Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/363

 THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. 351 on it, has already combined the phenomenal elements themselves from moment to moment perishing, and has more or less accurately placed the whole vacillating appear- ance in the unitary and enduring system of experience. In thus contemplating the full range of power which the combining principle must necessarily possess in order to con- stitute experience, it seems evident that nothing passively received can at all become definitely conscious. And this brings on the one fundamental assumption in Kant's theory of knowledge to which his transcendental followers cannot possibly assent. Kant believed most firmly that empirical sense-material is given to us from some source outside our own being. Indeed, the main achievement of the Critick consists in the presumed assimilation into the conceptual order of such extrinsically " given " material of experience. Xow the truth is, there is no material of cognition given to us from outside. Even physiology teaches unmistakably that everything found in consciousness must be all-through the exclusive property it might be said the exclusive creation of the feeling and thinking subject. Nothing whatever can penetrate into consciousness from without, not even through the senses. It must, therefore, be admitted that Transceiidentalists have justly corrected Kant, when they deny that the material of experience flows from an extraneous source into our re- ceptive sensibility. But they are living under a strange delusion if they continue, nevertheless, to look upon them- selves as Xeo-Kantians. To them the Critick of Pv.r>* Reason ought to represent hardly anything but a pathetic failure, a vast amount of strenuous exertion bestowed on the elucidation of an erroneous philosophical conception. The methodical aspect of the Critick and its serious and scrupulous scientific tenor are certainly very imposing ; but what assistance can it render to Transcendentalism ? Allured by Kant's rationalistic, though anthropocentric view, that it is our human understand iny, i.e., a spiritual principle, that makes nature, idealistic Neo-Kantians fail to see that the entire scheme of the Critick falls to pieces if material is not " given " to sense, from which nature can be made. The Critick is essentially an account of the means through which the raw-material of sense is received, and transformed into universally valid knowledge. In his 66th year Kant himself thus summed up the result of his researches : " Only after a laborious examination of all requisite conditions, rendering synthetical propositions a priori possible, the Critick arrives at the decisive final con-