78 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



speech, thought, and feeling, do, equally with the 

 vulgar, acknowledge their sensations to be the effects 

 of something external to them : this knowledge, 

 therefore, is as evidently intuitive as our knowledge 

 of our sensations themselves is intuitive. And here 

 the question merges in the fundamental problem of 

 transcendental metaphysics ; to which science we 

 leave it. 



But although the extreme doctrine of the Idealist 

 metaphysicians, that objects are nothing but our 

 sensations and the laws which connect them, has 

 appeared to few subsequent thinkers to be worthy of 

 assent ; the only point of much real importance is one 

 upon which those metaphysicians are now very gene- 

 rally considered to have made oat their case : viz., 

 that all we know of objects is the sensations which 

 they give us, and the order of the occurrence of those 

 sensations. Kant himself, on this point, is as explicit 

 as Berkeley or Locke. However firmly convinced 

 that there exists an universe of " Things in them- 

 selves," totally distinct from the universe of pheno- 

 mena, or of things as they appear to our senses ; and 

 even when bringing into use the technical expression 

 (Noumenori) to denote what the thing is in itself, as 

 contrasted with the representation of it in our minds ; 

 he allows that this representation (the matter of which, 

 he says, consists of our sensations, though the form 

 is given by the laws of the mind itself) is all we know 

 of the object ; and that the real nature of the Thing 

 is, and by the constitution of our faculties ever must 

 remain, at least in this sublunary existence, an 

 impenetrable mystery to us*. There is not the 



* I have much pleasure in quoting a passage in which this 

 doctrine is laid down in the clearest and strongest terms by M. 



