Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/64

52 SHADWOETH H. HODGSON. forms, experience was to be produced. But who does not see that this assumption of a chaos in sensations, out of which experience results, involves the assumption of causal agency in the Subject ? For what else remained capable of moulding experience out of them ? This thoroughness in avoiding the assumption of any par- ticle of experience, in explaining the genesis of experience, leads therefore to the most glaring assumption of all. A chaos of sensation is a pure and impossible fiction. It is true that we put together sensations of the various senses into a perception of the external world, as for instance sensa- tions of sight and of touch into solid coloured objects ; but each of those sensations severally is orderly both ad intra and ad extra, has always some duration, or duration and extension together, and always some place in a series of other sensations. Kant's phrase, " the manifold of sense," covers both cases of disorder in sensations, and serves to shelter the case in which the disorder is a fiction under the segis of the case in which it is a fact. I will show you pre- sently, that to take experience as it is given, that is, as a sequence of orderly sensations (though not orderly in the sense of being worked up into an external world of material objects), involves no assumption of an external world as the cause or source of that experience. Meantime it is enough to have shown, that the opposite course of assuming a chaos in sensations does involve the corresponding assumption of causal agency in the Subject, which is Kant's prime assump- tion, made to account for the genesis of experience as a whole. His noumenal Subject thereby became the consti- tutive agent of the whole objective world ; and thereby also this noumenal Subject, though individual originally in Kant's intention, lost all distinction of persons, and became, as the noumenal subjective agent producing and manifesting the phenomenal world, what Kant's immediate successor called the Absolute Ego. Whereupon all Germany went mad ; the voice of sober criticism was overpowered. Maimon's distinct step forward in the critical direction was disregarded. The crop of theories constructing the universe, which followed from this beginning, I need not describe. It became the fashion to construct the universe. It was as if every one had said ' Go to, let us discover a central principle whose efficacy shall reach unto heaven '. Many Towers of Babel arose in consequence, each built upon its own peculiar central prin- ciple, derived from Kant, some special form of causal agency in the Noumenon. Spinoza revived and walked. His wisdom