Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/478

This page needs to be proofread.

464 c. M. WALSH : KANT'S TEANSCENDENTAL persons, are the transcendental objects, taken by Kant for things-in-themselves, out of any person's experience, but cause of the many (supposedly similar) representations in many persons' experiences. This last is not clearly ex- pounded by Kant. But the general conception of the phenomenally or empirically real, as here explained, is to- be found, with somewhat of elaborateness, though not wholly free from admixture of the other conception, in the sixth section of the part of the Dialektik dealing with the Anti- nomies ; and it is employed by Kant throughout his solution,. or dissolution, of the first two Antinomies. 1 It has been described here first because it is the only way in which Kant's Transcendental Idealism and his treatment of time and space as forms of sensibility, consequently as peculiar to each individual, properly allowed him to treat them. This doctrine, let us notice, is perfectly consistent with the two transcendental doctrines already described. In fact, it is little else than a re'sumd of them, except for the drawing of the distinction between real sense-perception and imagin- ation or dreaming. According to it the empirically real is only either the by us experienced or the by us experienceable. Outside the possible range of our experience our sensible objects do not exist they are transcendentally ideal. Out- side the possible range of our experience the only objects that exist, exist in ways totally distinct from the ways in which our sensible objects exist. As such real transcendental ob- jects do not resemble our real empirical objects, and cannot be sensibly perceived, they cannot be said to have empirical reality. They have only transcendental reality. Beside this consistent Empirical Kealism Kant has another Empirical Realism that is not so consistent, either with itself or with the other two doctrines. He has another way of treating the unexperienced real phenomenal objects those objects which because unexperienced are not phenomenal to me, and possibly are not and never have been or never shall be phenomenal to anybody, and which yet are real because they are experienceable. This other treatment he brings about through a lack of definition and a slurring over of distinctions that ought to be recognised, which we find both in his treatment of time and space in the Aesthetik and in his treatmeat of experience in the Analytik. Kant gener- 1 Cf. " Eine rohe Unterscheidung der Sinnenwelt von der Verstandeswelt, davon die erstere nach Verschiedenheit der Sinnlichkeit in mancherlei Weltbeschauern auch sehr verschieden sein kann, indessen die zweite, die ihr zum Grande liegt, inimer dieselbe bleibt," iv., 299 (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitteri).