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PHYSIOLOGY OP PLANTS. 297
whose assertions, precisely on that account, cannot claim
To anyone who has studied and
unconditioned validity.
understood the Critique of Pure Reason to which our
standpoint is essentially foreign it must nevertheless still
appear as if Nature had intended the intellect for a puzzleglass
to mislead us and were playing at hide-and-seek with
us. But by our realistic objective road, i.e. by starting
from the objective world as given, we have now come to
the very same result at which Kant had arrived by the
idealistic, subjective road, i.e. by examining the intellect
itself and the way in which it constitutes consciousness.
We now see that the world as representation hovers on the
narrow line between the external cause (motive) and the
effect evoked (act of the will), in beings having knowledge
(animals), in which beings for the first time there occurs a
distinct separation between motive and voluntary act.
Ita res accendent lumina rebus. It is only when it is
reached by two quite opposite roads, that the great result
attained by Kant is distinctly seen ; and when light is thus
thrown upon it from both sides, his whole meaning be
comes clear. Our objective standpoint is realistic and
therefore conditioned, so far as, in taking for granted the
existence of beings in Nature, it abstracts from the fact
that their objective existence postulates an intellect, which
contains them as its representation but Kant s ;
subjective
and idealistic standpoint is likewise conditioned, inasmuch
as he starts from the intelligence, which itself, however,
presupposes Nature, in consequence of whose development
as far as animal life that intelligence is for the first time
enabled to make its appearance. Keeping steadily to this
realistic, objective standpoint of ours, we may also define
Kant s theory as follows : After Locke, in order to know
things in themselves, had abstracted the share of sen
suous functions called by him secondary qualities from
things as they appear, Kant with infinitely greater depth