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.

[Sidenote: 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