Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/167

106 achievements” of recent science; the latter, his ambition to frame a system that should blend in a single higher unity whatever of preceding theory he knew — Schopenhauer’s pessimism and sundry idealistic gleanings and fragments, no doubt also first suggested by Schopenhauer, but in detail borrowed largely from Schelling and the “left-wing” adherents of Hegel.

Schopenhauer, seizing upon Kant's doctrine of the ex mente origin of Nature, and the consequently phenomenal character of the world, asked the question that cannot but rise upon Kant’s results. What, then, is this “Thing-in-itself,” assumed as the source of the sensations that our a priori reason coordinates into a cosmos? He felt the force of Kant’s arguments for the limitation of knowledge to the world of experience, the force of the contradictions into which reason was apparently shown to fall when attempting to apply its categories to a Thing-in-itself supposed to lie beyond that region. But he also felt the necessity of the Thing-in-itself, of an Absolute, in order to the relativity which, according to Kant, was an essential feature of knowledge. He perceived, too, the chasm that separated Kant’s doctrines of the will and of the intellect.