Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/605

No. 5.] right. But his hypothesis is weak and unintelligible. What can an innate idea be before consciousness? A thought before thinking! Say that these ideas mean mental laws. Then you must hypostasize a subject as bearer of these laws. Then the theory contradicts itself, for one of its conclusions makes the existence of the mind problematical. If, however, you deny the reality of the mind and regard the a priori forms as mere abstractions resulting from mental analysis, what follows? Either an idealistic theory according to which everything is knowable, since everything is idea, and against which consciousness protests; or a dogmatism which holds that our ideas represent something, that they are in consciousness a product whose factors must be sought outside of it. Hence these laws will have an objective validity, and we are justified in constructing a truly scientific metaphysics.

F. adopts this latter view. Neither the existence nor the essence of objects is unknown to us. The existence of the soul, the world, and God is known to us, the essence of these partially knowable by the effects which they produce in us and which consist in thoughts and perceptions. To God we may ascribe as qualities the effects produced by him in the world; among these we enroll consciousness and thought. However great the sphere of the unknowable remains for such a philosophy as this, the knowledge it yields is sufficient for our guidance.

Reality is given us by means of sense-perception. The self can ascribe existence to the things to which it refers the various contents of perception only in case they have become its presentations. The consciousness of independence of me is a quality of my presentation of the object; it is the characteristic idea which distinguishes this presentation from others. Being is a category, a necessary rule of thinking, by which the object first gets its objective character. If I say 'A is,' I express the objectification of A simply through the category of being; but since the categories are only functions of thinking, and so purely subjective forms of spirit, the objects get their objectivity only through us. Reality cannot have the significance of absoluteness, but must rather have that of relativity. Things must be endowed with such a nature that the laws by which they become things find application to them; they can belong only to the sphere of the laws themselves; they must therefore be pure phenomena of spirit. Neither consciousness nor its object can exist for itself; consciousness has existence only in (an) its object. If neither outer nor inner objects appear to us, our consciousness, too, must disappear. Subject and object mutually condition one another.