Lange's recoil from the consequences of Cohen's reasonings throws an instructive light upon the nature of these consequences, and therefore I have dwelt upon his position perhaps longer than its own merits justify. This whole Neo-Kantian point of view is reduced to consistency by Vaihinger,[1] who exposes the contradiction latent in Lange's idea of the physico-psychic organization. He points out with inexorable logic that to hypostatize the subject, even in this half-hearted way, is to fall back into what Cohen calls Dogmatism; the subject has in this respect no prerogative over the object, both being alike epistemological categories, limitative conceptions. So far, it may be said, Cohen had already gone. Vaihinger differs from him, or advances beyond him, in that his attitude is essentially sceptical. "Critical Scepticism," he says, is the real result of the Kantian theory of knowledge. The result of Criticism is purely negative; it is the self-dissolution of speculation (Selbstzersetzung der Speculation), inasmuch as it restricts us rigorously to the immediate world of subjective states. All philosophy, he says again, has only intra-subjective significance; all thought moves in subjective forms whose objective validity can never be verified, and whatever instruments we employ to know reality, they are still subjective in their nature. Criticism, therefore, or consistent Kantianism denies the trans-subjective validity of every category and form of thought, and thus brings us back, in a more refined form perhaps, to the position of Hume. Hume devoted the greater part of his industry to showing how the illusion of a real world and a real self would naturally arise, in the absence of the corresponding realities; how these illusions would weave themselves out of the dance of detached and homeless ideas. Similarly Hartmann has appropriately labelled this last result of Neo-Kantian thought Illusionism. "Ideas," said Reid, "in view of Hume's results, "were first introduced into philosophy in the humble character of images or representatives of things. ... But they have by degrees supplanted
- ↑ In his book, Hartmann, Dühring und Lange (1876).
