Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/229

168 explanation here made, we get a clarifying account of that travesty of the noumenon which we oftenest understand by the thing-in-itself, and may now attend to the real meaning of Lange’s result.

The meaning is striking enough. For, in fact, our philosopher has unwittingly completed the proof of the absolute quality of human knowledge, and at the same time demonstrated the falsehood of materialism — not simply the impossibility of establishing this (which he had already done, as Kant had before him, merely from his agnostic standpoint), but its final impossibility, even as an hypothesis.

As to our real knowledge, he has now shown (1) that a bare thing-in-itself, a thing out of all relation to minds, does not exist; (2) that, even as notion, it is a self-contradiction, something whose sphere is solely within consciousness putting itself as if it were beyond it; (3) that, in spite of this, we continue, and must continue, to accept this illusion, which compels us to limit our knowledge to experience and to renounce all claims to its being absolute. That is to say, then, the sole cause of our doubting the rigorous validity of our knowledge, and reducing our cognition to the mere idiosyncrasy of one species out of an unknown number of possible orders of conscious beings, is an illusion whose genesis we know, a contradiction that we distinctly detect. Then, beyond dispute, our discrediting limitation of