Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/317

No. 3.] upon the fundamental presuppositions which predetermined the evolution of thought toward this end. In a preceding article we saw reason to believe that this was to be found in the unwarrantable extension given by Kant to the term 'experience,' and in his view of the merely immanent use of the categories and forms of thought. It is this idea of immanence which, in the hands of his idealistic followers, swallows up the transcendent reference involved in knowledge – a reference still maintained by Kant himself – and leads to the fiction of an experience which is experienced by nobody and is an experience of nothing.

The first essential, then, is to restrict 'experience' to its true and proper meaning. As soon as this is done, it becomes apparent how impossible it is to take experience as something self-contained, self-explaining, and self-existent. Those who profess to do so make matters plausible only by illicitly importing into their professedly pure experience a multitude of trans-subjective elements. Where, then, is the boundary-line to be accurately drawn between pure experience and what transcends experience, between the subjective and the trans-subjective? It is accurately drawn only when by pure experience is understood my own conscious states – the 'stream' of ideas which constitutes my mind in a phenomenal or psychological reference. Everything else is trans-subjective or extra-psychological, i.e., epistemologically transcendent. Limiting ourselves thus, let us look at the nature of this immanent world. There is a passage in Clifford's well-known essay 'On the Nature of Things-in-themselves' which seems to me to illustrate in an apt and vivid way the characteristics of our actual consciousness. It may be quoted without prejudice, as it is introduced by Clifford and used by him in quite another reference. "In reading over a former page of my manuscript," he says, "I found suddenly upon reflection that, although I had been conscious of what I was reading, I paid no attention to it; but had been mainly occupied in debating whether faint red lines would not be better than blue ones to write upon; in picturing the scene in the shop when I should ask for such lines to be ruled,