ULTIMATE SCIENTIFIC IDEAS. 51 



butes of entities or as non-entities. We are compelled to 

 think of them as existing; and yet cannot bring them 

 within those conditions under which existences are repre- 

 sented in thought. 



Shall we then take refuge in the Kantian doctrine? 

 shall we say that Space and Time are forms of the intellect, 

 — " a priori laws or conditions of the conscious mind " ? 

 To do this is to escape from great difficulties by rushing 

 into greater. The proposition with which Kant's philoso- 

 phy sets out, verbally intelligible though it is, cannot by 

 any effort be rendered into thought — cannot be interpreted 

 into an idea properly so called, but stands merely for a 

 pseud-idea. In the first place, to assert that Space 



and Time, as we are conscious of them, are subjective condi- 

 tions, is by implication to assert that they are not objective 

 realities: if the Space and Time present to our minds be- 

 long to the ego, then of necessity they do not belong to the 

 non-ego. Now it is absolutely impossible to think this. 

 The very fact on which Kant bases his hypothesis — namely 

 that our consciousness of Space and Time cannot be sup- 

 pressed — testifies as much; for that consciousness of Space 

 and Time which we cannot rid ourselves of, is the conscious- 

 ness of them as existing objectively. It is useless to reply 

 that such an inability must inevitably result if they are sub- 

 jective forms. The question here is — What does conscious- 

 ness directly testify? And the direct testimony of con- 

 sciousness is, that Time and Space are not within but with- 

 out the mind ; and so absolutely independent of it that they 

 cannot be conceived to become non-existent even were the 

 mind to become non-existent. Besides being posi- 



tively unthinkable in what it tacitly denies, the theory of 

 Kant is equally unthinkable in what it openly affirms. It 

 is not simply that we cannot combine the thought of Space 

 with the thought of our own personality, and contemplate 

 the one as a property of the other — though our inability 

 to do this would prove the inconceivableness of the hypo- 



