92 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



Before taking up the new doctrine of the actual (which takes 

 the place of the rationalistic doctrine of substance), it will be 

 convenient for us to examine some of the more immediate con 

 sequences of the essentiality of relations. 



In the first place, the representative theory of knowledge has 

 lost its excuse for being. The Kantian compromise, which had 

 preserved the old ideal only to show it to be impossible of ful 

 fillment, is already only of historical significance. With the 

 independent essence has vanished the independent standard of 

 truth. The task of reason is not simply to construct a thought- 

 copy of a reality which exists prior to all thought. On the con 

 trary, there is no aspect of reality which is not wholly dependent 

 upon at least the possibility of its being known. The new 

 conception of truth, which Kant had introduced as an imperfect 

 substitute for the ideal, and as having relevancy only within a 

 restricted sphere of thought the conception of truth as service 

 in the organization of experience has occupied the whole 

 thought-universe. While the relation of correspondence between 

 idea and object is not denied, it is not regarded as an ultimate 

 and inexplicable datum. 



From one point of view the critical doctrine is thus carried to 

 its extreme. But from another it has lost much of its apparent 

 radicalism. To make use of Kant s famous figure, both the 

 popular prejudice, that the sun revolves about the earth, and 

 the enlightened doctrine, that the earth revolves about the sun, 

 have given way to the theory, that both alike revolve about their 

 common center of gravity. It is the sober conception of a system 

 that has triumphed. The startling thesis of the critical philos 

 ophy, that the constitutive relations of things do not belong to 

 the things themselves, but are supplied by the subject, has given 

 way to the synthetic view, that these relations are at once sub 

 jective and objective that, belonging to the organization of 

 experience, they appertain to both subject and object indis- 

 solubly. 



In the second place, the intuition of reason has become un- 



