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knowledge. All other knowledge relates to wliat I understand 
by the phenomenal, hence to what is non-essential, not con- 
stitutive, and to effects or phenomenal causes, rather than 
true causes. 
By direct knowledge, I mean such as is furnished imme- 
diately in consciousness; the knowledge of our own being 
and of its attributes, and of all our conscious states ; by 
indirect, all other. 
I omit, for the present, the query whether or to what extent 
all knowledge of the real is direct ; a part of it, at least, 
evidently is such. But not all direct knowledge is of the real ; 
for the definite, changing contents of consciousness, which we 
know directly, are for the most part purely phenomenal. 
The reflection confronts us at the outset, that, in assuming 
the possession by man of knowledge of the real, we run counter 
to the dicta and arguments of noted philosophers in ancient 
and modern times. This fact of itself need not, however, 
deter us from making the assumption, since, for that matter, 
philosophers equally distinguished have upheld our doctrine. 
Nor will the conditions of this discussion permit more than 
a passing reference to the especial positions of opponents. 
Kant's attempt to establish a strict limitation of knowledge to 
the phenomenal was, fundamentally speaking, a failure. For 
his attempted demonstration of the exclusively subjective 
nature of the “ forms ” of sensibility and of the understanding, 
and of the ideas of the reason, has been shown to be defective, 
and hence inconclusive ; * he himself, in practice, did not 
observe the limitation for which he contended (he regarded 
“ things-in-themselves ” as causing in us impressions whence 
we could infer at least the existence of the former, and thus 
contradicted himself by applying to the transcendental realm 
of true being the category of causality, which he affirmed to 
belong merely to subjective, relative, human thought) ; and 
his doctrine may be said to have been disproved by a decree 
of history, since his immediate successors, professing (notably 
in the case of Fichte) to carry out to its legitimate conse- 
quences his own teaching, landed at the opposite extreme of 
pretended absolute knowledge. As for English philosophers 
of the empirical school, who have denied of man that he is 
equal to the cognition of anything that is real (in the sense of 
this term indicated above), the fundamental principle, upon 
which they proceed in their arguments, it is competent for us 
to pronounce an imperfect generalization and a principle which, 
* See, for example, Trendelenburg’s Logische Vntcrsuchungen, vol. i. clmp. / , 
and llistor, Beitrdge zur Philosophic, vol. iii. art. vii. 
