Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/224

Rh the right to demand that he shall be in earnest with this apriority, and a form a priori means a principle from and in our consciousness organically and solely. To say that a notion is a priori is to say that its being a spontaneous thought of ours exhausts its existence completely; that the entire being of it is in a native energy of our consciousness, and that this elemental discharge from consciousness is the whole meaning of the corresponding name. For instance, our pure thoughts corresponding to the words “space,” “time,” “cause,” are upon the a priori theory exactly and utterly what Space, Time, and Cause respectively are. Anything short of this view would render apriority null. For if there were anything extra mentem to which, even possibly, the a priori elements corresponded, we could never then be certain that they originated in our consciousness at all — we should remain in a quandary as to whether they did or did not. Yet from our consciousness they must originate if they are to have that absolute universality, and that necessity of application to their objects, with which we incontestably think them. As a consistent Kantian, Lange must assent to this; and not simply assent to it, but proceed from it wholly and thoroughly. To make the thing-in-itself a genuine form a priori is therefore to exclude its existence in any other sense. But this annuls the desired phenomenalistic conjecture of its