Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/187

] by Kant. The truth is that Kant professes to do one thing while he actually does something else. He nowhere shows that the manifold of sense are converted into cognizable objects of experience. What he proves in his Principles of the understanding is that the world of experience implies the presence in it of certain universal forms of connection as its ground principles. To say that fleeting sensations are transformed into the connected objects of a permanent world is one thing. To show that Reason is immanent in the objective world without which a knowledge of it would not be possible is something very different.

Though Green and the Neo-Hegelians have endeavored to educe a consistent Idealistic theory from the Philosophy of Kant, they have done nothing to show' a way out of the difficulty mentioned above. It reappears in their system too, with greater clearness, perhaps. They seem to think that the elimination of the Thing-in-Itself is sufficient to make Kant consistent. We are constantly told that the data of sense must be related to each other by the unity of self-consciousness, if there is to be knowledge. But how can the self relate evanescent sensations to each other? Of course the Neo-Hegelians do not admit a distinction between sense and understanding, but they state their theory in language which implies a separation between them. Every reader of Green knows that passage after passage can be quoted from his writings in which he speaks of feelings being converted into felt things by the relating activity of the self. But one is utterly at a loss to understand how the self can manufacture felt things out of feelings. Let self-consciousness relate feelings to each other in as many ways as it likes, and still no felt thing will be produced. Feelings will remain feelings to the last, though they may be encumbered with a whole world of relations. Green, indeed, in his Prolegomena to Ethics, denies that there is any hard and fast distinction between sense and understanding, but he no sooner proceeds to state his theory than he begins to talk of a world of experience being produced by the relation of feelings to each