ix EXPERIENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION 153 



relativity to reconstruct the reality which transcends it. It 

 works down to an analysis of cognition in which the con- 

 tent of any cognitive act is regarded as involving a refer- 

 ence to something beyond the cognitive act itself, and 

 having, therefore, prima facie, a separate existence. But 

 as, under another aspect, the content appears to be identical 

 with the total character of an act or state of consciousness, 

 the question that pressed was how any reference beyond 

 could ever be justified. At best the appeal could only 

 be to some other content, and we might move in a world 

 of such contents in the whole of which the apparent 

 external reference might be quite illusory. 



In fact, the result of the first stage in the development 

 of the problem was the Humian scepticism, in which the 

 fabric of knowledge was reduced to c impressions ' and 

 c ideas ' devoid of valid reference beyond themselves. 

 Reconstruction was attempted, in the first instance, by a 

 criticism of Objectivity. It might be that all that we 

 could know lay within the circle of our consciousness, but 

 that within this sphere there was an immutable order which 

 might be rationally apprehended and become the content 

 of science, or irrationally and arbitrarily conceived and so 

 form the content of mere opinion and error. This solution, 

 already put forward in principle by Berkeley, is worked 

 out by Kant on the basis of a theory of the contribution 

 of the mind, not merely to our way of thinking about 

 experience, but to experience itself. The underlying 

 elements of the empirical order are now brought more fully 

 into view. Complex elements are revealed in the appar- 

 ently simple data of perception, and the structural cate- 

 fories are argued to be not merely results of experience 

 ut principles implied in the formation of that order which 

 at first sight we take as simply c given.' 



But with this conception of objectivity Kant deliberately, 

 if inconsistently, combined a different theory of reality. 

 Things in themselves were unmodified by the work of 

 mind, and though they could not come within the grasp 

 of ordinary cognition, something of their fundamental 

 character could be apprehended by analysing the postulates 

 of the moral consciousness. This dualism broke up the 



