Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/196

182 ence between Berkeley's ideas of sense and Kant's empirically real phenomena lies in Kant's more adequate account of space and of the intellectual elements involved in perception. This difference is, of course, fundamental, and Kant's analysis may probably be used so as to make subjective idealism definitively untenable; but in such Kantian passages as those to which I have referred, it does not lift us at all beyond the Berkeleian standpoint.

I have just said that the only sense in which we can intelligibly speak of empirical reality is to designate the process as it passes in my consciousness or yours. But does Kant always use empirical reality and experience (Erfahrung) in this sense? Certainly he sometimes does, and perhaps always intended to do so – though good intentions cannot be credited in philosophy. In addition to many incidental statements, emphasizing the subjective character of these so-called objects, reference may be made to a passage which has all the appearance of being a carefully weighed official declaration on the subject. I mean the sixth section of the Antinomy of Pure Reason, where Kant, according to the title, brings forward his "transcendental idealism as the key to the solution of the cosmological dialectic." Here Kant repeats a great number of times and in the most explicit fashion this purely subjective and individualistic interpretation of experience. "It has been sufficiently proved in the Aesthetic," he says, "that everything which is perceived in space and time – all objects, therefore, of our possible experience – are nothing but phenomena, that is, mere ideas, which, as represented, that is to say, as extended beings or series of changes, have no self-subsistent existence beyond our thoughts... The realist in a transcendental sense makes out of these modifications of our sensibility self-subsisting things – makes mere ideas, consequently, into things in themselves." But for transcendental idealism "space itself and time and all phenomena are not in themselves things. They are nothing but ideas, and cannot exist at all beyond our mind (ausser utiserem Gemüth)... That there may be inhabitants in the moon, although no man has ever perceived them, must