KANT AND HEGEL 97 



substance or matter, and quality being no 

 longer a mysterious attribute of substance. 



It is evident that we cannot apply this 

 or that category at will. Specific categories 

 seem, as it were, to be embodied in all that 

 we experience. By no mere arbitrary process 

 of thought can I make a piece of stone into 

 a living organism or vice versa. I can, how 

 ever, deliberately abstract from what the 

 living organism really is, and regard it as 

 simply a material system. This, indeed, is 

 what the mechanistic theory of life invites 

 me to do. I can also abstract from what 

 the stone is, and regard it as simply a patch 

 of colour. This, or something like this, was 

 what Berkeley and Hume invited us to do, 

 pointing out that the stone, as a substance 

 outside us, is only a metaphysical product 

 of our imagination, and that all that is 

 really experienced is a patch of colour. But, 

 as Kant showed in principle, we cannot thus 

 divest our world of its meaning : we cannot 

 reduce higher to lower categories, and thus 

 explain the higher away : we find that the 

 higher categories are embodied in the very 

 texture of our experience. 



