Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/257

238 to us in consequence of the constitution of our sense organs. For in consequence of the laws of sensation, and of the context of our perceptions, we should come directly to observe the magnetic matter, were our organs fine enough. But the form of our possible experience has no dependence upon the mere coarseness of our actual sense organs. And thus, just so far as perception and its supplementation by virtue of empirical laws together suffice, so far extends our knowledge of the existence of things. But unless we begin with actual experience, and unless we proceed according to the laws of the empirical connection in experience, we vainly seek to guess or to investigate the existence of anything.”

So much, then, in general, for Kant’s statement of our present conception of the real. The novelty of Kant’s account, as against previous approaches to the same philosophical idea, lies in the fact that earlier metaphysic, in trying to define the realm of truth as truth, the realm of the Possible Being of Aristotle or of the Scholastic Theology, had almost always made this conception a mere incident in the account of a world defined either in realistic or in mystical terms, while Kant’s region of possible experience is sharply sundered from the realistic universe, and is quite as clearly distinguished from anything resembling that mystical limbo whose Schwärmerei Kant himself so much dreaded.

Subtle and difficult as Kant’s new ontological conception has been, it has simply dominated the most popularly influential treatments of the philosophy of science ever since. Men who have spoken lightly of Kant have