IMMANUEL KANT 73 



the details may be. It means also that be 

 tween ourselves and the world round us, and 

 between the various things which we find in 

 the world, there is no ultimate separateness 

 of existence such as seems to be assumed in 

 the ordinary physical conception of the world. 

 All are parts of one inseparable whole. 



This is a conclusion of such stupendous and 

 far-reaching import that it may need centuries 

 for the world to take it in and even dimly 

 realise its implications, and where it leads 

 us to. Sooner or later, however, it will be 

 realised that the materialism of the nineteenth 

 century has been nothing but an insignificant 

 eddy in the stream of human progress. In 

 Kant's writings his thought was evidently 

 trammelled by the difficulty of realising how 

 great a leap forward he was making. Hume's 

 scepticism had not completely done its work 

 in his mind, for he still postulates the existence 

 of a so-called noumenal world of things-in- 

 themselves which are the unknowable cause 

 of the constant newness and variety in our 

 experience. He also retains the idea of finite 

 individual minds, each armed, as it were, with 

 general ideas or ' categories ' which convert 



