HUMAN IMMORTALITY 297 



of knowledge as a fundamental fact ; when once we 

 pass beyond the external view of experience, which 

 causes it to appear as if it were constituted out of 

 sensation or impressions alone, and were not, as it 

 really is, itself a complex, in which the utterly vague 

 something we call "sensation" or "impression" is 

 always organised and made to take form and descrip- 

 tive definiteness, and thus clear reality, by a priori 

 or self-active consciousness. 



Our real experiences, day by day and moment by 

 moment, are so intrinsically organised and definite, 

 it does not at first occur to us that the principles 

 which organise and define them, rendering them 

 intelligible, and consciously apprehensible, are and 

 must be the spontaneous products of the mind's own 

 action. We do not at first see, as careful reflec- 

 tion later brings us to see, with Kant, that the 

 mental elements without which the apprehensible 

 presence of the items of experience would be incon- 

 ceivable and inexistent cannot possibly be derived 

 from these, and thence applied to the mind. But this 

 later penetrating reflection convinces us that what our 

 experienced objects must have in order to be objects 

 — to be perceived at all — must be brought by the 

 mind itself to the very act of experience. What 

 must be presupposed, if the objects are to be per- 

 ceived at all, can by no conceivable means be ex- 

 plained as first coming to tlie mXw'X from the objects. 



