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472 c. M. WALSH : KANT'S IDEALISM AND REALISM. they are still also retained as constitutive. The second Analogy is the most important. This we find even con- verted into a " regulative principle of the reason," to the effect that in the search after natural causes for any given phe- nomenon we can never stop at any first natural cause, but, however far back we go, must always regard the cause we reach as still an effect demanding search for a further cause (387). Yet, as originally enunciated in the Analytik, and as again repeated on the very next page after what has just been quoted, the second Analogy was a principle stating as a truth that every phenomenon has a preceding phenomenon for its cause. From this constitutive principle for it cer- tainly is expressed constitutively it follows analytically and apodictically that the series of preceding causes must be without a beginning, must be infinite, and " uneinge- schrankt " (388) and " nirgend geendigt " (389) Kant calls it, though he avoids the term " unendlich " except in connexion with the principle taken regulatively (as on 423). Now this constitutive principle, as thus established and held (taken to be true), fits in only with the second kind of Empirical Realism as above described, because it asserts that every phenomenon, hence also my first phenomenon, has a pre- ceding phenomenon for its cause ; but my first phenomenon cannot have a preceding phenomenon in me for its cause, and its cause can only be a phenomenon outside me. Nor can its cause be supposed to be a phenomenon entirely in some- body else ; for that would be absurd in itself, and would break the alleged continuity in the series of actual causes. It would also involve the position that there never was a first man or first animal, but that the succession of living creatures has been from eternity ; which Kant repudiated (359-360). Then the only phenomenon causing my first phenomenon, or causing the first phenomenon in the first living and per- cipient being, must be a phenomenon simply as a phenomenon, in the One world, or in the One consciousness. And the only place for the unlimited series of phenomena in the never- begun chain of events is the One phenomenal world in general, or the One consciousness. But if the first-described account of Empirical Realism be adhered to, then only can the regula- tive principle be held ; for this alone fits that theory, asserting as it does that so far as we go in the search after preceding causes so far we must regard the phenomenal reality as going, but not asserting that the phenomenal reality goes any farther nor even that it goes so far.