inference. This usage would not in itself be a matter for regret, but, as I have already suggested, it has not seldom led to a misconception of the meaning of philosophical writers who employ the word with something of its old Platonic significance.
Such a misconception is partly favoured by the way in which the so-called idealism of Germany has developed. Kant emphasized the relativity of objects to the unity of the self, but he still maintained the reservation that the objects so related are not in an ultimate sense real, apart from the subjectivity to which they are revealed. While, therefore, he contended that the world of experience cannot be regarded as independent of consciousness in general, and, indeed, of the consciousness of man, he still held to the distinction of the objects of experience from things in themselves. He thus, after all, seemed to seclude man in a world of his own consciousness, and to sever him entirely from reality. Hence when Kant was attacked as a Berkeleian, it gave him no little trouble to separate his own doctrine from that of Berkeley, and his attempts to work out this distinction are perhaps the obscurest parts of the Critique of Pure Reason. In fact, he was unable to achieve this result except by an argument which—if carried to all its consequences—would have been fatal to the distinction of phenomena from things in themselves, and would thus have transformed the most fundamental conceptions of the Critique. For the point of that argument is that we can be conscious of the subject only in distinction from, and in relation to, the object, and that, therefore, our consciousness of the external world is as immediate as our consciousness of the self, and our consciousness of the self as mediate as our consciousness of the external world. But if this argument be valid, the subjective point of view of Berkeley can once for all be set aside. To suppose that we are first conscious of our ideas, as our ideas, and then that secondly we proceed to infer from them the existence of objects, is to invert the order of our intellectual life, and to tear asunder its constituent elements. It is to invert its order: for, though the unity of the self may be implied in all consciousness of objects, yet it is to the object in the first instance that our attention is directed, and we observe the outward world and construe its meaning long before we turn the eye of reflexion upon the inner life. And it is to tear the elements of it asunder: for the outer and the inner life are at every point in close correlation, and there is no experience of ours, theoretical or practical, in which we have not to do with both. The growth of our inner life is just the development of our knowledge of the outer world and of our interests in it, and the attempt to retire
