LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 163 



the right to demand that he shall be in earnest with 

 this apriority, and a form a priori means a principle 

 from and in our consciousness organically and solely. 

 To say that a notion is a priori is to say that its 

 being a spontaneous thought of ours exhausts its 

 existence completely ; that the entire being of it 

 is in a native energy of our consciousness, and that 

 this elemental discharge from consciousness is the 

 whole meaning of the corresponding name. For 

 instance, our pure thoughts corresponding to the 

 words "space," "time," "cause," are upon the a 

 priori theory exactly and utterly what Space, Time, 

 and Cause respectively are. Anything short of this 

 view would render apriority null. For if there were 

 anything extra mentem to which, even possibly, the 

 « /r/^r/ elements corresponded, we could never then 

 be certain that they origi^iated in our consciousness 

 at all — we should remain in a quandary as to 

 whether they did or did not. Yet from our con- 

 sciousness they must originate if they are to have 

 that absolute universality, and that necessity of 

 application to their objects, with which we incontes- 

 tably think them. As a consistent Kantian, Lange 

 must assent to this ; and not simply assent to it, but 

 proceed from it wholly and thoroughly. To make 

 the thing-in-itself a genuine form a priori is therefore 

 to exclude its existence in any other sense. But this 

 annuls the desired phenomenalistic conjecture of its 



