contend against it.' But this sceptical relativism is due to a misconception. If our categories are competent to tell us that a trans-subjective world exists, they are also competent to tell us what its nature is. It is true that our categories are subjective, if it be subjective to express the necessities of connection and explanation which reason imposes upon us. But that they are merely subjective is, in the nature of the case, incapable of proof. They are principles of mental synthesis; but why should they not be at the same time principles of real connection in a trans-subjective world—a world whose real connections the mental synthesis only renders or reconstructs? The possibility of doubt, of course, always remains; for if we cannot prove dogmatically that the forms of thought do not apply to reality, neither can we prove that they do apply. The feat of comparing our percept with an unperceived thing is, as Berkeley incisively argued, for ever impossible; we cannot get behind our own knowledge, and know without knowing. Proof of this sort being impossible, we are thrown back upon a species of trust or presumption—a trust that knowledge in its fundamental characteristics renders correctly the world of existence, or, to put it otherwise and perhaps more simply, a trust that things exist as we know them. In presence of an ultimate sceptical doubt of the nature indicated, we are necessarily reduced to a balance of probabilities. Now, to suppose an absence of correspondence between the forms of knowledge and the forms of existence—to suppose the mere subjectivity of the former—is to suppose that the mechanism of knowledge has been expressly devised to defeat its own purpose. If we take the universe for a bad joke, such a supposition will have much in its favor, but it seems to me incompatible with any belief in the rationality of existence. In other words, the probability in favor of such a view is so small as to be a negligeable quantity.
The idea of merely subjective validity is a kind of speculative nightmare, for which we have largely Kant to thank. Yet we can see how it had been preparing all through the modern period. The problem of knowledge, when it comes into the foreground, inevitably tends to separate the knowing subject from the whole world of objective reality. The philosophical antithesis is no longer between the whole and the part, between the permanent unity and its dependent manifestations, as it is when the line of thought is metaphysical or ontological. The antithesis is now between the subjective consciousness and the world of real things. The subject is, therefore, placed upon one side and the whole trans-subjective universe upon
