Therefore, that which explains the data of consciousness must lie beyond all consciousness, and so must be a transcendent object.
But this answer is itself capable of taking various forms. Its most common form lays stress upon the conception of Causality, and calls for a causal explanation of the conscious data. Our consciousness, so one asserts, does not cause its own data, except in the case of our acts of spontaneity (if there be such acts). In general, the data of sense come to us with a certain Zwang, a compulsion, over which our will is powerless. This compulsion, which binds our experience, is, then, not explained by anything within the limits of this experience itself. But explanation is needed. Something must cause the data to be what they are. Shall this something be another state of consciousness? Or shall it be a fact of a real and transcendent world, independent of all consciousness? The first of these two answers, one says, would only postpone the problem. Consciousness nowhere shows us enough self-explained facts to form a basis for the causal explanation of the other facts. Consciousness is full of data that come in a compulsory fashion; but consciousness nowhere presents to us as a part of its own content anything adequate to furnish us the source of the compulsion. Consciousness, as such, is dependent. The transcendent objects alone can be causally independent — the sources from which our data proceed.
Other hardly less favourite ways of stating this insistence upon explanation demand either logical or teleological explanations of the conscious data, in such
