The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress. George Santayana

in thought, is Kant's conclusion, based on intrinsic logical analysis. Here experience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and without conditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkable objects. The relation between the transcendental function of experience and its empirical causes Kant never understood. The transcendentalism which—if we have it at all—must be fundamental, he made derivative; and the realism, which must then be derivative, he made absolute. Therefore his metaphysics remained fabulous and his idealism sceptical or malicious.

      Ask what can be meant by "conditions of experience" and Kant's bewildering puzzle solves itself at the word. Condition, like cause, is a term that covers a confusion between dialectical and natural connections. The conditions of experience, in the dialectical sense, are the characteristics a thing must have to deserve the name of experience; in other words, its conditions are its nominal essence. If experience be used in a loose sense to mean any given fact or consciousness in general, the condition of experience is merely immediacy. If it be used, as it often is in empirical writers, for the shock of sense, its conditions are two: a sensitive organ and an object capable of stimulating it. If finally experience be given its highest and most pregnant import and mean a fund of knowledge gathered by living, the condition of experience is intelligence. Taking the word in this last sense, Kant showed in a confused but essentially conclusive fashion that only by the application of categories to immediate data could knowledge of an ordered universe arise; or, in other language, that knowledge is a vista, that it has a perspective, since it is the presence to a given thought of a diffused and articulated landscape. The categories are the principles of interpretation by which the flat datum acquires this perspective in thought and becomes representative of a whole system of successive or collateral existences.

      The circumstance that experience, in the second sense, is a term reserved for what has certain natural conditions, namely, for the spark flying from the contact of stimulus and organ, led Kant to shift his point of view, and to talk half the time about conditions in the sense of natural causes or needful antecedents. Intelligence is not an antecedent of thought and knowledge but their character and logical energy. Synthesis is not a natural but only a dialectical condition of pregnant experience; it does not introduce such experience but constitutes it. Nevertheless, the whole skeleton and dialectical mould of experience came to figure, in Kant's mythology, as machinery behind the scenes, as a system of non-natural efficient forces, as a partner in a marriage the issue of which was human thought. The idea could thus suggest itself—favoured also by remembering inopportunely the actual psychological situation—that all experience, in every sense of the word, had supernatural antecedents, and that the dialectical conditions of experience, in the highest sense, were efficient conditions of experience in the lowest.

      Nature the true system of conditions.

      It is hardly necessary to observe that absolute experience can have no natural conditions. Existence in the abstract can have no cause; for every real condition would have to be a factor in absolute experience, and every cause would be something existent. Of course there is a modest and non-exhaustive experience—that is, any particular sensation, thought, or life—which it would be preposterous to deny was subject to natural conditions. Saint Lawrence's experience of being roasted, for instance, had conditions; some of them were the fire, the decree of the court, and his own stalwart Christianity. But these conditions are other parts or objects of conceivable experience which, as we have learned, fall into a system with the part we say they condition. In our groping and inferential thought one part may become a ground for expecting or supposing the other. Nature is then the sum total of its own conditions; the whole object, the parts observed plus the parts interpolated, is the self-existent fact. The mind, in its empirical flux, is a part of this complex; to say it is its own condition or that of the other objects is a grotesque falsehood. A babe's casual sensation of light is a condition neither of his own existence nor of his mother's. The true conditions are those other parts of the world without which, as we find by experience, sensations of light do not appear.

      Had Kant been trained in a better school of philosophy he might have felt that the phrase "subjective conditions" is a contradiction in terms. When we find ourselves compelled to go behind the actual and imagine something antecedent or latent to pave the way for it, we are ipso facto conceiving the potential, that is, the "objective" world. All antecedents, by transcendental necessity, are therefore objective and all conditions natural. An imagined potentiality that holds together the episodes which are actual in consciousness is the very definition of an object or thing. Nature is the sum total of things potentially observable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically; and common-sense is right as against Kant's subjectivism in regarding nature as the condition of mind and not mind as the condition of nature. This is not to say that experience and feeling are not the only given existence, from which the material part of nature, something essentially dynamic and potential, must be intelligently inferred. But are not "conditions" inferred? Are they not, in their deepest essence, potentialities and powers? Kant's fabled conditions also are inferred; but they are inferred illegitimately since the "subjective" ones are dialectical characters turned into antecedents, while the thing-in-itself is a natural object without a natural function. Experience alone being given, it is the ground from which its conditions are inferred: its conditions, therefore, are empirical. The secondary position of nature goes with the secondary position of all causes, objects, conditions, and ideals. To have made the conditions of experience metaphysical, and prior in the order of knowledge to experience itself, was simply a piece of surviving Platonism. The form was hypostasised into an agent, and mythical machinery was imagined to impress that form on whatever happened to have it.

      All this was opposed to Kant's own discovery and to his critical doctrine which showed that the world (which is the complex of those conditions which experience assigns to itself as it develops and progresses in knowledge) is not before experience in the order of knowledge, but after it. His fundamental oversight and contradiction lay in not seeing that the concept of a set of conditions was the precise and exact concept of nature, which he consequently reduplicated, having one nature before experience and another after. The first thus became mythical and the second illusory: for the first, said to condition experience, was a set of verbal ghosts, while the second, which alone could be observed or discovered scientifically, was declared fictitious. The truth is that the single nature or set of conditions for experience which the intellect constructs is the object of our thoughts and perceptions ideally completed. This is neither mythical nor illusory. It is, strictly speaking, in its system and in many of its parts, hypothetical; but the hypothesis is absolutely safe. At whatever point we test it, we find the experience we expect, and the inferences thence made by the intellect are verified in sense at every moment of existence.

      Artificial pathos in subjectivism.

      The ambiguity in Kant's doctrine makes him a confusing representative of that criticism of perception which malicious psychology has to offer. When the mind has made its great discovery; when it has recognised independent objects, and thus taken a first step in its rational life, we need to know unequivocally whether this step is a false or a true one. If it be false, reason is itself misleading, since a hypothesis indispensable in the intellectual mastery of experience is a false hypothesis and the detail of experience has no substructure. Now Kant's answer was that the discovery of objects was a true and valid discovery in the field of experience; there were, scientifically speaking, causes for perception which could be inferred from perception by thought. But this inference was not true absolutely or metaphysically because there was a real world beyond possible experience, and there were oracles, not intellectual, by which knowledge of that unrealisable world might be obtained. This mysticism undid the intellectualism which characterised Kant's system in its scientific and empirical application; so that the justification for the use of such categories as that of cause and substance (categories by which the idea of reality is constituted) was invalidated by the counter-assertion that empirical reality was not true reality but, being an object reached by inferential thought, was merely an idea. Nor was the true reality appearance itself in its crude immediacy, as sceptics would think; it was a realm of objects present to a supposed intuitive thought, that is, to a non-inferential inference or non-discursive discourse.

      So that while Kant insisted on the point, which hardly needed pressing, that it is mind that discovers empirical reality by making