judgments, which involve the basal category of cause and ultimately the whole structure of reason. If, therefore, sensation, or the sense-stimulus, be styled subjective or merely subjective, then the cognitions or perceptions[1] which are thus constituted out of the impressions by the a priori resources of the mind may be said to be, in comparison, objective, that is to say, they are not merely internal states of the subject, indistinguishably fused, as it were, in its inner life; they are objects or presentations which have a relative permanence, and which may be contemplated, so to speak, at arm's length. They are objective, however, only as thus compared with sensations (which may be hypothetically defined as the states of a being in which the contrast of subject and object has not emerged, and for which consequently the fact of knowledge does not yet exist). In themselves, as perceptions, they are still subjective, still modes of my consciousness. Their objectivity is an immanent or subjective objectivity, as compared with the transcendent or trans-subjective objectivity of independently existing things. Indeed, to call them objects is perhaps to invite misconception. These phenomenal objects are more probably described as percepts, and no percept carries me, so far as its own existence is concerned, beyond the ringfence of the self. Whatever reference to a trans-subjective world my percepts may carry with them, they are, as percepts, in me; they are my ideas, in the wide Lockian sense of the word, my Vorstellungen, as Kant so often says. Adopting the favorite Kantian expression, we might say that experience, just because it is experienced, is eo ipso a subjective fact. Mediately, of course, my experience is the only means I possess of passing beyond my individual subjectivity to the trans-subjective universe of other men and things. But in its immediacy, as a fact of consciousness doubt of which is impossible, it cannot bridge the gulf between the subjective and the trans-subjective. The sceptical question would never have been asked, if trans-subjective reality were already present – immediately present in the heart of consciousness. But it is presuming too much
- ↑ Kant's distinction between cognitions and perceptions is not here in point.
