Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/96

No assertions can escape such a test by pleading that they are “primal.” Or again, has the Creator, in making our souls, stamped upon them a system of principles which is in preëstablished harmony with the real order, so that our metaphysical theory, if true, will teach us that our ideas of order must correspond to an order present in the facts beyond us? With Kant we reject such a Präformations-System der Menschlichen Vernunft. Our special reason for rejecting it is contained in our thesis, so fully set forth in Lecture VII of the previous Series, to the effect that correspondence is never the most fundamental relation between Idea and Object, and that, accordingly, the world is not merely a world of facts to which our knowledge conforms. Our own view has in common with Kant (from whom we, of course, derive this portion of our fundamental doctrine) the thesis that the laws of the objective world are the expression of Categories which the nature of every subjective process, and the Unity of Apperception wherein all truth is embraced, together determine. Only, for us, the Categories are not stamped, as Kant’s Categories were, upon a foreign matter, but are in some measure, i.e. as far as they are really valid at all, at once objective and subjective. This last thesis we have in common with many forms of recent Idealism. But our own doctrine is not wholly identical with any of these forms. The differentia of our doctrine will be found, however, in the method whereby we define the special Categories, and in the special form that we accordingly give to them. Our logical genesis of the concept of real Law will determine the definition that we shall give to the term. It will also determine the limits of the subjec-