Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/22

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PREFACE
xix

with Kantianism. It certainly agrees with Kant, as it departs from Berkeley, in two chief matters: it maintains the a priori character of all the connecting and inference-supporting elements in human consciousness, and it consequently removes the centre of the permanent order in Nature from the Divine mind to the human, — understanding by the human the type of every mind other than God. It thus aims with Kant to avoid the merely theocentric or theological idealism of Berkeley, which rests on bare empiricism as an account of human knowledge; an idealism — or a sensationalism, rather — that at bottom is a mere assumption of a Divine Mind, as it permits to our intelligence no transcendental principle by which to reach the belief through a logical continuum.

Like Kant’s, the present system finds the basis for its theory of knowledge in the native spontaneity of the human mind, — of all minds not divine; and, again like Kant’s, it provides for the “transcendental” efficacy of this spontaneous intelligence, for the power to go beyond past experience and judge of the future in perpetuum with unreserved universality, by the hypothesis that Nature is a system of experiences, the “matter” of which is sensation, while the “form” or fixed order of it is determined by the elements — Space, Time, Cause, and so forth — that the self-active consciousness supplies. But from