Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/207

146 philosophy, he holds, is not a doctrine, but a method; and philosophy itself, when precisely defined, is simply the critical determination of the limits of the main tendencies in our faculty of consciousness. These tendencies are two: the investigation of phenomena, and speculation upon assumed realities beyond them. Philosophy has thus two functions: the one negative, resulting in the critical dissolution of all the synthetical principles of cognition, and the stripping them of all competence to the absolute, leaving their outcome purely phenomenal; the other positive, affirming the right and the uses of the free exercise of the speculative bent, when taken no longer as knowledge but only as poesy.

The supports of this “Standpoint of the Ideal” are sought in a critique of the Critique of Pure Reason, or a sort of “new critique of reason,” whose ambition it is to bring to the needed consistent fulfilment what Lange regards as the first principle of Kant’s undertaking. This principle is assumed to be the rigid restriction of our knowledge to experience: we have a priori forms of cognition, but they become futile when applied beyond phenomena. That Kant himself regarded this as only the principle of his theoretical view is, to be sure, unquestionable; but his setting up the practical reason as in itself absolute was, Lange maintains, a direct violation of the principle, and was in fact rendered