upon a quasi-scientific basis. In this aspect, it quite squarely opposes three, at least, of the most important positions of the Kantian criticism. In the first place, it does not for a moment accept, or even tolerate, the high and dry a priorism of Kant. It is ready to surrender to the testing of experience the validity of the most 'pure' of conceptions and propositions of both physics and mathematics. Its criticism is, therefore, much more thorough than that which was possible for the author of the Critical Philosophy. And to deny that this criticism has been fruitful by way of clearing up confusion, of distinguishing truths from half truths, and of tracing both to their sources, as well as by way of sharpening the intellectual faculties of the workmen, would be quite unduly to disparage the history of philosophical and scientific development during the nineteenth century.
But the second point of departure from the conclusions of Kant is this. The modern scientific conception of the Being of the World is, as has already been said, distinctly metaphysical in the meaning of ontological; it is a reasoned theory of Reality, solidly built upon faith in the cognitive powers of the human intellect, when employed according to its own rational forms with data gathered by trained observation of facts. But this assumption involves a departure from the agnostic conclusion of the Critique of Pure Reason,—a conclusion which bears with particularly oppressive weight upon all the claims of science to have an appreciable ontological value. Whatever the individual workers in the fields of the chemico-physical and biological sciences may confess, when, on being pressed, they fall unawares into the quite bottomless pit of solipsism; so long as they are moving in the domain of what they are pleased,—and properly enough,—to call science, they do not for a moment admit, or act as though they believed, that the conceptions and formulas scientifically established have no ontological value. But the very essence of the Kantian position on this point is that the relation of the work of the human intellect to so-called 'things-in-themselves' is such that, on no account and never, can science claim ontological value for its results.
This leads on at once, and directly, to the third point at issue
