Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/162

Rh him, after his thesis of the absolute limitation of knowledge to objects of sense. But surely that thesis has a strange sound, coming from the same lips that utter with equal emphasis the lesson of our really having cognitions that are independent of all experience. This is neither the place nor the time to expose the oversight and confusion by which Kant fell into this self-contradiction; I must content myself with saying that the contradiction exists, and that I think the oversight is exactly designable, and entirely avoidable. There is a truth concealed in Kant’s thesis of the immutable conjunction of thought and sense, but there is a greater falsehood conveyed by it. And there is a stranger contradiction still, between his two main philosophical doctrines — between his Primacy of the Practical Reason and his Transcendental Ideality of Reason as an account of Nature and of science. Let it be as true as it may — and I suppose it is demonstrably true — that a predictive science of Nature is impossible unless Nature is construed as strictly phenomenal to the cognising mind, and is consequently taken entirely out of the region of “things in themselves,” it by no means follows that such a science becomes possible by that supposition alone. The withholding of the supposition prevents science; but the greatest question is: Can the granting of it establish science? May not far other conditions have to be met, besides the required synthesis of sense with Space and Time and the Categories, before we can declare science to be a real possibility? Or, again, because a concentration of reason upon its pure sense-forms and their sense-contents is