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 H. HOFFDING, Geschichte der neueren Philosophic. 401 If so, all experience must be subject to their laws, i.e., the latter are valid for all experience. Hence the fact that the truths of Mathematics are universally applicable to Nature. While, how- ever, validity is thus secured for the laws of nature and science, it is only on condition that their claim to validity beyond this sphere should be surrendered. Kant saved the objective truth of science by throwing overboard all pretensions to (dogmatic) metaphysics. This process of criticism was not complete, how- ever, until he had applied it to understanding as well as to sensibility. Understanding is a faculty of synthesis. We cannot " understand " except by combining objects in the ways indicated by the ' categories '. The ' synthetic unity ' is the condition of intelligence as well as of intuition. The question whether the sensibility also possesses synthetic power is one which must be answered by reference to Kant's maturer thinking, and involves a previous question as to our right to separate sensibility from understanding as Kant does. There is no doubt that Kant at first did ascribe synthetic power to the sensibility, but just as little that this ascription is, according to his maturer thought, unjustifiable and that synthesis in every form is the work of understanding. The application of the ' Copernican principle ' to the under- standing as well as to the sensibility rendered Kant's Erkennt- nistheorie complete. The immediate consequence was that we cannot in any way know ' things per se '. We cannot know the soul, the world, or God. We may think these, but we cannot intuite them ; and thinking without perception is hollow. With- out given intuitions the understanding has really no objects before*, it ; though it may have adventures in dreamland or ghostland. In this thought of synthesis as the ground of conscious activity,, says Hoffding, Kant found a conception which advanced him beyond the atomistic psychology, the basis of empiricism, as well as beyond the spiritualistic psychology on which most idealist systems were founded. Against empiricism, which would treat- the unity of the spirit as a bare result of manifold impressions, he asserts the unifying activity of consciousness as the very mint- mark of spiritual life, which refuses to be explained by any merely external influence. Against spiritualism, which had observed thia mark, but referred it dogmatically to a mystical substance behind consciousness, he asserts that our knowledge is incapable of carry- ing us farther back than the foundation of spiritual life, so far as this foundation enters into experience. At the same time he advanced beyond the psychology of the Aufklarung, which took account only of the " clearly conscious," of that which can be seen in the sunlight of intelligence. Synthesis is, indeed, the continual presupposition of consciousness, but need not itself come forward as an object of consciousness. It can work darkly and instinc- tively as an inscrutable power of our innermost nature. Hoffding arranges his exposition of Kant's Erkenntnistheorie in 26