which keeps within the realm of mental concepts had, for him, an obvious universality, but it could not add to our knowledge of things, could not prophesy new conjections in experience. Its breadth was due to its shallowness. On the other hand, empirical knowledge provides a synthetic union of diverse elements of experience, but it dare not transcend the present moment and the actual synthesis given. But these strange judgements of mathematics speak confidently, not depending on experience, and yet giving us fresh knowledge of objective things! In order to explain this kind of knowledge Kant found it necessary to carry over that activity of knowledge, in accordance with which its decrees possess universality in the realm of mind, into the province of actual experience. If the objects of experience, he argued, are amenable to the universality which belongs of right to thought and which cannot be obtained empirically, then thought must have a share in the constitution of the objects of experience.
The problem soon broadened out from its original form. Previous philosophy, Kant thought, had gone on the assumption that the task of knowledge is to correspond to an independent object out of essential relation to knowledge, and scepticism had been the outcome. For if the object is ex vi termini beyond knowledge and independent of it, there is no guarantee that the content known stands in any relation to the independent and unknown real. Taking his stand, therefore, on the validity of knowledge, Kant asks, What must be true of the object in order that it may be known? The boasted independence of the object quickly disappears under this treatment, and Kant discovers one condition of knowledge after another to which objects must conform if they are to be intelligible. These conditions, Kant thought, do not hold of the independent object, the thing-in-itself, but they govern the phenomenal object, that which can be known. Kant, however, does not dismiss the conception of the independent object, but continues to contrast it with the known object; and by virtue of the opposition condemns the latter as subjective.
The extent to which Kant transcended this crude dualism does not concern us here, because the thing-in-itself never disappears from his argument. Even when other reasons are offered for the subjectivity of the known object, e.g. in the
