THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

206 THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
through a thousand channels at once in disorderly multitude;
it is cm
purpose that put order and sequence and unity upon this importunate
lawlessness; it is ourselves, our personalities, our rr.ir.ds, that bring light
upon these seas. Locke v.as wrong when he said "There is
?
nothing in the
intellect except what was first in the series"; Leibnitz was right when he
added, "nothing, except the intellect itself." "Perceptions without con-
" to
ceptions," says Kant, are blind." If perceptions wove themselves automatically
into ordered if thought, mind were not an active effort hammering
out order from chacs, how could the same experience leave one
man mediocre, and in a more active and tireless soul be raised to the
light of wisdom and the beautiful logic of truth?
The world, then, has order, not of itself, but because the thought that
knows the world is itself an ordering, the first stage ir that classification
of experience which at last is science and philosophy. The laws of thought
are also the laws of things, for things are known to us only through this
thought that must obey these laws, since it and they are one : in effect, as
Hegel was to say, the laws of logic and the laws of nature are one, and
logic and metaphysics merge. The generalized principles of science are
necessary because they are ultimately laws of thought that are involved
and presupposed in every experience, past, present, and to come. Science
is absolute, and truth is everlasting.
3. TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC
Nevertheless, this certainty, this absoluteness, of the highest generalizations
of logic and science, is, paradoxically, limited and relative : limited
strictly to the field of actual experience, and relative strictly to our human
mode of experience. For if our analysis has been correct, the world as
we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost one might say
a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its
moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli. (So we perceive
the top of the table as round, whereas our sensation is of an ellipse.) The
object as it appears to us is a phenomenon, an appearance, perhaps very
'different from the external object before it came within the ken of our
thing-initself
'
may be an object of thought or inference (a "noumenon"), but it
cannot be experienced, for in being experienced it would be changed
by its passage through sense and thought. "It remains completely unknown
to us what objects may be by themselves and apart from the re-
senses; what that original object was we can ne\ r er know; the ss
ceptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving
them; that manner being peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared by
every being, though, no doubt, by every human being." 20 The moon as
* Critique, p. 37. If Kant iiad not added the last clause, his argument for the
necessity of knowledge would have fallen.