phase. If in experience the forms of the objective world are
themselves involved, the process of knowledge sets no limits to itself,
which it may not, does not, by implication transcend. As further
indication of the shift by which thought had passed into possession of
the world of things in themselves stands the antinomy which in Kantian
experience marks the limit of our knowledge while in post-Kantian
idealism it becomes the antithesis that leads to the synthesis upon the
higher plane. Contradiction marks the phase at which the spirit becomes
creative, not simply giving an empty formal law to nature, but creating
the concrete universe in which content and form merge in true actuality.
The relation of the sensuous content to the conceptual form is not dead,
as in Kant's doctrine. It is fused as perception into concept and
carries its immediacy and concreteness of detail into the concrete
universal as the complete organization of stimulation and response pass
into the flexible habit. And yet in the Hegelian logic, the movement is
always away from the perceptual experience toward the higher realm of
the _Idee_. Thought is creative in the movement, but in its ultimate
reality it transcends spatial and temporal experience, the experience
with which the natural and mathematical sciences deal. Thought is not a
means of solving the problems of this world as they arise, but a great
process of realization in which this world is forever transcended. Its
abstract particularities of sensuous detail belong only to the finite
experience of the partial self. This world is, therefore, always
incomplete in its reality and, in so far, always untrue. Truth and full
reality belong not to the field of scientific investigation.

In its metaphysics Romantic Idealism, though it finds a place for
scientific discovery and reconstruction, leaves these disdainfully
behind, as incomplete phases of the ultimate process of reality, as
infected with untruth and deceptive unwarranted claims. The world is
still too much with us. We recognize here three striking results of the
development of reflective consciousness in the modern world:--first, it
is assumed that the objective world of knowledge can be placed within
the experience of the individual without losing thereby its nature as an
object, that all characters of that object can be presented as belonging
to that experience, whether adequately or not is another question; and
second, it is assumed that