Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/187

standing challenge, “How can you make out that perceptions and thoughts are true of the Real, when from the nature of the case they must be products of our a priori cognition, and therefore shut in to the perpetual contemplation of themselves?” “By searching in the right place,” Dühring answers in substance, “and finding that ‘common root’ of sense and understanding of which you yourself, Kant, have more than rarely spoken, but the investigation of which you have found it so much easier to evade.” What sort of “criticism of reason” is it, he goes on in effect, that stops with thrusting experience into the limbo of an abstraction called the a priori, and never asking what the Prius thus implied must be? Man brings his perceptive and thinking organisation into the world with him, doubtless; but from whence? Whence indeed, if not from the bosom of Nature? Let us but once think the Actual as the Actual — as a continuous whole, unfolding toward its Final Purpose — with man and his conscious organism verily in it, and the reality of knowledge becomes intelligible enough. For consciousness is then no longer an imprinted copy of things, as the truth-cancelling and unthinkable theory of dualism makes it, but becomes instead a new setting of them, pushed forth from the same original stock. Man thus inherits the contents and the logical system of Nature by direct