Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/80

Rh spring — of association, of unification, of synthesis, in that consciousness itself. Nor can anybody merely by the suggestion of a counter-theory, however plausible, dispose of those profound and penetrating arguments of Kant’s by which the great Königsberger shows Time and Space, for instance, to be a priori, and exposes the fact that every attempt to explain them as generalisations from experience must tacitly assume them already operative in the very formation of the experiences from which the generalisation is made. Without them, Kant’s point is, the thinker could not make use of the experiences to generalise to them; he must have had them, and in forming experiences employed them already, in order to his having in the experiences the requisite characters on which to rest and support the generalisation.

The theory that the synthetic processes in our human consciousness are merely associations of habit, Hume, to be sure, construed as referring to each single mind only; and Kant’s force in replying to him might at first seem owing to this neglect of the evolutional series in which experiences really run. But adding the vast enginery of æonic evolution to Hume’s views really does nothing toward removing that weighty and piercing objection of Kant’s. For even supposing all other cases conceded, whatever seeming necessity of other ideas