Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/313

No. 3.] presupposes other processes and coincides with part of them." The transcendental subject, therefore, as a real source and locus of experience, goes the way of the transcendental object. It is just a form which the current of psychical events has a way of taking, but from which we can infer no real being behind the psychical flux, whose the experience is, or to whom the appearance appears. As soon as we attempt to do so, we become the victims, according to Neo-Kantianism, of an illusion precisely similar to that described by Cohen in the case of the object. But though Cohen, as we have seen, follows the same line of argument in both cases, and reduces subject and object alike to forms of thought to which no trans-subjective reality corresponds, he stops short of branding the subject also as an illusion. He does not write in a sceptical interest; he proposes this self-rounding world of Erfahrung or experience as the one and all-sufficient reality. Kant's supposed "theory of experience" is consistent Criticism the latest birth of philosophy; and accordingly it would be stultifying himself to speak of illusion, in so many words, in connection with the supreme form of experience.

Nevertheless it is perfectly apparent that the whole structure hangs in the air. This purely immanent reference of the categories and forms of thought leaves us with no real being whose the experience is. This 'experience' or Erfahrungswelt has no locus; it evolves itself in vacuo, and in the course of its evolution evolves the form of personality. Lange, who otherwise adopted Cohen's results as true Kantianism and true philosophy, was disturbed by this lack of any real basis, and entered a mild protest against it. "If the emphasizing of the merely transcendental standpoint be carried too far, we arrive at the tautology that experience is to be explained from the conditions of possible experience in general – that the synthesis a priori has its cause in the synthesis a priori." By the merely transcendental standpoint Lange means what I have just called the purely immanent or inward reference of the categories and forms of thought – the proof, for example,