ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

Kant and Spiritualism. 229
istic hypothesis in the conception which he takes of it as sensory
realism. But in his remarks of the latter half he totally forgot
what he had admitted in the admission of symbolic representations
or veridical hallucinations invol7ied in the possible communication
between mind and mind. He now returns to sense
perception as the only criterion of knowledge, and so it is if you
assume that conception of " knowledge " which makes it convertible
with sense data. But his own system is forever ignoring
such limitations and in nothing does he ignore it more than in
making the existence of spirit " metaphysical " and thus condemning
it, while he assumes that the existence of matter is not
''metaphysical," the fact being that its existence is equally
" metaphysical , with spirit, and modem conceptions of matter
absolutely prove this. To our scientific men with their atoms,
ions, electron, corpusles, etc., as the basis of their theories matter
is quite as transcendental a thing as theology ever made spirit,
quite as much a " fiction to which reason, when deprived of other
refuge, flies for aid." What Kant is forever forgetting is the
equivocal import of the term" knowledge." It has at least three
separate meanings. ( 1) Certitude, ( 2) sensory presentation, and
( 3) communicable ideas, the last more or less coinciding with
the first. If we limit " knowledge " to sensation or having a
thing in consciousness as a sense datum, we may well say that
spirit is not normally accessible to that source, and I say " normally
" because experience shows a different law for the influence
of transcendental agents on the organism than that prevailing in
matter. If we mean by saying that spirit cannot affect the senses
that things which are not objects of sense perception cannot
affect the senses, we are merely uttering a tautological proposition,
a truism, an analytic proposition in Kant's phrase, which
conveys no knowledge. We may well concede that spirit cannot
reveal itself to sense perception and question whether the idea of
"knowledge" is exhausted by this conception. The fact is that
"knowledge" has quite as much meant certitude, whether sensory
or inferential, as it has sense presentation, and that fact
must be taken into account when discussing its limits. There
are quite possibly limits to sense " knowledge " but these do not
determine any limits to inferential certitude. And indeed we
may raise the question 'whether the limits of sensory "knowl-
Digitized by Goog I e