Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/367

 THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. 355 sense, is a bare impossibility. Not only are such appear- ances already in themselves through-and-through the work of combination, but they occupy moreover a distinct place in the whole system of experience, and are therefore, in the very moment of realisation, inserted by the active principle into their proper position, and recognised as definitely related to other parts of the totality of experience. All this collecting and recollecting, cognising and recog- nising, being performed by the assumed synthetical power, it is clear that very little can be discovered in consciousness that is not its workmanship. Before we have done, we shall see how all-efficient the synthetical principle proves to be. Xo wonder, for it is nothing less than our whole feeling, thinking, and willing subject ; in fact, our very being mentally occupied. We have, however, not yet explicitly accounted for the distinction between fancy and reality as established by Transcendentalism ; and we are not yet quite clear about the manner in which the qualitative contents of conscious- ness arise. The qualitative or sensorial element has always been to Transceudentalists the most awkward ingredient of con- sciousness. Yet they have various ways of plausibly dis- posing of it. For instance, they may say : a sensation is felt more or less as a special or qualitative element of ex- perience in proportion as its proper place in the whole system of experience is not yet given to it. As soon as it comes to stand in its real position and proper relation to all other elements of experience it loses its sensorial character, and goes to constitute with other ingredients of conscious- ness an intelligible fact. Sensations, from this point of view, are, therefore, unrecognised fragments of experience, and contain least reality of all that enters consciousness. It has always been a chief endeavour of conceptual realism to cancel the reality of sensation, making it appear, as much as possible, a mere unassimilated residuum of indistinct con- ception. Leibniz had so completely succeeded in this, that it happened to Kant to have to rediscover in the oddest way by means of logic the lost domain of sensible presentation in time and space. But to bim also conceptual processes .led pre-eminently, nay, exclusively active. And it was principally due to this strangely unnatural philosophical pre- possession, that he committed the ominous mistake of looking upon percepts as passively received, intrinsically inert con- tents of consciousness. The truth is : conceptual apperception actually appears,