EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 207 



is already immanent in any experience, and which 

 accordingly makes no determinate difference to any 

 one experience as compared with any other, or with 

 any past or future form of itself. The concept is 

 treated first as that which makes an experience 

 actually different, controlling its evolution towards 

 consistency, coherency, and objective reliability; 

 then, it is treated as that which has already effected 

 the organization of any and every experience that 

 comes to recognition at all. The fallacy from 

 which he never emerges consists in vibrating be 

 tween the definition of a concept as a rule of con- _ 

 structive synthesis in a differential sense, and the 

 definition of it as a static endowment lurking in 

 * mind,&quot; and giving automatically a hard and fixed 

 law for the determination of every experienced 

 object. The a priori conceptions of Kant as im 

 manent fall, like the rain, upon the just and the 

 unjust; upon error, opinion, and hallucination. 

 But Kant slides into these a priori functions the 

 preferential values exercised by empirical reflect 

 ive thought. The concept of triangle, taken geo 

 metrically, means doubtless a determinate method 

 of construing space elements; but to Kant it also 

 means something that exists in the mind prior to 

 all such geometrical constructions and that un 

 consciously lays down the law not only for their 

 conscious elaboration, but also for any space per 

 ception, even for that which takes a rectangle to 



