LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY III 



a priori. He proceeds in the light of the supposed 

 contradiction involved in any transcendent Thing-in- 

 itself — an assumed background, as it were, hid behind 

 the vision-world of experience, this phenomenon rising 

 thus between the Thing and the mind, and so veiling 

 it. Hence he proposes as the remedy the bringing 

 of the Absolute within the veil of the phenomenon, 

 and, so to speak, between it and the mind, to lie there 

 as if an originative tissue, connecting the two as it be- 

 gets them. In other words, he makes the Absolute, 

 construed as his Unconscious, the immanent source 

 of two concomitant streams of appearance : the one 

 objective, the sensible world itself, the other subjec- 

 tive, the stream of the conscious perceptions of the 

 world. ^ These two streams, as both flowing from the 

 one Unconscious under identically corresponding con- 

 ditions, are in incessant counterpart. Thus know- 

 ledge, though not a copy from natural objects, is an 

 exact counter-image to them, engendered from a com- 

 mon source. Consciousness and Nature are both pure 

 show {SchciJi). The world is an "objective appari- 

 tion " (^ein objectiver Schein), perception is a duplicate 

 "subjective apparition" {ein subjectiver Sc}iein\ and 

 both are exhaled from the depths of the Unconscious : 

 phenomenal existence is thus doubled throughout. 

 Space, Time, and the Causal Nexus are also dupli- 

 cated, as well as the items they contain or connect. 



^ A reminiscence here of Spinoza, or of Spinoza hegelised. 



