ry
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.

[Sidenote: 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. B