1 68 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



explanation here made, we get a clarifying account 

 of that travesty of the noumenon which we often- 

 est understand by the thing-in-itself, and may now 

 attend to the real meaning of Lange's result. 



The meaning is striking enough. For, in fact, 

 our philosopher has unwittingly completed the proof 

 of the absolute quality of human knowledge, and at 

 the same time demonstrated the falsehood of ma- 

 terialism — not simply the impossibility of cstablisJi- 

 ing this (which he had already done, as Kant had 

 before him, merely from his agnostic standpoint), 

 but its final impossibility, even as an hypothesis. 



As to our real knowledge, he has now shown (i) that 

 a bare thing-in-itself, a thing out of all relation to 

 minds, does not exist ; (2) that, even as notion, it is 

 a self-contradiction, something whose sphere is solely 

 within consciousness putting itself as if it were 

 beyond it ; (3) that, in spite of this, we continue, 

 and must continue, to accept this illusion, which 

 compels us to limit our knowledge to experience and 

 to renounce all claims to its being absolute. That 

 is to say, then, the sole cause of our doubting the 

 rigorous validity of our knowledge, and reducing our 

 cognition to the mere idiosyncrasy of one species 

 out of an unknown number of possible orders of 

 conscious beings, is an illusion whose genesis we 

 know, a contradiction that we distinctly detect. 

 Then, beyond dispute, our discrediting limitation of 



