Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/163

Rh cause I am sane, because I have what Kant calls unity of apperception in me, because I need an orderly consciousness, therefore it is that the world of sense and of experience has an outwardly visible good order about it. My understanding, working upon sense, gives laws to nature, because if there were no such laws given by my understanding I should have no true inner experience at all. The show world of experience is the poem of our constructive imagination, the product, then, of our deepest nature, of our largest selves. Moreover, even Kant, with all his caution, has to speak of that true self, to which you and I alike appeal, whenever we discourse about the things of space and time, as if it were something that we all shared in, a certain universal self, whose offspring are we all, with our flying moments of sense, our weak efforts at truth, our study of experience, our common trust in understanding. The world that we know is, according to Kant, the world, not of dead outer things, but of human thoughts; and when we try to get at truth we are trying to find how the world in space and time would seem to the experience of a perfectly sane and rational and far-seeing onlooker; in other words, we are trying, all of us alike, as we think, to find out the mind of the ideal man. Well, I say, that is the essence of Kant’s thought, restated in one word.

And now for a very natural extension of this view. I suggest this extension here first merely as a possible view, then as the one that we shall find history developing. You will think it at first fantastic, but I shall not try as yet to defend or to attack it. I am so far only chronicler.

Grant, if you will, the existence of such a universe as Kant describes, a universe of numerous, free, but ignorant moral agents, each naturally engaged in imaginatively building up, with an unconscious but thoughtful art, an inner personal world, in the sense-forms of space and