mind between a thing in itself and its manifestations or phenomena. All this Kant overlooked, and in overlooking it in effect denied. As in the sense-world he found phenomena only, so in the spirit-world he recognized only ideas, or
rather by recognizing only phenomena in either he reduced the
world of both matter and spirit to the ideas appropriate to each.
Starting with the laudable purpose to emerge from the shadowy
world of impressions and ideas into which the scepticism of
Hume had brought him, he succeeded so far as to find it necessary for the purposes of science to connect these phenomenaby
a priori forms and categories and ideas. He found, however,
that even if the relations which connected phenomenawere real
and necessary, the materials were shadowy still, and that consequently the universe of matter and spirit must be resolved into a
system of related ideas or phenomena given in what we call sense
and consciousness. Things and realities were nowhere at the
end because they were denied at the beginning. The conjuror
had undertaken to draw out of his pocket more than he had put
into it, i.e., to evolve realities from ideas by metaphysical jugs
glery. He thought by the force of necossary and a priori relations to make a real universe of matter and spi.rit out of the
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