Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/473

IDEALISM AND EMPIRICAL REALISM. 459 things nor attributes of things existing apart from such a- faculty that there is no Gegenbild of time and space (iii., 608), and consequently none of phenomenal objects, existing " in the same manner " (iii., 570), or "in the same quality " (iii., 607, 608), outside, by themselves. 1 Also, in spite of all Berkeleyans, we can perfectly well think of the existence of things beside percipient beings and their representations ; wherefore we may perfectly well entertain a system of Transcendental Realism concerning them. For entirely consistent with itself and with the preceding is the concep- tion that there may be a world of things existing by them- selves, not in time and not in space, either themselves or their " determinations " or " manners of existing," about which therefore we are not able to know or even to conceive what they may be in detail, whether we happen or not to be able to know or to believe that they exist. We can, further- more, think of them as interacting and as acting upon our subjects - in - themselves ; for ourselves, by abstracting our faculties and their contents, may be regarded as similar things-in-themselves. The concept of causality applied to these is not the concept of causality which Kant applied to our sensible objects and denned as the positing of something preceding as condition of something following, since this is applicable only to events taking place in time. That kind of causality he called the sensible, phenomenal, or empirical. The kind which is applicable to things-in-themselves he called the intelligible, noumenal, or transcendental. 2 So it is conceivable that the objects-in-themselves may cause in me (a subject-in-itself) my sensations, which I distribute into a spatial and temporal and orderly world of phenomena ; and similarly they may cause in you your sensations, which your subject-in-itself distributes into an extended and tem- poral and orderly world of phenomena, and so on in every individual person, every one of whom would have his own subjective world of phenomena, and the only objective world, common as object to all individual persons, would be the one world of things-in-themselves. To imagine what may be the conditions or states in that world corresponding to the extended and succeeding states in our phenomenal worlds is impossible, for the very reason of their total differentiation from our representations ; but simply to think 1 Bather that our time and space and the objects appearing in them -are not Gegenbilder, or mirrored images, of a real time and space and of real things existing in them. 2 III., 349, 374, 377, 378.