The fourth dimension

APPLICATION TO KANT’S THEORY OF EXPERIENCE 117

the modern evolution theories. And, as is so often the case, the first effort was the most stupendous in its scope. Kant does not investigate the origin of any special part of the world, such as its organisms, its chemical elements, its social communities of men. He simply investigates the origin of the whole—of all that is included in consciousness, the origin of that “thought thing” whose progressive realisation is the knowable universe.

This point of view is very different from the ordinary one, in which a man is supposed to be placed in a world like that which he has come to think of it, and then to learn what he has found out from this model which he himself has placed on the scene.

We all know that there are a number of questions in attempting an answer to which such an assumption is not allowable.

Mill, for instance, explains our notion of “law” by an invariable sequence in nature. But what we call nature is something given in thought. So he explains a thought of law and order by a thought of an invariable sequence. “Je leaves the problem where he found it.

Kant’s theory is not unique and alone. It is one of a number of evolution theories. A notion of its import and significance can be obtained by a comparison of it with other theories.

Thus in Darwin’s theoretical world of natural selection a certain assumption is made, the assumption of indefinite variability—slight variability it is true, over any appreciable lapse of time, but indefinite in the postulated epochs of transformation—and a whole chain of results is shown to follow.

This element of chance variation is not, however, an ultimate resting place. It is a preliminary stage. This supposing the all is a preliminary step towards finding out what is. If every kind of organism can come into