Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/169

166 —but we never discover any absolute, i. e. entirely unformed matter, in our consciousness, and it would therefore be impossible even to inquire concerning the cause of the matter! The pure matter (pure sensation) is an "idea" like the pure form, the pure subject.

Maimon, the Lithuanian Jew, following the example of Reinhold in quitting the Catholic cloister, abandoned his native village with its limitations and poverty, in order to satisfy his intellectual hunger in Germany. Kant admitted that Maimon was the man who best understood him; but the venerable master was nevertheless dissatisfied with the criticisms and corrections offered by his brilliant disciple.

Maimon saw clearly that the mere reference to the conditions of experience is not the solution of Hume’s problem: for what Kant calls experience, the permanent, necessary coherence of impressions, is the very thing that Hume denies. By experience Hume understands nothing more than impressions. That which is given in experience is never anything more than a succession of impressions, and it is useless to appeal to the categories, for they are nothing but rules or ideas used in our investigations. The concept of causality, e. g., enables us to attain the highest possible degree of continuity in the series of our impressions.

It is not reason that impels us to transcend experience, but the imagination and the desire for completeness. These are the motives that give rise to the ideas (in the Kantian sense), to which we afterwards ascribe objective reality. It is not the objects which are believed to exist on these grounds, but rather the constant striving after totality—which is the source of faith—that constitutes