Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/488

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Besides, I have throughout assumed readers will see that Kant's agnostic restrictions are anticipated, provided for, and rendered inapplicable, by the plain implications of the fact of a priori cognition itself, when that is once clearly established and clearly understood; and this fact I have explicitly argued out, in two different places in the volume — in the first essay, and again in the sixth. Then, too, I have relied on the plain power of the essentially social nature of the self-defining consciousness to lead my readers to see how irrelevant Kant’s agnostic tenets are. (See, particularly, my pp. 351-353, and cf. pp. 173-175) That is to say, the Kantian agnosticism is annulled, so far at least as concerns the certainty of the existence, even the noumenal or eternal existence, of the self. In fact, however, my reviewer is a trifle out in saying I depart from Kant on this point, for Kant himself never supposed that this was unknown or unknowable: what was unknowable was not the existence, but the nature of the noumenon. If nowhere else, then at all events in the Prolegomena, Kant declares unmistakably that the existence of selves as Dinge an sich is a known certainty. “That there are no Dinge an sich,” he says in substance, “is absurd.” (Cf. the Prolegomena, passim, but especially in §57.)

(2) A more serious complaint is that which Mr. McTaggart makes that my reasons for treating the Categories as applicable to the self, when I refuse to describe it in terms of the Sense-Forms, are “not brought out anywhere in the book.’ This fault, if it is a fault, I shall have to admit. Within the limits of the brief volume I could not compress everything pertaining to a complete vindication of my general view. In particular, Mr. McTaggart’s centrally pertinent question — Why are not the Categories in exactly the same position as Time, as to being necessarily transcended by the noumenal self? — could only be answered after a complete reexamination, going to the foundations of the