Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/200

186 conscious beings something of which the individuals have ideas, and to which their ideas must conform. Erfahmng, or experience, a term which should expressly emphasize the sub- jectivity, comes to signify for Kant, perhaps unconsciously, a stable and connected world of things, identified neither with the intermittent cognitions of individual subjects on the one hand nor with the admittedly trans-subjective world of things- in-themselves on the other. Sometimes, as in the passages already quoted, Kant rouses himself and emphatically declares that this world of experience is only "a play of ideas" in us ; but at other times he clothes it with all the permanence and independence which the ordinary man attributes to real things. And when he says that no enquiry is made in experience after the trans-subjective reality, that is true only because he has virtually installed the phenomenal object in its place. If the phenomenal object were consistently understood as the percept or cognition of an individual subject, it would be absurd to say that in experience we rest content with that ; its dependent and explanation-craving character would be too apparent. It need hardly be added that there is no justification for the intermediate position of quasi-independence insinuated by Kant. The object of consciousness in general, or the social object, is in itself a pure abstraction. It expresses an agreement in con- tent between a number of cognitions which, as far as they are real facts, exist in as many numerically distinct consciousnesses. There is no " consciousness in general," and consequently its object cannot be an existent entity but only an ens rationis. But although this seems tolerably plain when thus stated, it is beyond question that Erfahrung or the world of phenomena which plays such an important part in Kantian literature is a hybrid conception due largely to the ambiguity of the words object and objective which has just been explained. The de- velopment in the hands of the Neo-Kantians of this conception of experience as the exclusive reality will show us the danger of departing from the trans-subjective reference in knowledge. But that subject must be pursued in a separate article. UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. ANDREW SETH.