Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/227

166 founding its own organic notions with the hypostatised notion of a thing-in-itself, sets a bound to its own certainty by an a priori illusion which, just because a priori, it can never dispel; though it learns by “criticism” to interpret the illusion correctly.

The justness of this analysis, so far as it goes, is evident enough. We doubtless have here the correct partial genealogy of the remarkable notion Thing-in-itself — in so far, that is, as this notion forms the basis of the common-sense dualism of mind and matter — and the exact genesis of all “critical” agnosticism. There is missing from the analysis, however, the very important fact, that the cooperation of the other a priori elements — Space and Time — with those actually mentioned, is what imparts to the “material-substance” interpretation of this notion its specific character and its chief plausibility. The infinity of Space and of Time, in contrast to the finitude of every sense-presentation, joined with our tendency to ignore the strictly supersensible elements in consciousness — the categories in their purity, and the pure Ideas — and to take our leisure in the familiar region where Time and Space render all things plain, makes it easy for us to suppose there is “abundant room” for “existence wholly out of consciousness” and, as the saying is, “independent” of it. This blun-