The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

criticism, because at every instant we have direct and incontrovertible experience of their value through the mere fact that we think, and sceptical criticism itself could not even be brought into play without making use of them. Thus Kant had now formulated an answer to the problem which had been tormenting him; how to find a basis for the sciences, that would be impregnable to sceptical criticism such as Hume’s, and thereby to provide a valid philosophical foundation for the system of Galileo and Newton.

In this way Kant satisfied that imperatively felt requirement which had been the inspiration of his researches. In the course of them he had discovered a fundamental organon for the orientation of thought and research, the transcendental method. The corner-stone of this was that the factors which combine to make up knowledge should be recognised as being present only in the concreteness of the act of cognition. They could no longer be torn away from their synthesis in man’s actual experience and located either in the empirical ego, or in the external world, or else in a remote Heaven above. He sees cognition, therefore, as resulting from a synthetic a priori principle, without which it would not be possible; and this he referred to in various ways but most frequently as the creative, synthetic unity of apperception. Although it is true that every judgement based on first-hand experience implies the statement ‘I think . . .’, this principle is essentially an operation, and therefore not to be confused with the subject as self-existent. It is equally not to be confused with an object as self-existent, for the object is a resultant of the operation. This principle is therefore an autonomous principle, and identifiable with the subject in cognition only in the sense that, in the act of experiencing, the subject constitutes itself as the knower. It is identifiable with the object only in the sense that it is, through the same act, constituted as thing known, in other words phenomenon. In short, both the subject in cognition, and the object of cognition, are the products, not the causes, of the cognitive process.

Kant had thus found the way of escape from the blind alley into which he had been driven by the traditional philosophy, which persistently maintained that knowledge has its source either in the subject treated as absolute, or in the object treated as absolute, or else in a realm of ideas treated as absolute. Kant’s success was due

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