126 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



standing challenge, " How can you make out that 

 perceptions and thoughts are true of the Real, when 

 from the nature of the case they must be products 

 of our a priori cognition, and therefore shut in to 

 the perpetual contemplation of themselves?" "By 

 searching in the right place," Duhring answers 

 in substance, "and finding that ^common root' of 

 sense and understanding of which you yourself, 

 Kant, have more than rarely spoken, but the inves- 

 tigation of which you have found it so much easier 

 to evade." What sort of "criticism of reason " is it, 

 he goes on in effect, that stops with thrusting ex- 

 perience into the limbo of an abstraction called 

 the a priori, and never asking what the Prius thus 

 implied must be ? Man brings his perceptive and 

 thinking organisation into the world with him, 

 doubtless ; but from whence ? Whence indeed, if 

 not from the bosom of Nature ? Let us but once 

 think the Actual as the Actual — as a continuous 

 whole, unfolding toward its Final Purpose — with 

 man and his conscious organism verily in it, and 

 the reality of knowledge becomes intelligible enough. 

 For consciousness is then no longer an imprinted 

 copy of things, as the truth-cancelling and unthink- 

 able theory of dualism makes it, but becomes in- 

 stead a new setting of them, pushed forth from 

 the same original stock. Man thus inherits the 

 contents and the logical system of Nature by direct 



