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PHENOMENAL IDEALISM] its ingenious attempt to give to Kantism itself a consistency, which, however, has only succeeded in producing a new

philosophy of Neo-Kantism, differing from Kantism in modifying the a priori and rejecting the thing in itself. Lange to some extent modified the transcendentalism of Kant’s theory of the origin of knowledge. A priori forms, according to Kant, are contributions of the mental powers of sense, understanding, and reason; but, according to Lange, they are rooted in “the physico-psychical organization.” This modification was the beginning of a gradual lessening of the antithesis of a priori to a posteriori, until at last the a priori forms of Kant have been transmuted into “auxiliary conceptions,” or “postulates of experience.” But this modification made no difference to the Kantian and Neo-Kantian deduction from the epistemological to the metaphysical. Lange entirely agreed with Kant that a priori forms can have no validity beyond experience when he says: “Kant is at any rate so far justified as the principle of intuition in space and time a priori is in us, and it was a service to all time that he should in this first great example, show that what we possess a priori, just because it arises out of the disposition of our mind, beyond our experience has no longer any claim to validity” (Hist. of Materialism, trans. E. C. Thomas, ii. 203). Hence he deduced that whatever we know from sensations arranged in such a priori forms are objects of our own experience and mental phenomena. Hence also his answer to materialism. Science, says the materialist, proves that all known things are material phenomena. Yes, rejoins Lange, but Kant has proved that material are merely mental phenomena; so that the more the materialist proves his case the more surely he is playing into the hands of the idealist—an answer which would be complete if it did not turn on the equivocation of the word “phenomenon,” which in science means any positive fact, and not a mere appearance, much less a mental appearance, to sense and sensory experience. Having, however, made a deduction, which is at all events consistent, that on Kantian assumptions all we know is mental phenomena, Lange proceeded to reduce the rest of Kantism to consistency. But his ardent love of consistency led him far away from Kant in the end; for he proceeded consistently from the assumption, that whatever we think beyond mental phenomena is ideal, to the logical conclusion that in practical matters our moral responsibility cannot prove the reality of a noumenal freedom, because, as on Kant’s assumption we know ourselves from inner sense only as phenomena, we can prove only our phenomenal freedom. Lange thus transmuted inconsistent Kantism into a consistent Neo-Kantism, consisting of these reformed positions: (1) we start with sensations in a priori forms; (2) all things known from these data are mental phenomena of experience; (3) everything beyond is idea, without any corresponding reality being knowable. “The intelligible world,” he concluded, “is a world of poetry.” Our reflection is that there is a great difference between the essence and the consistency of Kant’s philosophy. Its essence, as stated by Kant, was to reduce the logical use of reason to mental phenomena of experience in speculation, in order to extend the practical use of reason to the real noumena, or things in themselves, required for morality. Its consistency, as deduced by Lange, was to reduce all use of reason, speculative and practical, to its logical use of proceeding from the assumed mental data of outer and inner sense, arranged a priori, to mental phenomena of experience, beyond which we can conceive ideas but postulate nothing. As H. Vaihinger, himself a profound Kantian of the new school, says: “Critical scepticism is the proper result of the Kantian theory of knowledge.”

2. The Reaction to Hume.—When the Neo-Kantians, led by Lange, had modified Kant’s hypothesis of a priori forms, and retracted Kant’s admission and postulation of things in themselves beyond phenomena and ideas, and that too without proceeding further in the direction of Fichte and the noumenal idealists, there was not enough left of Kant to distinguish him essentially from Hume. For what does it matter to metaphysics whether by association sensations suggest ideas, and so give rise to ideas of substance and causation a posteriori, or synthetic unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori notions of substance and causation into objects which are merely mental phenomena of experience, when it is at once allowed by the followers of Hume and Kant alike that reason in any logical use has no power of inferring things beyond the experience of the reasoner? In either case, the effective power of inference, which makes us rational beings, is gone. Naturally then the reaction to Kant was followed by a second reaction to Hume, partly under the name of “Positivism,” which has attracted a number of adherents, such as C. Göring (1841–1879), author of an incomplete System der Kritischen Philosophie (1874–1875) and (q.v.), and partly under the name of the “physical phenomenology” of E. Mach.

(q.v.) is a conspicuous instance of a confusion of physics and psychology ending in a scepticism like that of Hume. He tells us how from his youth he pursued physical and psychological studies, how at the age of fifteen he read Kant’s Prolegomena, and later rejected the thing in itself, and came to the conclusion that the world with his ego is one

mass of sensations. For a time, under the influence of Fechner’s Psychophysics, he thought that Nature has two sides, a physical and a psychological, and added that all atoms have feeling. But in the progress of his physical work, which taught him, as he thought, to distinguish between what we see and what we