Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/237

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ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

whole world of intelligences. This presupposition is radically at variance with Kant’s subsequent finis to his theoretical critique, by which he shut in knowledge to the world of sense, and with Lange’s acceptance and development of this. It is simply in keeping with this acceptance and development that Lange takes the ground, which otherwise would be quite surprising, that the contents of our a priori endowment can only be determined by induction. This position, however, is clearly a self-contradiction. For an induction, despite its formal generality, is always in its own value a particular judgment, always comes short of full universality; whereas, to establish the apriority of an element, we must show it to be strictly universal, or, in other words, necessary. It is evident, then, that Lange has here finally abandoned the standpoint proper to Kantianism, and, without so intending, has really gone back to the standpoint of Locke. There we may leave him and his followers to the thoroughgoing surgery of Hume.

A suflflcient cure, in fact, for all such agnostic and empirical tendencies might be found in a faithful study of Hume, not in the more literary and much mitigated form in which he appears in the Essays, but in his undiluted masterpiece, the Treatise of Human Nature. The very common neglect of the Treatise in behalf of the Essays is no doubt