1 62 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



must treat this also as phenomenal, and hence we 

 cannot be sure if there is, or is not, a thing-in-itself. 

 But he holds we cannot now silence the apprehen- 

 sion that there may be one. So the distinction 

 remains, and the thing-in-itself becomes simply a 

 notion, but a limiting notion. The antithetic form- 

 ula Me and Not-me becomes the all-encompassing 

 category,^ which therefore causes all our cognition 

 to seem merely subjective, whether it be so in reality 

 or not, and thus compels us to limit our certainty 

 to phenomena. The agnostic force of the formula 

 is accordingly rather increased than diminished : we 

 have now not a single cognition remaining that can 

 pretend to belong to intelligence as such. Except 

 unluckily (let us, the readers, add in passing), this very 

 last decision that condemns every other, — the goblin 

 of certainty which haunts the steps of all agnosti- 

 cism, and which it cannot lay! This Nemesis of 

 phenomenalism will presently appear in a clearer 

 form. 



For it cannot longer be concealed, that in setting 

 out upon his chosen path Lange was in fact moving 

 towards a goal he little suspected and still less in- 

 tended. He has decided that to validate the phe- 

 nomenal limitation of knowledge he must make the 

 thing-in-itself a mere form a priori. But we have 



^ How Schopenhauer the Epistemologist must have blessed Lange 

 for this stroke, so masterfully repeating his own ! 



