Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/288

 276 GEOBGE J. STOKES : common presupposition as may render it really synthetical and really a priori. Kant then tried to account for the possibility of a priori syn- thetical knowledge, and it remains to be shown that his method of doing so deprives such knowledge of its d priori and synthetical character. In the well-known passage in the Preface to the Second Edition of the Critick of Pure Reason Kant states the fundamental principle of his method. " It has hitherto been assumed," says he, " that our cognition must conform to the objects, but all attempts to extend our knowledge concerning them a priori by means of concepts have under this assumption failed. Let us try if we may not be more successful in the pro- blems of metaphysics if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition." In this passage is contained the germ not merely of Kant's philosophy but also of that of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Cognition can have a priori knowledge of the object because it is in itself to that extent the object which it knows. To that extent it makes the object and makes itself objective. But in the first place there cannot here be even cognition. If we confine ourselves carefully to the consideration merely of the a priori knowledge and the a priori object, it is evident that prior to the cognition there is no h priori object to be cognised since the cognition itself first constitutes that object, and a cognition which is the cognition of nothing is impossible, and therefore cannot exist to constitute an object of cognition. There is thus present in Kant's theory an element of pure tautology which, like every tautology, can have no beginning or end and simply vanishes in nothing. This tautology has, however, been faithfully pre- served by Kant's successors. But even if we were to grant to Kant that the knowledge in question is knowledge, it certainly is not knowledge a priori. For if I only know that h priori of objects which I myself add to them in the act of knowing them, it is obvious that there is here no a priori knowledge whatever. Knowledge implies that it is a knowledge of something, and a priori knowledge implies that it is a knowledge of something prior to or independent of the experience of it. But independent of or apart from the experience in which it is given the object does not exist according to Kant, at least does not exist in regard to the elements in it which are the object of a priori knowledge. There is thus no object left in relation to which cognition may be d priori. At the very most we have only a cognition of a certain constitution of our faculties which enters into, conditions and forms phenomena. Cognition is thus supposed already to be at least in part the object which it was a priori to know. But the knowledge of this constitution is itself a posteriori. No matter how intellectual and truly h priori such knowledge may be in itself, Kant's theory of its origin renders it simply a posteriori, one may say mere matter of fact. If a priori knowledge is really not recognised as that which it