THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



that Kant and his disciples have estabHshed the tran- 

 scendental ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, just 

 as Kepler, Newton, and Laplace established the laws of 

 celestial motion. Schleiden imagined that this dogmatic 

 affirmation would refute "the mateiialism of modem 

 German science." Lange has shown, on the contrary, 

 that such dogmatism is utterly foreign to the spirit of 

 the Critique of Pure Reason, and that Kant held the 

 three ideas to be quite incapable of either positive or 

 negative proof, and so thrust them into the domain of 

 practical philosophy. Lange says: "Kant would not 

 see, as Plato would not see before him, that the intelligi- 

 ble world is a world of poetry, and has no value except 

 in this respect." But if these ideas are mere figments 

 of the poetic imagination, if we can form neither positive 

 nor negative idea of them, we may well ask: What has 

 this imaginary spirit-world to do with the pursuit of 

 truth? 



As I have raised the question of the limits of truth 

 and fiction, I may take the opportunity of pointing out 

 the general importance of this distinction. Undoubt- 

 edly man's knowledge is limited, from the very nature of 

 our faculties or the organization of our bram and sense- 

 organs. Hence, Kant is right when he says that we 

 perceive only the phenomena of things, and not their 

 inner essence, which he calls the " thing in itself." But 

 he is wrong and altogether misleading when he goes on 

 to doubt the reality of the external world, and says it 

 exists only in our presentations — in other words, that 

 life is a dream. It does not follow, from the fact that 

 our senses and phronema can reach only a part of the 

 properties of things, that we call into question their 

 existence in time and space. But our rational craving 

 for a knowledge of causes impels us to fill up the gaps 

 in our empirical knowledge by our imagination, and 

 thus form an approximate idea of the whole. This work 



438 



