174 ESSAYS I.V PHILOSOPHY 



Kant's day the world has heard so much, but of that 

 residue of the noumenon which we noticed Lange 

 leave unexamined.^ It would find the explanation 

 of the categories, and the nature of the final nou- 

 menon, in a single active principle in consciousness, 

 of which the vague notion Noumenon is only our con- 

 fused native feeling. Our ordinary name for this 

 principle is the moral consciousness, the conscious- 

 ness in each mind of its own reality, integral and 

 sacred, and of the equal reality of all others ; but this 

 is in fact rather the supreme theoretical principle, the 

 spring of all intelligence, the master-light of all logic 

 and all knowledge. The categories are the intrinsic 

 modes in which this principle puts its activity forth. 

 Though they appear so different to our first or nat- 

 ural view, they turn out on critical investigation to 

 be expressions of one and the same single syntheti- 

 cal energy — simply forms of a necessary nexus be- 

 tween all possible terms of sense, which reduces 

 these to the serviceable means of our reality as free 

 intelligences. This principle, as blending in one 

 energetic whole above the categories the two activi- 

 ties of absolute subject and absolute cause, is the one 

 intelligible creative unity — the unity of the Person 

 in its whole reality. The universe-consciousness 

 thus passes from apparent mere Fact into a pure 

 conscious Act. And this Act, as always determin- 



1 See pp. 165, 167, above. 



