transcendental freedom. There are not two kinds of search for causes, but only one. But Kant has done great service in showing by this antinomy in the clearest manner that true causes are all transcendental and not to be met with in the realm of mechanically related things and events. Freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal. His failure to take account of the transcendental factors of our experience is the source of his errors. These transcendental factors include, first, the self or ego, and secondly, the inferred selfhoods of organic beings, including plants, animals, men, and the First Cause; and to understand how Kant failed to recognize them, one must study the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, in connection with these antinomies. Internal experience, he thinks, does not transcend the category of time, and relates only to events. All mental facts are events. This, too, was the doctrine of Hume. The self-identity of the ego must be denied on this hypothesis. By its admission we are led to the absurd conclusion of the antithesis to the third antinomy, namely, that in experience we find no case of transcendental freedom, but only of mechanical causation. Hence we must deny that we know our own identity and that we know any such beings as plants, animals, and our fellow-men; we know only mechanical combinations and relations and must not suppose that we know any spontaneity or transcendental freedom in connection with such organisms, for the recognition of such spontaneity would destroy the unity of our experience. We seek for causes, it is true, but we must be careful not to find any real causes, because we should then cease to inquire further in the line of experience, and that would be a great calamity. The supposed calamity would consist in a change from the study of a mechanical series for the study of motives, purposes, or final causes. In other words, we should here change from the study of matter to the study of mind.
W. T. Harris
