Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/590

 578 SCOTUS NOVANTICUS'S METAPHYSIGA NOVA ET VETUSTA. attuent intelligence is aware of nothing save the fact of motion and change. Association of antecedent and consequent and resultant habits of expectation form the causal nexus of such a consciousness. But the necessary connexion which reason recognises between a cause and its effect is something more than this, and is due, like the affirmation of Being, to the activity of the subject. "The necessity is engendered on the time-sequence by means of the "a priori causal synthetic predicate," and rests ultimately on the Law of Identity. Whether the predicate has been rightly applied in any particular case is, of course, " a ques- tion of accuracy in the observation of the phenomenal sequential series". The Absolute, or the Absolute-Infinite, the third of these percepts, is implicit, the author maintains, in every act of perception ; for such an act is possible only " through the negation of an absolute and contentless, through a limitation of the not-limited, a determining of the undetermined, a making finite of the non-finite, a conditioning of the unconditioned. . . . Perception being determination, finite-making, negation, we have only to look out into the Infinite from the sphere of the finite to find that the Infinite is a negation of a negation, and so, a positive. As a positive w r e know it." Just as in the case of Being, however, "I can predicate nothing of it save that it is, and that it is given to me dialectically as the ground of all possible activity of Will in percipience ". Or, as the author afterwards explains his meaning, in a way less open to misinter- pretation, it is known only through its manifestation. " Nature and finite mind are the only predicates of the Absolute." The Absolute, or the Absolute-Causal-Being, as it is henceforth called, is the whole substance of the notion of God, so far as that notion is purely rational; and God is known to us only through " the things that are made ". These dialectic percepts constitute the a priori categories, if we choose to call them so. All other categories, as enumerated by Kant and others, the author holds, " in consistency with dualism," to be d posteriori and given by the outer. They are " generalisations of the data of sensibility," and " it is only so far as they are raised to predications that they owe anything to Will-reason at all ". Unless sensibility be explicitly taken to imply the negation of reason, there ought to be no objection to such a statement. From a psychological or phenomenological point of view, it ought, indeed, to be a matter of course ; and so far as Kant seems to imply anything else, his influence has been prejudicial. The author's emphatic statement here may be useful. When we proceed to gather up the results of the book, more particularly in regard to the Absolute-Casual-Being which the critique of knowledge has revealed, we find, as already hinted, that the phenomenological dualism of the book tends to give place to a metaphysical monism. " No one denies," it is said,