APPENDIX E 427 



Besides, I have throughout assumed readers will see 

 that Kant's agnostic restrictions are anticipated, provided 

 for, and rendered inapplicable, by the plain implications 

 of the fact of a priori cognition itself, when that is once 

 clearly established and clearly understood; and this fact 

 I have explicitly argued out, in two different places in the 

 volume — in the first essay, and again in the sixth. Then, 

 too, I have relied on the plain power of the essentially 

 social nature of the self-defining consciousness to lead my 

 readers to see how irrelevant Kant's agnostic tenets are. 

 (See, particularly, my pp. 351-353, and cf. pp. i73-i7S-) 

 That is to say, the Kantian agnosticism is annulled, so far 

 at least as concerns the certainty of the existence, even 

 the noumenal or eternal existence, of the self. In fact, 

 however, my reviewer is a trifle out in saying I depart 

 from Kant on this point, for Kant himself never supposed 

 that this was unknown or unknowable : what was unknow- 

 able was not the existence, but the nature of the noumenon. 

 If nowhere else, then at all events in the Prolegomena, 

 Kant declares unmistakably that the existence of selves as 

 Dinge an sich is a known certainty. " That there are no 

 Dinge an sich,'" he says in substance, "is absurd." (Cf. 

 the Prolego7nena, passim, but especially in § 57.) 



(2) A more serious complaint is that which Mr. McTag- 

 gart makes that my reasons for treating the Categories as 

 applicable to the self, when I refuse to describe it in terms 

 of the Sense-Forms, are " not brought out anywhere in the 

 book." This fault, if it is a fault, I shall have to admit. 

 Within the limits of the brief volume I could not compress 

 everything pertaining to a complete vindication of my gen- 

 eral view. In particular, Mr. McTaggart's centrally perti- 

 nent question — Why are not the Categories in exactly the 

 same position as Time, as to being necessarily transcended 

 by the noumenal self? — could only be answered after a 

 complete reexamination, going to the foundations of the 



