Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/225

164 perhaps absolute existence; we have committed ourselves irretrievably to the judgment There are no things-in-themselves. Therewith, as shown already, an act of absolute cognition enters, and universal phenomenalism falls to the ground. The “critical” procedure has annulled its own principle. The Nemesis of all agnosticism, of which we caught a glimpse above, has for the a priori agnostic formed to itself a companion avenger.

Lange, however, is equal to the emergency; he has that dogged courage which does not realise its own defeat. He rallies on a new base, and this rally is the real explanation of his singular doctrine that the ground-form of consciousness, as he considers it, — this contrast between consciousness and noumenal Reality, — is an “organic contradiction.” He would evade the force of the above conclusion by showing that the “critical” thing-in-itself — the noumenon as pure category — is not the actual contents of that a priori notion which forms the "limiting" term in the relation Phenomenon-Noumenon. On the contrary, that limiting term is an hypostasis by consciousness, an imaginary “enrealising” — a putting as beyond, independent of, or plus consciousness — of its own system of internal categories appertaining to phenomenal objects. In short, it is a putting of the notions Substance, Cause, and Agent, as if they