Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/24

8 5) Because the "unity of experience" is secured through the law of causality and according to it, the mind always seeks an adequate cause. But, according to Kant, it destroys experience to find an adequate cause; experience must always seek and never find, else its unity will be destroyed.

6) The thesis asserts that self-activity or self-determination is the basis of all causality, and that without it causality or the origination of new determinations cannot be. The antithesis, on the other hand, sets up the law of causality and proceeds to seek a cause for any event that is not self-originated. Thus it affirms the thesis in so far as it asks for an adequate cause. The impulse that leads us to look for a cause certainly demands an adequate cause, since it is aroused only by the sight of dependence or incompleteness in a phenomenon.

7) But a self-active or self-determined being is not a phenomenon; it is not a thing or an event, but a living being. Although it can manifest itself in things and events it is not either of them. It can organize matter into a body and can perform deeds. It can have an internal life of consciousness—perceiving internally feelings, ideas, and volitions—three forms of self-activity. The form of the object of our external senses is thing and environment—everything is made what it is by its environment—no freedom in that realm, but only necessity.

8) Hence we see that experience has two phases, outer and inner, or sense-perception and consciousness, and consequently two orders of objects of experience. We perceive things in space as mechanical aggregates and moved by external influences. We perceive internally feelings, ideas and volitions, each one of these being a determination of a self-active subject, our own ego. The form of the external object of the senses is fate—outside necessity; the form of the internal object of sense is subject-object of self-determination.

9) But Kant's antinomy assumes that there is but one phase of experience, namely, the outer or external, whose object takes the form of mechanism. Since mechanism is devoid of self-activity all changes and arrangements have to be explained by