Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/276

260 CRITICAL NOTICES: say that experience is a mere phenomenon, veiling an unknowable Beyond. This ready-made alternative exhausts all possibilities for the author. The next question is, how are the Ideas to be derived (degagees) from experience? M. Gory notices and rejects the Kantian attempt to find them as limits of empirical series (whose nature is to have no such absolute limits, -hence the dialectical character of the Ideas with Kant) : and he substitutes the method of " progression," a development of what is contained in the sensible representation (des puissances qui sont en elle). This can be continued indefinitely, in two opposite directions, at present by imagination only ; but the notion of an infinite ex- tension, or a finite limit, is quite inapplicable to the process, which deals with what is presented or imagined only. The " representa- tion," further, is not the unity of a manifold but is an immanent unity (pp. 33-35), hence analysis alone can disengage its aspects, not abstraction : we soon see, however, that it is analysis of "abstract representations" which the author has in view, time, space, substantiality, causality. The Ideas of Reason are only the terms of abstract relations, used apart from those relations in which alone they are thinkable. Proceeding to the analysis, we find that the most abstract and universal aspects of experience are, a principle whose nature is to determine, and one whose nature is to be an object determined ; these are only thinkable in distinction from each other, the thought by which we distinguish the latter from the former is the same as that by which we dis- tinguish the former from the latter. In experience, their correla- tion assumes four forms : the mathematical point and the pure continuum of space ; the mathematical instant and the pure continuum of time ; the pure cause and the pure effect ; the pure substance and the pure mode. Involved in these relations, as manifested in experience, is a unity which is the synthesis of their terms, and in which alone they are real ; this is the unity of con- sciousness : not (as with Kant) a subjective form of synthesis, but the immanent unity of every form which the fundamental correla- tion assumes. Thus M. Gory, in his anxiety to uphold the " immanence " of thought, has left no place for the real nature of knowledge as a process of reference : the knowing and the known become absolutely identical. The author thinks that all systems of " pure metaphysic " have the incurable vice of employing one or other of the Ideas as a thinkable predicate of reality or realities beyond experience ; and in his second and third divisions he proceeds with much ingenuity to characterise and classify metaphysical systems from this point of view, giving the outlines of a systematic pathology of philo- sophic thought. In the fourth and last division of the book he points out the only "natural and legitimate" use of the Ideas, viz., in their syntheses : for by these we are brought back to experience. The synthesis of the ideas of the point and the spatial continuum,