THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY 8 1 



their validity to the nature of thought, would lose all relevancy. 

 Forms of thought, universal relations, must be relations as such* 

 relations indifferent to, and hence external to, the terms which 

 they relate. Being thus external, they must remain inoperative 

 unless there is posited a somewhat for them to connect; and this 

 somewhat, not being constituted by the relations, must be con 

 ceived as a bare matter, whose ground can only be sought in a 

 contentless thing-in-itself or, having no ground, it becomes it 

 self a thing-in-itself. 



The question may become clearer upon comparing the critical 

 position with that of rationalism. The demand of rationalism 

 for substance was fundamentally a demand for a reality not 

 constituted by relations. The series of conditions must find a 

 final source in the unconditional, that is, in a categorical proposi 

 tion. The imperativeness of this demand for a categorical source 

 for conditional propositions arose from the fact that conditional 

 propositions were regarded as wholly conditional. The idea that 

 there could be no final distinction between conditional and exis 

 tential propositions was wholly foreign to the logic of rationalism. 

 For plainly, if conditional judgments involved in themselves a 

 categorical element, the positing of a distinct, purely categorical 

 proposition would be purposeless. 



Now the position which criticism takes is that the series of 

 conditions cannot be traced to a final categorical source, for such 

 source would lie beyond the limits of experience. It therefore 

 assumes that a certain set of conditional propositions must be 

 final for experience. But if criticism indeed recognized that con 

 ditional judgments as such contained categorical implications, 

 it would have no ground for assuming the finality of any given 

 set of conditions. The demand for finality would lose all perti 

 nence. What we wish to point out here is that the conception of a 

 set of final conditions, which lies at the very root of criticism, 

 inevitably carries with it the demand for a final given somewhat 

 to which these conditions may be applied. In short, we must 

 conclude that without the conception of a thing-in-itself, the 

 whole critical contention falls to the ground. 



