rough our atmosphere.

If now we inquire why Kant did not believe that the matter of our
knowledge extends beyond its form, this is what we find. The criticism
of our knowledge of nature that was instituted by Kant consisted in
ascertaining what our mind must be and what Nature must be _if_ the
claims of our science are justified; but of these claims themselves Kant
has not made the criticism. I mean that he took for granted the idea of
a science that is one, capable of binding with the same force all the
parts of what is given, and of coordinating them into a system
presenting on all sides an equal solidity. He did not consider, in his
_Critique of Pure Reason_, that science became less and less objective,
more and more symbolical, to the extent that it went from the physical
to the vital, from the vital to the psychical. Experience does not move,
to his view, in two different and perhaps opposite ways, the one
conformable to the direction of the intellect, the other contrary to it.
There is, for him, only _one_ experience, and the intellect covers its
whole ground. This is what Kant expresses by saying that all our
intuitions are sensuous, or, in other words, infra-intellectual. And
this would have to be admitted, indeed, if our science presented in all
its parts an equal objectivity. But suppose, on the contrary, that
science is less and less objective, more and more symbolical, as it goes
from the physical to the psychical, passing through the vital: then, as
it is indeed necessary to perceive a thing somehow in order to symbolize
it, there would be an intuition of the psychical, and more generally of
the vital, which the intellect would transpose and translate, no doubt,
but which would none the less transcend the intellect. There would be,
in other words, a supra-intellectual intuition. If this intuition exist,
a taking possession of the spirit by itself is possible, and no longer
only a knowledge that is external and phenomenal. What is more, if we
have an intuition of this kind (I mean an ultra-intellectual intuition)
then sensuous intuition is likely to be in continuity with it through
certain intermediaries, as the infra-red is continuous with the
ultra-violet. Sensuous intuition itself, therefore, is promoted. It will
no longer attain only the phantom of an unattainable thing-in-itself. It
is (provided we bring to it certain indispensable corrections) into the
absolute itself that it will introduce us. So long