216 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



to our reasonings ; but this matter, in all that it has 

 that is intelligible, is our own work ; of the reality 

 &quot;in itself&quot; we know nothing and never shall know 

 anything, since we only get its refraction through the 

 forms of our faculty of perceiving. So that if we 

 claim to affirm something of it, at once there rises 

 the contrary affirmation, equally demonstrable, equally 

 plausible. The ideality of space is proved directly by 

 the analysis of knowledge, indirectly by the antinomies 

 to which the opposite theory leads. Such is the 

 governing idea of the Kantian criticism. It has 

 inspired Kant with a peremptory refutation of 

 &quot; empiricist &quot; theories of knowledge. It is, in our 

 opinion, definitive in what it denies. But, in what 

 it affirms, does it give us the solution of the problem ? 

 With Kant, space is given as a ready-made form of 

 our perceptive faculty, a veritable dcus ex machina, of 

 which we see neither how it arises, nor why it is 

 what it is rather than anything else. &quot; Things-in- 

 themselves &quot; are also given, of which he claims that we 

 can know nothing : by what right, then, can he affirm 

 their existence, even as &quot; problematic &quot; ? If the un 

 knowable reality projects into our perceptive faculty a 

 &quot; sensuous manifold &quot; capable of fitting into it exactly, 

 is it not, by that very fact, in part known ? And 

 when we examine this exact fitting, shall we not be 

 led, in one point at least, to suppose a pre-established 

 harmony between things and our mind, an idle 

 hypothesis, which Kant was right in wishing to avoid ? 

 At bottom, it is for not having distinguished degrees 

 in spatiality that he has had to take space ready made 

 as given whence the question how the &quot; sensuous 

 manifold &quot; is adapted to it. It is for the same reason 

 that he has supposed matter wholly developed into 



