which deduces a unity as the condition of synthesis, but which can say nothing of the unity apart from the act or movement of synthesis of which it is, as it were, the moving form. Such a proof, Lange says, in analyzing experience or knowledge into conditions which are confessedly abstractions except as realized in the act or fact of knowledge, is really explaining experience by itself – is at all events giving no account of the real conditions on which the existence of experience at all depends. Hence, he says, if the transcendental deduction is to be more than the tautology indicated above, "the categories must necessarily be something more than simply conditions of experience." In other words, he is seemingly not content to speak with Cohen of "the notions" round which objects revolve. The realistic basis of the categories lay for Kant himself, of course, in the noumenal self; but for this Lange proposes to substitute "the physico-psychic organization" as the source from which spring all the forms, notions, and Ideas which give rise to the appearance of a world in space and time. The physico-psychic organization is thus the cause or ground of the appearance, and at the same time it is that to which the appearance appears, and thus we seem to secure a certain anchorage. But Lange has learned his Neo-Kantian lesson too well to admit that this organization is a thing-in-itself. The physico-psychical organization is itself only an appearance or phenomenon, though it may be the appearance of an unknown thing-in-itself. Hartmann has wittily but not unjustly dubbed this position of Lange's mere Confusionism.[1] If the organization is mere appearance, we are no better off than we were with Cohen; if, on the other hand, we are going to speak of a real being at all, this problematical way of referring to it is absurd. It is impossible to blow hot and cold in this fashion with a 'perhaps.' Our view must either be frankly immanent, in which case the subject is merely an epistemological category, or it must be frankly transcendent, in which case the subject is the real being in whom and for whom the whole process of experience or knowledge takes place.
- ↑ In his Neukantianismus, Schopenhauerianismus und Hegelianismus (1877).
