Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/107

"94 CEITICAL NOTICES : and H of the second part of the book : "The true distinction is between what is fully true and what is partially true~ Yhat is fully true once is fully true always, of anatural phenomenon no less than of a geometrical figure ; but any proposition about a natural phenomenon is true of it only under conditions of which we do not know all, while a proposition about a geometrical figure, if true at all, is true of it under conditions which we completely know" (p. 250; cp. also pp. 264 ft). It will be evident from such instances that the lectures are quite as much devoted to evolving a coherent philosophy out of Kant as to expounding the undiluted Kantian doctrine. As an interpreter of Kant, indeed, Green follows substantially the method already familiar to us in Pro- fessor Caird's Philosophy of Kantv?h&t I should call the method of sympathetic development. But he is perhaps more careful in distinguishing between the positions thus developed and the less coherent utterances of the original Kant. The Hegelianising of Kant may be best illustrated from the section on the ' Deduction of the Categories/ as the most centrally important part of Kant's work. Here it is noteworthy that Green follows the first edition in preference to the second. The former undoubtedly contains statements which seem to make powerfully for the Hegelian view of the unity of apperception and its relation to reality. Kant there speaks, for example, of the transcendental object as a mere -x, and defines it as " that which prevents our cognitions from being determined at random or as we choose, and determines them a priori in a certain fashion ". It may well be argued that the predicates which he applies to the object here are no more than would be equally applicable to the transcendental Ego. Hence Green concludes : " With Kant, the transcendental object and transcendental subject are the same. The presence of an eternal and unchangeable self to all phenomena at once makes them an order of nature and makes our experience of them one connected system. ' Order of nature ' and ' unity of experience ' are only two aspects of one and the same function of the eternal Self, which we call object or subject, according as we look on one or the other of these 'aspects " (p. 28). The main objection to such a statement, in my view, is the " With Kant " with which it opens. It is true that Kant, in the last paragraph of the passsge referred to, does speak in terms which bear a certain resemblance to this position of Green's. That is, having for the time being our rational experience alone in view (and seeing, in his own words, that, so long as we so restrict ourselves, " the x which corre- sponds to our ideas (i.e., the object), inasmuch as it must be some- thing distinct from them all, is nothing for us"), Kant in this one passage identifies the objective reference which, within experience, we give to our ideas with the constitutive action of the appercep- tive unity. But this is still far from attributing to the transcen- dental Ego the metaphysical place here assigned to it by Green. In reality, Green immediately finds it necessary to correct the too