OF REALITY, 



439 



There were several reasons which prevented Kant 

 from destroying the remnant of reality which he assigned 

 to external things. When it was pointed out to him by 

 some of his critics that the logical consequence of his 

 doctrine would be to negative altogether the conception 

 of Things in themselves, and that this would lead inevit- 

 ably to the position taken up by Berkeley, he strongly u. 



His objec- 



obiected to the statement, maintaining that this would tionto 



'' ^ Idealism. 



be leading back to the position of idealism, the refuta- 

 tion of which was one of the main objects of his critical 

 philosophy. Whilst he insisted that all we know about 

 things was what followed from our own sensuous and 



conception. An analysis of ex- 

 ternal phenomena (Kant) or of 

 experience in general (Spencer) 

 seems to leave an unexhausted 

 Something without which neither 

 the Unity, nor the "Together," nor 

 the immediate evidence of phen- 

 omena, can be explained. We 

 seem to have lost the kernel of 

 reality and to grasp only the shell. 

 Examples of a similarly unsatis- 

 factory state of knowledge are, 

 however, so to speak, of daily 

 occurrence. A prominent example 

 is the impossibility of defining life, 

 that Something which distinguishes 

 a dead from a living organism. 

 We seem to grasp this only by the 

 synoptical function of some sense, 

 be tins lower or higher, physical 

 or spiritual. It can, so to speak, 

 only be seen and experienced but 

 not reproduced by any synthetic 

 action of the intellect. A more 

 serious objection attaches to Kant's 

 Unknowable which does not in the 

 same degree apply to that of 

 Si>encer. It recurs again in deal- 

 ing with Schojienhauer's doctrine. 

 Both Kant and Schopenhauer, fol- 

 lowing Hume, con.sider Causation 

 as a subjective form or habit of 



thought, but they nevertheless 

 — as Jacobi had pointed out in 

 dealing with Kant's view — apply 

 this category to the " Unknowable 

 Thing in Itself" which lies, as it 

 were, beyond or beneath the region 

 of experience, whereas causation 

 refers only — it is maintained — to 

 things as they appear. A third 

 objection which has been urged 

 against Kant's Unknowable, and 

 which does not apply to that of 

 Spencer, is this : that Kant does 

 not only speak of the Thing in 

 itself, but goes even the length of 

 speaking of Things in themselve.s. 

 This plural is, as Lotze amongst 

 others has remarked, quite un- 

 justifiable, as no reason exists to 

 conceive of the Unknown as a 

 plurality and not as a unity. In 

 fact, as the former error consisted 

 in transferring and applying the 

 phenomenal categorj' of causation 

 to that which is supjjosed not to 

 enter into the phenomenal world 

 at all, so, in the other instance, 

 the error arises through tacitly 

 applying distinction which de- 

 pend on time and space to a 

 content which is supposed to be 

 outside of time and space. 



