Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/63

 THE METAPHYSICAL METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY. 51 means of a priori, forms springing from itself, which, from their being links between experience and that which trans- cends experience, are termed transcendental, and give the name trfmscfm^'ntal to the Kantian philosophy. But this alters nothing in the essential nature of the thing assumed, I mean so far forth as it is a causal agency in the Subject. It is worthy of note, that, as against the tabula rasa theory of the mind, and on the assumption of causal agency in the Subject, common to the upholders of that theory and Kant, his theory, that there must be some < priori contribution to knowledge, is irrefragable. For if there is causal agency in the Subject, it must have laws or ways of working which really contribute to the result, experience. If it contributed nothing to the result, it would not be a causal agent. To re- gard it as purely passive is impossible. Pure passivity is an impossible idea. It is as much an ens logic urn as Aristotle's Matter. This, however, is by the way. The real point in Kant is his assumption of agency in the Subject, and the proof that it is, with him, an assumption. Now when a man tells you in one breath, or even at the distance of a few pages, that such and such a thing certainly exists, and that he and the rest of mankind know absolutely nothing about it, the first of those statements is the statement of an assump- tion. Kant's theory, then, is at bottom a refinement of the traditional assumption of causal agency in the Subject, and at the same time an attempt at removing that agency into an unknowable or technically a nounwnal region, where it should be beyond the reach of criticism. His philosophy therefore proposes to be critical and transcendental at once. There is another assumption in the Critick of Pure Reason closely allied to the foregoing and involving it. This is the assumption that sensations, which are the matter of experi- ence, are originally, and as supplied to us from without, an absolute chaos, and that perceptions of order, and even of mere succession among them, that is, the lowest beginnings of experience, are the work of subjective agency. I imagine that Kant was led to make this assumption by the desire to go to the root of the genesis of experience. He would con- struct experience, without assuming any fragment of experi- ence already existing, since to do so would, he thought, open the door, as it certainly would, to further sceptical questions, like Hume's, to which no answer could be given, would, in fact, be equivalent to assuming an orderly external world. The matter of subjective experience was to be, what Aris- totle's physical matter was to common-sense objects, a pure potentiality, out of which by subjective agency, in subjective