explain that the existence of mathematics is no proof of the existence of a priori knowledge. There is no a priori knowledge. Theology, in this respect, is neither worse nor better off than mathematics and physics.
There may be some who, while ready to admit the weight of these arguments against Kant's initial and fundamental assumption, will yet endeavor to escape their force by the assertion that without a priori principles there could be no knowledge or experience whatever. These interpreters concern themselves less with Kant's direct problem than with that analysis of experience to which its solution forces him. And with the results of that analysis before them, they ask in Kant's own words, How can experience be organized without a priori functions of the understanding, and whence could it derive its certainty if all the rules on which it proceeds were themselves empirical and contingent? But in this objection two assumptions are involved, both of which have been already to some extent refuted. In the first place, it is assumed that experience has a certainty transcending the evidence of sense-perception. But this we cannot to-day accept. And, in the second place, it is assumed that experience, which it is rightly seen is more than a chaos of passive feelings, has its sense-presentations ordered under "principles" which are more than postulates. But this we have adduced grounds for denying. No doubt the sensational philosopher is in error when he supposes that custom or association, based on a repetition of sensations, could be the source of the "principles" under which sensations are colligated. These principles can by no mental chemistry be extracted from those sensations. They are the product of the mind's activity as Kant rightly saw, though not its spontaneous product. But when Kant, following his rationalistic bias, attributes to them a metempirical authority, he flies in the face of the facts of philosophic thought, both in the individual and in the race. They are not the absolute and immutable decrees of a world-creating reason, but the tentative hypotheses of a world-interpreting understanding.
