52 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. I 



environment furnishes in the duplex act of cognition, we can 

 none the less determine exactly what the mind furnishes. By 

 this wonderful inconsistency Kant opened the way for the later 

 German idealism. Through this inlet entered Fichte, Schel- 

 ling, and Hegel, with their swarm of mediseval conceptions, 

 to perturb the onward course of philosophy. Kant might in 

 vain protest. It was in vain that " he showed that the sub- 

 jective d priori nature of these truths was peremptory proof 

 of their objective falsehood ; that they could not be truths 

 of things, precisely because they were purely subjective con- 

 ditions of thought." Once granted that the subject could of 

 itself possess truth independent of experience, independent 

 of intercourse with the objective environment, the inference 

 was inevitable that the subject might impose its necessities 

 upon the object, that the possibilities of thought might be 

 rendered coextensive with the possibilities of things. Thus 

 Kant, after laboriously barring out ontology at the main 

 entrance, carelessly let it slip in at the back door. Thus, by 

 admitting the possibility of arriving at truth otherwise than 

 through experience, did he render nugitory his elaborate 

 demonstration of the relativity of knowledge. 1 



This will appear still more evident as we proceed to 

 examine the second portion of Kant's theorem, — the assertion 

 that uniformity of experience, however long continued, can 

 never afford us a sufficient guaranty of necessary truth. The 

 argument here is at first sight a plausible one. Any parti- 

 cular experience can only tell us that a phenomenon, or a 



1 "The truth is," says Mr. Lewes, in his new work just now appearing, 

 " Kant tried to hold contradictory positions. The whole drift of his polemic 

 against the ontologists was to show that knowledge was limited, relative, and 

 could not extend beyond the sphere of possible experience ; but while thus 

 cutting the ground from umler the ontologists, he was also anxious to cut the 

 ground from the sensationalists and sceptics, and therefore tried to prove that 

 the Mind brought with it an d priori fund of knowledge."— Problems of 

 Life aval Mind, vol. i. p. 453. In the present chapter I quote by preference 

 from Mr. Lewes, because it seems to me that he has ill nitrated both the 

 strength and the weakness of Kant's position (and thus, virtudty, of all 

 modern metaphy des) more thoroughly and more clearly than any other critic 



