THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. 361 and not'the all-including, organically concentrating and epito- mising subject, is thought to be the actual power gathering up, preserving, binding together and, therefore, giving meaning and reality to the phenomenal conglomerates. Fully to realise the visionary airiness and helpless inanity of this volatilising procedure, we must firmly bear in mind that the mental phenomena themselves are considered by Transcendent alists to be in their consistency and arrange- ment wholly the product of the thinking Ego ; that, therefore, there can be nothing binding in their sensorial presentation, by which the work of gradual conceptual transformation and assimilation performed by the spiritual agent may in any way be experientially gauged, and from which some clue to the exact nature and to the limits of its powers can be de- rived. Indeed, under Transcendental assumptions, nothing foreign, no resistance or compulsion of any kind, and, con- sequently, no limitation on the sensorial side is at all per- mitted to hamper the creative activity of the spiritual subject. If there is restraint anywhere, it must necessarily be in its own utterly inaccessible disposition ; for, on the conceptual side, the limit of possible objective productiveness is reached only when individual consciousness has become identical with universal consciousness. What boundless range for fanciful conjecture ! What hope- less prospect for scientific progress ! Shall we have a re- vival of the reign of logical emanation self-evolving concepts creating our world of realities ? Or will our present Trans- cendent alists, as they promise, seriously attempt to harmonise the unencumbered performances of their productive Ego with the stringently binding disclosures of natural science ? It will be curious, indeed, to watch how they will set about projecting into actuality the conceptual obstructions between individual and universal consciousness, so that these shall constitute a natural science of perceptual phenomena, such quasi-science being to them necessarily merely the record of inadequately conceived relations relations that are real only in eternal consciousness. Meanwhile, we may be allowed to declare our bodily or- ganisation veritably given in existence, as a fact of some sort, not to be argued away. To Transcendeutalists our body represents a wholly incongruous superfluity, much less assimilable even than conscious states have proved to Biological Automatism. Formerly, the sensorial affections at least, and especially the so-called sensualities were held to be of bodily origin. And this gave rise to a lively warfare, carried on through
