Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/198

184 the long section quoted from the Dialectic, "the non-sensuous cause of these ideas" – "the transcendental object" – reappears, as if Kant, like Berkeley, found it necessary to give a permanent background to what would otherwise be too palpably a flickering, intermittent, and disconnected existence in the shape of experiences of this or the other individual consciousness.

But it is equally certain that, at other times, the non-sensuous cause falls into the background with Kant, and he speaks of the phenomenal objects in a way that ill accords with the purely subjective existence which is all he here allows them. Kant has told us himself that material objects, or the phenomena of the external sense, "have this deceptive characteristic about them that, as they represent objects in space, they detach themselves, as it were, from the soul, and appear to hover outside of it" – "although (as he proceeds) space itself in which they are perceived is nothing but an idea, whose counterpart is not to be met with in the same quality outside of the soul." In spite of this caveat about the subjectivity of space, it is impossible to read the Critique carefully without becoming aware that this deceptive characteristic of our spatial perceptions – this subtle detachment of themselves from consciousness – has its influence upon Kant himself. Kant does not habitually think of his phenomenal objects as merely subjective experiences, a moment here then gone, till a similar experience occurs in my own or in some other human subjectivity. He talks with some scorn of those who "hypostatise ideas and transfer them outside of themselves as real things," but he may easily be shown to fall under his own censure. It is already dangerous to speak, as he does in the Aesthetic, of ideas as having external things for their objects, when the true state of the case, on the Kantian theory, is that the ideas, i. e., our spatial perceptions, are the external things. So, a few pages later, he defines our perception as the idea or representation of phenomenon (Anschauung = Vorstellung von Erscheinung), where the perception is not identified with the phenom-