Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/195

No. 2.] upon the ambiguity of words to ask us to accept the immanent object as actually being the transcendent object – the real thing. The subjective object is certainly, like faith, the evidence of that trans-subjective world. It is, we may hold, the substantial and sufficient evidence, but the one is not the other. If the one were the other, doubt, as I have said, would be impossible and to lead evidence would be ridiculous.

Hence when Kant argues, as he so often does, that his system is immeasurably superior to the problematical Idealism of most philosophers, his speech bewrayeth him. His very insistence on the fact that, in his system, doubt of the existence of material things is impossible – that he is as certain of the existence of objects in space as he is of any fact of the internal sense – only proves that these material things in space are simply my spatially arranged perceptions. Space and all its contents, as he is so fond of saying, are only phenomena of my consciousness, only ideas in me. Kant's immediately known real things in space recall, in fact, Berkeley's very similar protestations that he is placing reality upon a firmer basis than ever before. Others may doubt whether matter exists or not; for his part, he has immediate certainty on the point. Berkeley plainly availed himself in this of something like a double entendre; he endeavored to substitute the perception, or the object immediately present to consciousness, for the trans-subjective real of which it is the perception. But the trans-subjective to which all subjective facts refer is not thus to be got rid of. Berkeley restores it in another form; Hume himself, in the Enquiry, seems inclined to leave it standing in the attenuated form of "a certain unknown, inexplicable something"; and in this shape it is retained by Kant as the thing-in-itself. For the counterstroke of all this somewhat mystifying talk on Kant's part about real things in space is his reminder that these objects are, after all, only phenomena in consciousness. Their reality is only empirical; and as the only empirical reality of which we can intelligibly speak is the process as it passes in my consciousness or yours, Kant stands practically on the same ground as Berkeley. The only differ-