Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/368

356 EDMUND MONTGOMEEY : in a certain sense, more active than perceptual apperception, because the so-called voluntary activity which constitutes attention and recognition, leads in conceptual apperception to the articulate framing of motor signs of recognition and predication, which definite muscular functions are parti- cularly felt as an active process ; whilst similar, but less definite, activities in perceptual attention and recognition are not so distinctly felt as " an action of the subject ". However, at present, we are concerned not with the ex- planation of natural phenomena, but with their spiriting away. Such Transcendentalists as desire to constitute objective knowledge, not by a more profound and thorough insight into the natural connexions of the perceptual order, or by mysticism within the boundaries of the w r orld of sensorial compulsion, but rather by a complete absorption of the apparent manifold of sense into the realising and objectifying unity of apperception, such so-called Neo-Kantian Trans- cendentalists have still another way out of the difficulty of sensible presentation. They may simply point to the pro- bability that our " productive imagination," which without help from outside, quite by means of its own, is capable of constructing a more or less consistent agglomeration of all kinds of conscious phenomena, may well be competent to produce the entire contents of objectively valid experience, when working not in its own fanciful manner but under the strict regulations of the categories. This may with more likelihood be considered to be actually the case, as according to Transcendental Idealism it is this same " productive ima- gination " which, in fact, constructs the a, priori figura- tions of pure mathematics, and discovers the synthetical truths connected with them, to which all experience has to conform. When we reflect how much we can accomplish within our- selves, by means of intrinsic spontaneity, without the aid of sensorial compulsion, we may rightly pronounce the source of such spontaneity to be well-nigh all-efficient. The spon- taneously acting subject in us is obviously the real power creating our phenomenal world. And thus, under the sup- position of such a creating subject or personality of the intelligible order, one finds naturally no difficulty in legiti- mately reaching the conclusion, that the entire contents of consciousness are throughout, in form and material, its pro- duct ; for they are certainly the product of the power, which in verity constitutes the feeling and thinking subject. There remains now nothing essential unexplained, except