ut
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 inferences
from the data of sense, he admitted at the same time that such use of
understanding is legitimate and even necessary, and that the idea of
nature so framed his empirical truth. There remained, however, a sense
that this empirical truth was somehow insufficient and illusory.
Understanding was a superficial faculty, and we might by other and
oracular methods arrive at a reality that was not empirical. Why any
reality--such as God, for instance--should not be just as empirical as
the other side of the moon, if experience suggested it and reason
discovered it, or why, if not suggested by experience and discovered by
reason, anything should be called a reality at all or should hold for a
moment a man's waking attention--that is what Kant never tells us and
never himself knew.

Clearer upon this question of perception is the position of Berkeley; we
may therefore take him as a fair representative of those critics who
seek to invalidate the discovery of material objects.

[Sidenote: Berkeley's algebra of perception.]

Our ideas, said Berkeley, were in our minds; the material world was
patched together out of our ideas; it therefore existed only in our
minds. To the suggestion that the idea of the external world is of
course in our minds, but that our minds have constructed it by treating
sensations as effects of a permanent substance distributed in a
permanent space, he would reply that this means nothing, because
"substa