164 /ASSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



perhaps absolute existence ; we have committed our- 

 selves irretrievably to the judgment There are no 

 things-in-tJiemselvcs. Therewith, as shown already, 

 an act of absolute cognition enters, and universal 

 phenomenalism falls to the ground. The " critical " 

 procedure has annulled its own principle. The 

 Nemesis of all agnosticism, of which we caught a 

 glimpse above, has for the a priori agnostic formed 

 to itself a companion avenger. 



Lange, however, is equal to the emergency ; he 

 has that dogged courage which does not realise 

 its own defeat. He rallies on a new base, and 

 this rally is the real explanation of his singular 

 doctrine that the ground-form of consciousness, as 

 he considers it, — this contrast between conscious- 

 ness and noumenal Reality, — is an "organic con- 

 tradiction." He would evade the force of the above 

 conclusion by showing that the "critical" thing-in- 

 itself — the noumenon as pure category — is not 

 the actual contents of that a priori notion which 

 forms the "limiting" term in the relation Phe- 

 nomenon-Noumenon. On the contrary, that limit- 

 ing term is an hypostasis by consciousness, an 

 imaginary "enrealising " — a putting as beyond, in- 

 dependent of, or pins consciousness — of its own 

 system of internal categories appertaining to phe- 

 nomenal objects. In short, it is a putting of the 

 notions Substance, Cause, and Agent, as if they 



