question, in putting the judgment There are things-in-themselves, we put a judgment of absolute validity, and see by the light of intelligence as such — with the eye common to all possible intelligences. This would force upon the agnostic the further perilous question. By which of our merely subjective categories, then, do we manage this astonishing achievement? The admission of this one noumenal judgment would open the entire agnostic mechanism of the a priori to the inroad of absolute knowing. So, by some means, this judgment must be reduced to a mere conjecture. It will not do to dissipate it wholly, for then another absolute judgment would arise in its place, namely. There are no things-in-themselves. But the validity of this would put an end to phenomenalism conclusively. If there are no things-in-themselves, then our cognition, call it “subjective” as long as we may, is the cognition of all there really is, by all the minds there are; the objects that we represent to ourselves in our normal activity are then the only objects, and our intelligence becomes itself the universal because the only intelligence.
Hence it is with the instinct of self-preservation that Lange draws the mentioned distinction back within the sphere of merely human consciousness. Even this distinction itself he will have us refrain from using as if referring to anything absolute. We
