Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/220

 consciousness that these conceptions are being used in an unauthorized way. Thus even Kant speaks of the thing in itself as the reason of the phenomenon, and also of a ground of the possibility of all phenomena, of an intelligible cause of phenomena, of an unknown ground of the possibility of the sensuous series in general, of a transcendental object as the ground of all phenomena and of the reason why our sensibility should have this rather than all other supreme conditions, and so on in several places. Now all this does not seem to me to tally with those weighty, profound, nay immortal words of his, "the contingency of things is itself mere phenomenon, and can lead to no other than the empirical regressus which determines phenomena."

That since Kant the conceptions reason and consequence, principium and principiatum, &c. &c., have been and still are used in a yet more indefinite and even quite transcendent sense, everyone must know who is acquainted with the more recent works on philosophy.

The following is my objection against this promiscuous employment of the word ground (reason) and, with it, of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in general ; it is likewise the second result, intimately connected with the first, which the present treatise gives concerning its subject-matter proper. The four laws of our cognitive faculty, of which the Principle