Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/312

298 the action is at the same time the unity of consciousness." He recalls to us that Kant even abstracts from the actual existence of the ego – in his frequent references, namely, to the 'I think' which must be capable of accompanying all my thoughts. What kind of faculty is that, asks Cohen, whose actual existence or non-existence may be disregarded? Taking Kant's own example, he proceeds: "The transcendental ego is a form of synthesis ... The unity of consciousness arises in the synthesis of the drawing of a line, and this synthesis consists in the notion of quantity under which the line is subsumed. Thus the transcendental apperception falls together with the synthetic unity which is contained in the category. ... As space is the form of external perception and time of internal, so the transcendental apperception is the form of the categories. ... The synthetic unity is the form which lies as a common element at the basis of all the separate kinds of unities thought in the categories. The transcendental unity of apperception (in Kant's own words) is the unity through which all the manifold given in perception is united in a notion of the object."

Here the wheel has come full circle. The transcendental object was first reduced to a radiation or reflection of the subject, and now the subject has become merely the unity of the object. Both, in fact, are simply forms assumed by this "one all-embracing experience" (to use a phrase of Kant's on which Cohen naturally lays stress). They are not really separate facts or even separate forms; they are the Janus-faces of a single fact called experience. Subject and object are forms which this experience necessarily takes, and, as such, they are described as transcendental conditions of the possibility of experience, but they have no existence or meaning apart from this immanent reference to the experience whose forms they are. As Cohen says, summarizing his own position, "the form is not a primitive action; it is a form in the sum of psychical occurrence (im psychischen Gesammtgeschehen), a form which