enon, but is said to be a perception of it, as if the phenomenon existed independently of the conscious process. Such questionable expressions might be quoted in large numbers, but that is the less necessary, seeing that the fallacy is traceable to the leading determinations of his own scheme in the Analytic. It is in the Analytic that the ambiguous use of the terms 'object' and 'objective' to which reference has been made, reaches its height – one consequence of which is that the real thing to which reference is made in knowledge is temporarily shouldered out of the system. We are told that objects are made by the superinduction of the categories and the forms of intuition upon the matter of sense. Such objects, it is true, are still phenomenal or purely subjective – subjective matter of sense shot through with subjective forms of thought – but they are insensibly thought of as having a permanence which does not belong to the come-and-go of our subjective experiences; we are led to regard them, not as individual perceptions of individual subjects, but as objects valid or existent for all. This idea of objectivity as universal validity – validity for all human beings or for consciousness in general – becomes of determining importance for the Kantian thought, and in it all the ambiguities of the system meet.
Recognition by other consciousnesses, it may be freely admitted, is an all-important test of trans-subjective reality. That which is recognized by others certifies itself to me as an objective or trans-subjective fact, not a subjective fancy. The recognition is a decisive ratio cognoscendi of its independent existence, but, conversely, it is the existence of a trans-subjective reality that is the ratio essendi of the recognition. That, at any rate, is the only hypothesis which can be got to work with more than superficial plausibility. Because an independent fact exists, everybody recognizes it; but no multiplication of subjective recognitions can in themselves manufacture a real object in any other than a Berkeleian sense. To Kant, however, by the help of this conception of validity, the phenomenal object acquires a quasi-independence; it seems to become more than the actual and possible subjective experiences of individual
