Kant’s day the world has heard so much, but of that residue of the noumenon which we noticed Lange leave unexamined.[1] It would find the explanation of the categories, and the nature of the final noumenon, in a single active principle in consciousness, of which the vague notion Noumenon is only our confused native feeling. Our ordinary name for this principle is the moral consciousness, the consciousness in each mind of its own reality, integral and sacred, and of the equal reality of all others; but this is in fact rather the supreme theoretical principle, the spring of all intelligence, the master-light of all logic and all knowledge. The categories are the intrinsic modes in which this principle puts its activity forth. Though they appear so different to our first or natural view, they turn out on critical investigation to be expressions of one and the same single synthetical energy — simply forms of a necessary nexus between all possible terms of sense, which reduces these to the serviceable means of our reality as free intelligences. This principle, as blending in one energetic whole above the categories the two activities of absolute subject and absolute cause, is the one intelligible creative unity — the unity of the Person in its whole reality. The universe-consciousness thus passes from apparent mere Fact into a pure conscious Act. And this Act, as always determin-
- ↑ See pp. 165, 167, above.
