Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/618

602 way functions in independence of empirical consciousness. The author repeatedly warns us that this is no reality, but only a concept, yet it is never quite clear that it is meant to denote an immanent rational principle operating in and through individual experience, and not something that is independent of the empirical consciousness without yet existing as an actual reality.

On the other hand, Professor Rickert's epistemology seems to me ultimately unsatisfactory just because of his refusal to connect it with metaphysics. For, after all, knowledge is always, in some sense and to some degree, knowledge of the real, and to investigate its nature is, at the same time, to inquire into the character of ultimate reality. Indeed, it is only by an arbitrary restriction of the terms 'being' and 'reality' to what exists as a thing or object, and by refusing to apply them to the world of meanings or values, that the author escapes this conclusion. His transcendental idealism has shown that 'the object of knowledge,' what is ultimately real and knowable, does not exist in objective form, but as over-individual values or meanings. But apart from the fact that this view obviously does not avoid metaphysics, it must be regarded as in itself incomplete and unintelligible, since the values or meanings appear as isolated, transcendent, and mysterious. It seems to me that we are compelled not merely to postulate a holy will as a necessary ideal of our religious consciousness, as Professor Rickert admits, but also to advance to the thought of an over-individual or absolute consciousness as the necessary presupposition and ultimate reality of our knowledge, though, of course, we cannot claim to define such a consciousness as an object. The doctrine that ultimate reality does not exist as the object, but as the true subject of knowledge, is, however, an extension of Professor Rickert's conclusions which the principles of transcendental idealism appear to demand and justify.

Not long ago it used to be claimed, with some specious plausibility, that the bankruptcy of philosophy was evident from the lack of systematic treatises on the subject. We have enough and to spare, it was said, in the way of history of philosophy and criticism of particular philosophical systems; but where and by whom is the constructive