Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/487

426 Type to be one of the series of really possible beings, “and consequently that a being exists who realises the Type.”

But enough of these misapprehensions. I must now turn to sundry difficulties that Mr. McTaggart finds with some of the cardinal conceptions in my theory, or else with my method of advocating them.

(1) He complains that after going closely with Kant to a certain point, I then suddenly separate myself, — “abruptly,” as he says. By this he appears to mean my rejection of Kant's restriction of all our cognition to phenomena and denial of our power to know noumena. He implies that I nowhere give any reasons for rejecting Kant’s criticisms on the Paralogism of Pure Reason, but go on to maintain that pure reason can know' that the self exists, and exists eternally, — simply ignoring these celebrated criticisms. It is a fact, of course, that I have not felt it needful to reply in detail to the various branches of Kant’s agnostic doctrine, and especially not to his assault upon the possibility of proving theoretically the freedom and the immortality of the self. I have chosen to rely, rather, on a general refutation of the agnostic motif, which I have supplied in my first essay; and I have relied more especially on the self-refutation of Kantian agnosticism by its own inner dialectical dissolution, which I have traced out in the fourth part of my third essay. These very essential parts of my general argumentation, my reviewer appears to have quite overlooked. No reader who omits them will properly understand the argumentative procedure on which I rest my case in the seven essays taken together.