necessary elements of experience. He has to show how by the aid of certain mentally-supplied principles of synthesis – and only by their aid – the discontinuous and unconnected particulars of sense are worked up into "experience-objects," and, generally, into an experience-cosmos in space and time. The deduction or exposition of this a priori system may be said to constitute Kant's whole industry in the Critique. The a posteriori element, though equally necessary to experience as a living fact, he is content to refer to simply as given – given from another source, as he says somewhat curtly in the press of his investigation into the a priori. The infrequency of reference to this other source is the less to be wondered at, seeing that the thing-in-itself had become attenuated under the influence of Kant's presuppositions, into no more than the unknown cause or correlate of our sense-impressions – "a notion so imperfect," according to Hume, "that no sceptic will think it worth while to contend against it."[1] As nothing could be said of the sense-matter until it was formed, the thing-in-itself seemed merely to furnish the prick of sense that set the a priori machinery in motion. Kant himself says in the Aesthetic, with a kind of naïve triumph, that the thing-in-itself is never asked for in experience. In short it is completely obscured, and its place practically taken, by the subjective or experience-object which Kant constructs, and which he interposes, as it were, between us and it.
It is high time, therefore, to inquire narrowly into the nature of this 'experience' which tends to swallow up everything else in Kant, and which, in the mouths of his more recent followers, becomes a magic and all-sufficing formula.
Experience is distinguished, on the one hand, from mere sensation. Kant holds, and rightly holds, that from particular impressions of passive sensation alone no knowledge could possibly arise. These sensations, if they exist, are unknowable; they become elements of knowledge only when actively seized and rationally interpreted by the mind. Knowledge implies, besides the stimulus of sense, a nucleus of primitive
- ↑ Enquiry, Section 12.
