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 difficult to understand why one form of classification should be more applicable than another, and we end at the same time in reducing knowledge to nothing more than a creation of the subject totally devoid of any objective meaning. Or must we admit data to be possessed of characteristics and a physiognomy of their own which act as a stimulus to the activity of thought in certain directions? If this be granted, we cannot explain how these stimuli which have their source in the impenetrable heart of things can, by some happy accident, be moulded without any difficulty by the human intellect. This uncertain equivocal position of neo-Kantian philosophy left a painful sense of doubt in the mind which no flight of imagination, even though inspired by genius, and no feeling, however lofty and poetical, could entirely dispel.

7. Riehl’s Monism. — Riehl, while retaining the unknowable residuum of the thing in itself, has endeavoured to invest science with objective validity by substituting a monistic conception for the subjectivism of the neo-Kantists. The harmony between the activity of thought and the processes of the real, which could not be explained by Kantism pure and simple unless the sensible objects were to be regarded as a creation of the mind, thus returning to the theories of romantic idealism, is, according to Riehl, accounted for by the identity of the unknowable source, in which the streams of thought and objective reality both take their rise, and from which they pursue their course along parallel lines. The unifying activity of the human mind, the one and only true a priori, is not purely formal, but has its objective correlative in the unity of nature, the ruling idea of scientific research. The intuitive forms and the categories are not a priori, but are constructed by the synthetic activity of thought, which is ever striving to reduce the changeful world of individual perceptions to a reality possessed of social value; they express necessary conditions, because experience in its manifold forms acquires characteristics of universal