Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/23

xx this point onward its adherence to Kant ceases. It does not, like Kantian idealism, restrict the applicability of a priori principles to the world of sense, to mere phenomena, and thus confine knowledge to natural science; nor does it make of the distinction between our a priori scientific and our a priori ethical equipment a disjunct and impassable difference in kind. On the contrary, a leading aim with it is to break down the Kantian barrier between the “practical” and the “theoretical” consciousness, and to open a continuous theoretical highway for reason in both its scientific and its ethical uses. It seeks to raise our ethical intuition into the region of intelligence instead of feeling, and to do this by showing that the ethical first-principle is not only itself an act of knowledge, but is the principle of all knowledge, and of all real experience as distinguished from illusion.

In further consistency with this, in its philosophy of Nature it departs from Kant on the question of the origin of the “contents” in experience, the “matter” in natural objects. Whichever of the two views ascribed to Kant may really be his, — whether this "matter" of sensation, which he says is strictly “given,” be taken as given (1) in the sense of being produced in us by the agency of some other being, or (2) in the sense of simply being there inexplicably, as a dead datum, back of which we cannot get, and