Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/142

Rh ence itself, but it has neither originating force nor corrective skill. Experience is needed in order to set going the activity of thought, to supply materials for its operations, and to furnish means of testing and examining the results of the exercise of thought. Yet it is to be noted, as an essential correction to the Kantian view, that thought has not as its result the mere fashioning of experience into order and form it does not itself possess, but points constantly to what is never matter of experience. For in thought we may well distinguish from one another the functions which express its formal nature and the categories or conceptions of trans-subjective content which its exercise involves. The latter are often, perhaps for the most part, unconscious elements in our thinking.

It is evident that, apart from details as to the processes involved in thinking, the general position of thought in reference to the trans-subjective implied in it, may be characterised by the term subjective, and Prof. Volkelt, adopting on the whole the view excellently stated by Lotze (Logic, 536), gives a striking exposition of the Notion as the mode in which there is summed up the results of thought respecting the nature of its object.

It only remains to note, in this brief and imperfect account of a work unusually full of matters open to discussion, that Prof. Volkelt finds no other source of objective knowledge deserving to be placed alongside of the principle of logical necessity. Moral necessity, which in Kant's system played so great a part, is indeed allowed by him to have a quasi-objective reference, but "in essence it remains subjective". It does not give us, like logical necessity, the knowledge of causal order and regular subordination to law; it extends in no way our conception of the real order of the trans-subjective world. In a similar fashion are rejected the principles, often appealed to in the history of thought, of intuitive perception and intuitive self-apprehension.

It has been possible to comment only on that portion of Prof. Volkelt's work in which the central difficulty of theory of knowledge as conceived by him is explicitly stated, and what has been suggested by no means fulfils the requirements of adequate criticism on what one would describe as the Cartesian position. The essential characteristic of that position is the abstract consideration of consciousness as having within its own narrow limits the only certain knowledge attainable, and the natural consequence of the position is exactly that "flight" to belief in the trans-subjective validity of knowledge of which Prof. Volkelt's work is for the most part an elaborate defence. I believe it to be a real error in philosophical method to make the initial steps in a theory of knowledge from the Cartesian position, and am of opinion that the whole advance achieved by Kant is lost if we return, in dealing with the epistemological problem, to the identification of knowing as a fact in the inner life of a subject with knowledge as the representation of a content known. It is only when we make