PREFACE XIX 



with Kantianism. It certainly agrees with Kant, 

 as it departs from Berkeley, in two chief matters : 

 it maintains the a priori character of all the con- 

 necting and inference-supporting elements in human 

 consciousness, and it consequently removes the centre 

 of the permanent order in Nature from the Divine 

 mind to the human, — understanding by the human 

 the type of every mind other than God. It thus 

 aims with Kant to avoid the merely theocentric or 

 theological idealism of Berkeley, which rests on bare 

 empiricism as an account of human knowledge ; an 

 idealism — or a sensationalism, rather — that at bot- 

 tom is a mere assumption of a Divine Mind, as it 

 permits to our intelligence no transcendental princi- 

 ple by which to reach the belief through a logical 

 continuum. 



Like Kant's, the present system finds the basis 

 for its theory of knowledge in the native spontaneity 

 of the human mind, — of all minds not divine ; and, 

 again like Kant's, it provides for the "transcen- 

 dental " efficacy of this spontaneous intelligence, for 

 the power to go beyond past experience and judge 

 of the future in pcrpetnum with unreserved univer- 

 sality, by the hypothesis that Nature is a system 

 of experiences, the "matter" of which is sensation, 

 while the "form" or fixed order of it is determined by 

 the elements — Space, Time, Cause, and so forth — 

 that the self-active consciousness supplies. But from 



