FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 191 



comes into view as simply the postulate of disjunctive syllogizing? 

 How in the world can disjunctive syllogizing, the confessed act of 

 the /-thinking intelligence, really postulate anything as Totality of 

 Conditions, in any other sense than the total of conditions for such 

 syllogizing? -- namely, the conditioning I that organizes and does 

 the reasoning? There is surely no warrant for calling this total, which 

 simply transcends and conditions the subject and the object of sen- 

 sible experiences, by any loftier name than that which Kant had 

 already given it in the Deduction of the Categories, when he desig- 

 nated it the "originally synthetic unity of apperception (self-con- 

 sciousness)," or "the /-thinking (das ich-denke) that must accompany 

 all my mental presentations," - that is to say, the whole Self, or 

 thinking Person, idealistically interpreted. The use of the name God 

 in this connection, where Kant is in fact only seeking the roots of the 

 three orders of the syllogism when reasoning has by supposition been 

 restricted to the subject-matter of experience, is assuredly without war- 

 rant; yes, without excuse. In fact, it is because Kant sees that the 

 third Idea, as reached through his analysis, is intrinsically immanent, 

 - resident in the self that syllogizes disjunctively, and, because so 

 resident, incapable of passing the bounds of possible experience, - 

 while he also sees that the idea of God should mean a Being tran- 

 scendent of every other thinker, himself a distinct individual con- 

 sciousness, though not an empirically limited one, --it is, I say, 

 precisely because he sees all this, that he pronounces the Idea, though 

 named with the name of God, utterly without pertinence to indicate 

 God's existence, and so enters upon that part of his Transcendental 

 Dialectic which is, in chief, directed to exposing the transcendental 

 illusion involved in the celebrated Ontological Proof. Consistently, 

 Kant in this famous analytic of the syllogism should be talking, not 

 of the Soul, the World, and God, but of the Subject (as uniting- 

 principle of its sense-perceptions), the Object (as uniting-principle of 

 all possible sense- per ce pts) , and the Self (the whole / presiding over 

 experience in both its aspects, as these are discriminated in Time and 

 Space) . By what rational title - - even granting for the sake of argu- 

 ment that they are the genuine postulates of categorical and of con- 

 ditional syllogizing -- can this Subject and this Object, these corre- 

 late factors in the Self, rank as Ideas with the Idea of their condi- 

 tioning Whole the Self, that in its still unaltered identity fulfills, in 

 Practical Reason, the high role of Person? If this no more than meets 

 the standard of Idea, how can they meet it? How can two somethings, 

 neither of which is the Totality of Conditions, and both of which are 

 therefore in fact conditioned, deserve the same title with that which 

 is intrinsically the Totality of Conditions, and, as such, uncondi- 

 tioned? To call the conditioned and the unconditioned alike Ideas is 

 a confounding of dignities that Pure Reason should not tolerate, 



