Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/371

No. 3.] recognize in man intellectual intuition without recognizing in him beyond his sensuous abstract understanding also a supersensuous intuitive intellect. If any one wishes a simple term for the compound expression unconscious representation or unconscious intellectual function, we may use the word idea (specific and not generic in its signification in Greek and German v. English and French). Idea is equally incapable of being experienced along with intellectual intuition and unconscious representation, and like these words it excludes all difference or opposition, e.g. between that which is presented and that which presents, and like them is in opposition to sensation and intuition on the one side and concept on the other. H. rejects the eternal and immutable idea; the concreteness and the singularity of the one absolute idea attains to validity in the temporal changing content of the world-process. This idea is one with unconscious representation, i.e. if this idea exists, unconscious representation exists. On the latter H. builds his system.

This article is a criticism of Kant's Thing in Itself and of Herbart's Absolute Real. Experience teaches that the change in an object is conditioned not only by the cause but by its own nature also. The subject A occasions in B the reaction b, the subject A the reaction b; b and b' are both expressions and states of one and the same object; they must accordingly correspond to its nature. So in our mental world. The sensation with which we react on external impressions cannot be otherwise than conformable to the nature of our Self. The perception must be in conformity with the subjectivity of the sensibility. The subjectivity of the content of perception brings with it that of all knowledge. The latter is conditioned on the one hand by the laws of thought and on the other hand by sensation. The dualism of sense and understanding was the great error which fettered the metaphysics of antiquity. Every form of epistemological dualism must involve the understanding in contradictions. The entire nature of the spirit, the whole field of its productions, forms a unity. As the understanding asserts that the objects of the sensibility do not exist in themselves, so must it also say: All of my products and objects must correspond to my nature and my laws; they would be different if I myself had another character.

The 'thing in itself' preserves its character of a being only through its qualities; if it is posited without determination there is nothing posited; for that which has no determination, as Hegel teaches, is the Nothing. Every quality which we apply to 'the real' can have only a subjective significance; the 'thing in itself' is not to be thought as