Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/329

No. 3.] THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF NEO-KANTISM. 315 which judgment is the vehicle, the instrument of our enfran- chisement from subjective bonds. But it becomes so only when it is frankly taken in this trans-subjective reference. The categories do construct for us an objective world, but only when they are transcendently employed. Transcendental Realism rather than transcendental Idealism was the result to which the Kantian theory of judgment fairly pointed, and many of his expressions may be read in this sense. "All experience," 1 he tells us, for example, "in addition to the perception of the senses by which something is given, contains besides a notion of an object which is given, or which appears, in perception." So he says again, "Cognitions consist in the definite reference of given ideas to an object." 2 The notion -of of the object is doubtless itself subjective, as Neo-Kantian subtlety urges ; how, we may ask, could it be otherwise ? But it is the notion of a real object, a trans-subjective thing. It is the presence of this notion that differentiates what Kant calls knowledge, cognition or experience from sensation or what he calls mere perception. Or, as we have been led to express it in the last few pages, the trans-subjective reference constitutes the very essence of knowledge as distinguished from experience as a series of subjective happenings which take place but which mean nothing. Kant himself did not consistently follow out this line of thought. But it is per- haps not too much to say that a fresh interpretation of the categories in the realistic sense just indicated is at the present time the only promising basis of a sound philosophy. ANDREW SETH. UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. 1 Werke, III, 1 12 (ed. Hartenstein). Experience is here used in the specific Kantian sense as opposed to mere perception and the associative play of ideas in the soul. V/, p. 1 1 8.