Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/211

150 Kant suspected, and its contradictions are profounder. The limiting thing-in-itself Kant assumed as a reality, or, at all events, he declined to doubt its existence; but to carry the a priori principle to its proper conclusion, we must now recognise the phenomenal nature of this notion itself. Our all-encompassing distinction between thing and conscious presentation, between noumenon and phenomenon, is itself a judgment a priori; in fact, an illusion of that order. The illusion arises from our constitutional tendency to put the positive pole of the category of relation — Substance, Cause, Agent — as if it were something additional to the system of experience, instead of merely a term within this. It is thus itself a contradiction, one not simply functional but organic, and therefore provokes to endless other contradictions.

And not only, let us steadfastly remember, is it an illusion; it is an illusion which, though we recognise, we can never dispel, — any more than that of the moon’s enlargement on the horizon, the bending of the stick when thrust into the water, or the apparition of the rainbow. But, like these, it will mislead only such minds as persist in the stolidity of the peasant; and just as the cited illusions, when comprehended, not only do not disturb our science, but continue to quicken the pleasure of existence by their variety and their beauty, so will this ground-