Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/186

170 Transcendental Deduction that has played the most important part in the arguments of the English Kantio-Hegelians."

Now Kant's method of determining the conditions under which experience is possible has, it seems to me, only a negative value. He succeeds in showing that the basal principles of Nature are the categories of our own understanding, but not how the manifold of sense can at all be subsumed under the categories. Kant's argument that experience could not be possible if the raw materials of sense were not determined by the universal forms of thought is irrefragable, but when we come to ask how two such dissimilar elements as sense and understanding can combine in order to produce knowledge, we get no satisfactory answer. The cumbrous and uncouth machinery of the Schemata fails to mediate between sense and understanding. If the manifold of sense be really chaotic and devoid of all connection with one another, how can they be reduced to order and rendered intelligible by the understanding? What mysterious power is there in the understanding to transform the dark chaos of sense into the beautiful cosmos of the world of our experience? If such a power exists, how are we to think of its exercise? If it be maintained, that the impressions of sense have such connections between them as to furnish a clue to the synthetic activity of the understanding, the obvious rejoinder is, what need is there, under the circumstances, for the synthesis of the understanding at all? This insurmountable difficulty of the Kantian theory of knowledge has very ably been brought to light by Dr. Hutchison Stirling, and no Neo-Hegelian, so far as I know, has yet been able to meet his objection. Professor Edward Caird in his Critical Philosophy of Kant has tried hard to obviate the difficulty, but I confess I have not been satisfied by his argument. He succeeds in saving the system of Kant from utter collapse at this point only by going far beyond it. The gulf between sense and under- standing remains profound, and it does not seem probable that any one will be able to put Dr. Stirling to shame by constructing a bridge over it with the rotten materials supplied