The Concord School of Philosophy [pp. 49-71]

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.
end to be in possession of, only impressions and ideas. His
opponents should meet him here and drive back the ravager at
the entrance. But Kant took down his outer wall and allowed
the Trojan horse to enter with an armed force which he could
not cast out, and which kindled a conflagration which left nothing but ashes and mounds behind.
I take deeper objection to Kant's philosophy than was done
by President Porter or Professor Morris at the Concord meeting. First, I object entirely to his phenomenal theory of knowledge, to what is called phenomenology. Professor Mears says
in his paper of "the materials presented to us by the inner and
outer sense:" "These materials are not objects, and their presence does not constitute them experience until they have passed
through the pre-existing moulds of the mind and taken their
shape. They are not in space or in time of themselves; they
are neither one, nor many, nor all; they are neither like nor
unlike [is one rose not like another?]; they are neither substance nor qualities, neither cause nor effect; they have in fact
no being except as the mind by its own insight recognizes or
affirms it of them." The professor is forever lauding Kant for
undermining sensationalism; but he did so by making mind as
well as matter unknown, and thereby, without meaning it, landing us logically in agnosticism, in the darkness of which Huxley
builds up materialism. I could show that agnosticism claiming
to be logically derived from Kant is lowering thought in this
the last quarter of the nineteenth century quite as much as
sensationalism professing to come logically from Locke did in
the corresponding quarter of the eighteenth century. As Americans began then to search Locke, so they must now commence
to search Kant,-always after studying him and taking what is
good from him. Dr. Stirling thus expounds: "In short, both
outer object and inner subject, being perceived only through
sense, are, by necessary consequence, perceived not as they are
in themselves, or not as they just are, but merely as they appear. Whether we look to space or time, it is only our own
states we know in either,"-and I may add, our own states merely
as appearances. I hold that the mind begins with things and
not with phenomena, with things appearing and not mere appearances. Even a tree seen in the water with its head down
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