Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/232

Rh nated from within. But the hypothetical potential of sense, the assumed subsensible substance called matter, we have now seen to be precisely that self-contradiction talked of as the physical thing-in-itself, and it therefore disappears from the real universe along with that illusion. We have, then, a definitive Critique of all Materialism.

By the path into which Lange has led us we therefore ascend from the agnostic-critical standpoint to the higher and invigorating one of a thorough, all-sided, and affirmative idealism. A few words must suffice to outline its general conception. The result is, in brief: Our normal consciousness has the trait of real universality, — it puts judgments which in the same circumstances every intelligence, and every order of intelligence, would put. The objects it perceives, and seen as it sees them when it sees to its full, are the same that from the same outlook all intelligences would perceive. For such objects are themselves but complexes of its judgments, and the mentioned circumstances and outlook are in fact part of the objects as perceived; they are not limitations imposed upon consciousness from without, but are particularisations of its own primordial processes. Or, to state the case inversely, the potential reach of normal human consciousness is the very thing meant by universality: intelligence as such is simply the fulfilment of human intelligence.