Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/226

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LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
165

transcended conscious experience, and existed apart from it as its object and ground. The a priori category of substance and accident (subject and predicate), which, properly, only connects one composite phenomenon (called the “subject” of a judgment) with another phenomenon (called the “predicate”) so as to compose a new and fuller unity, lends its term “substance” for this purpose; the category of cause and effect, which, properly, connects one phenomenon with another so as to condition and determine the second's occurrence, lends similarly its term “cause”; and, in like manner, the category of agent and reagent, which, properly, connects phenomena into a system of mutual attraction and repulsion, lends its term “agent.”

Thus this triune hypostasis, by some a priori impulse which Lange does not attempt to explain,[1] is projected beyond the limits of consciousness, and is thought as one term of the relation Phenomenon-Noumenon, while consciousness as a whole is taken as the complemental term, its “organisation” (as Lange calls it) being viewed as the reagent, its sum of phenomena as the effect of an interaction between it and the thing-in-itself, and as the predicate of this supposititious being. By this spontaneous contradiction of the strict nature of its categorical system, our consciousness, con-

  1. Compare pp. 167 and 174, below, as referred to in their foot-notes.