XX PREFACE 



this point onward its adherence to Kant ceases. It 

 does not, like Kantian ideahsm, restrict the applica- 

 bility of a priori principles to the world of sense, to 

 mere phenomena, and thus confine knowledge to 

 natural science ; nor does it make of the distinction 

 between our a priori scientific and our a pj'iori ethi- 

 cal equipment a disjunct and impassable difference 

 in kijid. On the contrary, a leading aim v/ith it is 

 to break down the Kantian barrier between the 

 "practical" and the "theoretical" consciousness, and 

 to open a continuous theoretical highway for reason 

 in botb its scientific and its ethical uses. It seeks 

 to raise our ethical intuition into the region of intel- 

 ligence instead of feeling, and to do this by showing 

 that the ethical first-principle is not only itself an 

 act of knowledge, but is the principle of all know- 

 ledge, and of all real experience as distinguished 

 from illusion. 



In further consistency with this, in its philosophy 

 of Nature it departs from Kant on the question of 

 the origin of the " contents " in experience, the "mat- 

 ter" in natural objects. Whichever of the two views 

 ascribed to Kant may really be his, — whether this 

 "matter" of sensation, which he says is strictly 

 '^ given,'' be taken as given (i) in the sense of being 

 produced in us by the agency of some other being, 

 or (2) in the sense of simply being there inexplicably, 

 as a dead datum, back of which we cannot get, and 



