Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/189

No. 2.] which it could be applied – makes a queer impression upon the reader. When you think you are going to lay hold on an object, you lay hold on yourself instead ; in fact the groping hand grasps only itself."

It may seem strange that a system with such a firm realistic basis should have been the parent of so many idealisms, whether we look to the constructive Idealism of his immediate successors, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, to English Neo-Hegelianism or to the sceptical and positivistic idealism of many German Neo-Kantians. But the reason is not far to seek. If Kant starts from, or implies throughout, a hypothetical dualism of the Lockian type, he likewise accepts in the most unqualified way the doctrine which we found in Locke and Hume of the subjectivity of knowledge – the necessary limitation of the mind to its own ideas. This doctrine we saw to be true in what it affirms; it forms, indeed, the first step in philosophical reflection. Consciousness cannot, in the realm of fact or existence, pass beyond itself; its own states are, therefore, all that is immediately present to or in the mind. But if it be forthwith concluded from this, that it is impossible by means of certain facts in my consciousness indirectly to reach, or in other words to know, a world of other facts beyond my consciousness, we are arguing with more haste than caution. The two propositions, at all events, do not mean the same thing. That knowledge is, and must be, a subjective process is not of itself sufficient to discredit its results and stamp its efforts in advance as unavailing. Yet historically the two statements are generally found together, as if they were two sides of the same truth: knowledge is subjective, therefore it can never give us the object as it really is. So it was with Hume, and so it is with Kant.

By Kant the position is not usually stated quite so broadly. He does not usually say in so many words that, because knowledge is subjective, it can bring us no true report of real objects. To Kant it is the sensuous or receptive character of our perception that invalidates it. Our perception is derivative; it depends for its matter upon an affection of our sensi-