Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/44

 the norms of thought, considered as categorical prescriptions which act as our guides in the search for truth, and the natural laws of psychology, in accordance with which objects are presented to the mind, thoughts change and pass away, and the empirical content of the consciousness is transformed: the a priori must not be regarded as an innate idea, but rather as the basis of sensible experience and of the world of speculation. Schultze, another adherent of the neo-Kantian school, observes that the psycho-genetic theory does not in the least advance the critical problem, i.e. the analysis of the conditions essential to knowledge at the present stage of our thought. Both Liebmann and Schultze, however, agree with Lange in the doubt he expresses of the existence of the thing in itself, leaning, as they do, towards phenomenalistic idealism, and viewing the noumenon as a mere product of feeling, a poetical creation of the mind.

6. Criticism of the Neo-Kantian School. — The theories of the neo-Kantians, whilst thus striving to overcome the difficulties arising from the conception of the thing in itself, and from its relations to phenomena, do but increase those difficulties. We cannot possibly understand how that which is absolutely outside consciousness can stand in any sort of relation to feeling and imagination, the most intimate and subjective functions of the mind of man. The thing in itself, problematic as it may be, is ever present, like some mysterious deity, behind sensible appearances, and our absolute ignorance of its function forbids us to take for granted that the stream of phenomena of which it is the source will always be content to flow in the channel of forms and intellectual categories. Our mental organism may subject phenomena to law, but the Absolute is completely beyond its jurisdiction, and might at any moment reveal an aspect of itself antagonistic to our nature, and by so doing imperil the universal character of science. Are the sensations imparted to us by the unknowable object purely plastic and amorphous? If so, it is