Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/369

THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. 357 the difference between fancy and reality, which is not quite effaced by calling fancy that which " productive imagina- tion" builds up without restraint ; reality being its product, when the synthesis is performed in conformity with the categories. Experience and knowledge have to be experience and knowledge of something definitely subsisting, in order to be worthy of the claim of being objective, real, necessary, universally valid. Truth cannot consist of subjectively acquired thought merely, but has to be the agreement of such thought with some enduring standard. This enduring standard can, evidently, not be found in anything given through the senses. "We do not experience a world of steadfast things and relations lying outside con- sciousness. We have to admit that the principle or subject which is the bearer of the permanently and universally valid standard whose recognition constitutes knowledge for us, must be analogous in nature to the principle or subject which in ourselves is labouring to realise the standard truth. How otherwise could we at all possess universally valid ex- perience, recognising such permanent relations as are truth for our thinking? Our individual subject, and that which it recognises, must be of essentially the same nature. As surely, then, as our own thinking subject proves in confor- mity with transcendental assumption to be a spiritual power, just as surely must its knowledge, in order to be true, consist in the recognition of the contents of a universal conscious- ness, borne by a spiritual subject ; a consciousness not incident to time and its changes, but belonging to an all-comprising being, whose thought must be the world of everlasting reality. This is an inevitable inference from the admission of an intelligible or spiritual principle of synthesis. According to it, the object and aim of our knowledge can consist in nothing but a growing conformity with universal consciousness, indi- vidual thought becoming more and more identical with All- Being, the more closely it is reproducing universal thought. The goal of all striving is the entire identification of our being with universal consciousness by the recognition of truth, which consists in the thinking of eternal thoughts. This is all very clear thus far. But how strange of our present Transcendentalists to wish to graft this ancient and simple doctrine on the elaborate investigation of immanent metaphysics, i.e., of the a priori principles of the natural knowledge of the world of sensible presentation, which most certainly and avowedly makes up the Critical system, as taught with so much German thoroughness and Scotch pene- tration by the philosopher of Konigsberg ! 25