FORM AND MATTER. 37 



§ 13. Kant's great-discovery, in his owo^estimat- 

 ion was, that the inquiry into the nature of our 

 knowing faculty must precede actual investigation. 

 We must discover how we can know, before we 

 examine what we do know. This is the gist of the 

 famous Criticism, and the basis of a theory of know- 

 ledge which substituted " epistemology " for meta^ 

 physics. But though this undertaking is apparently 

 simple, it involves several assumptions which are no 

 longer admissible in the present state of our know- 

 ledge. 



§ 14. It involves, in the first place, the assumpt- 

 ion that- the Form and Matter of knowledge can be 

 separated :. that the growth of the Matter does not 

 affect its Form, and that hence it is possible to 

 examine the knowing faculty independently, and 

 that any conclusion arrived at concerning it will 

 hold good of all our knowledge for all time. For, 

 unless all possibilities of valid inference can be 

 determined with, absolute certainty, in consequence 

 of an exhaustive analysis of their forms, it is evident 

 that the future course of knowledge cannot be pre- 

 dicted. And yet, even as a matter of pure logic, it 

 seems that no such separation of Form and Matter 

 is possible. The *' pure forms " collapse as empty 

 abstractions when, it is attempted to treat them as 

 independent realities. The 'Maws of thought" by 

 themselves do not work nor lead to real knowledge. 

 Even in logic, thought turns out to be an organism 

 in which form and matter imply each other, so that 

 each grows with the growth of the other. 



And when we go on to the principles of actual 

 investigation, it appears still more clearly that we 

 can never know until we try. The process, which 

 is fruitful of results, cannot be predicted beforehand, 

 but only analysed after the event. And every such 



