Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/50

Rh and the objects in it, and (2) mere things, the passively constituted parts in experience. Plainly, then, the required proofs can only be brought by exhibiting minds, through the study of them in our human selves as types, in the actual exercise of spontaneous constitutive judgment, — framing a world of things perceivable, according to conceptions that derive in the last resort from concepts a priori; that is, from combinative and constitutive acts of cognition, that are strictly spontaneous with and in us, or with and in any beings that are like us.

Thus, once more, the whole proof comes down to showing (1) that the doctrine of cognition a priori is true and real, and (2) that the absolutely fundamental cognition of this sort is the self-defining consciousness of each mind that it exists just by being self-aware, and, in that very fact, aware of its correlation with a system of other minds. The steps in exhibiting these two main members of the system of a priori knowledge, the reader will come upon, more or less, in every one of the essays; but if he require a more specific direction, he may turn especially to pp. 19-21, 32 cf. 18, 46 seq., 300 seq., 306 seq., for the first; and, for the second, to pp. 173-175, 310-312, 351-354, and 359. However, these are, so to speak, only samples.

For the rest, to take a due notice of the critic who has brought forward, out of an evidently wide philo-