Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/254

Rh, as every one interested in philosophy knows, a twofold world, — a world of “things in themselves” on the one side, and of “phenomena” on the other; but also to define a very important distinction between two sorts of what he still regarded as genuinely objective reality. For it is very noteworthy that, for Kant, both regions of his twofold world are real. That is, both the things in themselves, and the phenomenal facts, are explicitly called by him objective. Neither is a matter of your private view or of mine. Neither, so Kant directly says, is subjective. It is wrong to suppose that Kant viewed his phenomenal world as a merely inner experience of any one man. The question whether or no there are inhabitants in the moon is, for the Kant of the critical philosophy, as much a question about objective facts as it is for any ordinary scientific observer of the moon. Yet this question is, in his opinion, no longer a question about things in themselves; for the moon is a phenomenon in space; and the unknowable things in themselves have no spatial characters. Precisely so the Newtonian theory of gravitation, or a problem about the innermost constitution of matter, is, for the critical Kant, a discussion about real facts, but not about the things in themselves.

In brief, the former realist, Kant, has now come, not to resign his Realism, but to add thereto the definition of another sort of reality. Besides his independent reals, which he never abandons as unreal, but which he now regards as wholly unknowable, he asserts as critical philosopher the objective character of beings that are of a wholly different type from the absolutely independent realities.