Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/185

Rh the individual mind acquires a knowledge of the objective world, the further question arises: How is it possible for the subject to know the object? Psychology deals with the fact, the theory of knowledge with the possibility of the fact. The psychologist seeks merely to describe the processes and stages through which the human mind comes to have a knowledge of the objective world and of itself. The opposition of subject and object, the possession of a knowledge of the latter by the former, are for him given facts. The epistemologist, on the other hand, seeks to point out the conditions under which the subject acquires a knowledge of the object and to determine the relation between them. How is knowledge possible? This is the fundamental question of Epistemology. Kant was the first, in modern times, to answer the question and Green and the Neo-Hegelians have accepted his answer with some important modifications.

It is not necessary to give here a sketch of Green's theory of knowledge. He accepts Kant's doctrine, on the whole, with the elimination of the thing-in-itself. The aim of the Kantian Philosophy, as is well known, is to show that the spatial and temporal world of our knowledge is the making of our own understanding. Things-in-themselves affect us somehow and produce impressions in our minds. These impressions, however, are a mere manifold, chaotic and incapable of being known. It is the mind that reduces them to order by first arranging them in time and space and then subsuming them under twelve thought-forms or categories of the understanding. All this is done under the guidance of the highest principle of unity, viz., the unity of self-consciousness. The unity of Nature, according to Kant, is solely due to the relating activity of our own understanding, which brings the disconnected impressions of sense into relation with each other. The fundamental laws of Nature are forms of unity whereby self-consciousness puts together our fleeting sensations and converts them into mutually determining objects of an orderly and coherent world. Kant proves his doctrine in his Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, and, as Professor Seth says, "it is the