THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY 8 1 



their validity to the nature of thought, would lose all relevancy. 

 Forms of thought, universal relations, must be relations as such* 

 relations indifferent to, and hence external to, the terms which 

 they relate. Being thus external, they must remain inoperative 

 unless there is posited a somewhat for them to connect ; and this 

 somewhat, not being constituted by the relations, must be con- 

 ceived as a bare matter, whose ground can only be sought in a 

 contentless thing-in-itself or, having no ground, it becomes it- 

 self a thing-in-itself. 



The question may become clearer upon comparing the critical 

 position with that of rationalism. The demand of rationalism 

 for substance was fundamentally a demand for a reality not 

 constituted by relations. The series of conditions must find a 

 final source in the unconditional, that is, in a categorical proposi- 

 tion. The imperativeness of this demand for a categorical source 

 for conditional propositions arose from the fact that conditional 

 propositions were regarded as wholly conditional. The idea that 

 there could be no final distinction between conditional and exis- 

 tential propositions was wholly foreign to the logic of rationalism. 

 For plainly, if conditional judgments involved in themselves a 

 categorical element, the positing of a distinct, purely categorical 

 proposition would be purposeless. 



Now the position which criticism takes is that the series of 

 conditions cannot be traced to a final categorical source, for such 

 source would lie beyond the limits of experience. It therefore 

 assumes that a certain set of conditional propositions must be 

 final for experience. But if criticism indeed recognized that con- 

 ditional judgments as such contained categorical implications, 

 it would have no ground for assuming the finality of any given 

 set of conditions. The demand for finality would lose all perti- 

 nence. What we wish to point out here is that the conception of a 

 set of final conditions, which lies at the very root of criticism, 

 inevitably carries with it the demand for a final given somewhat 

 to which these conditions may be applied. In short, we must 

 conclude that without the conception of a thing-in-itself, the 

 whole critical contention falls to the ground. 



