knowledge besides those which he mentioned."* And again: "Sensations of sight and touch are the occasions which give rise to the idea of space, and by which it is developed; but though such sensations give rise to it, it has not its origin from them, but in the constitution of the intelligent agent by which these sensations of sight and touch are perceived."t

It is, we presume, for convenience' sake that Mr. Lanigan speaks throughout of the ideas of space and time. In Kant's language, these are not forms of the intellect, they belong to the intuitive faculty (anschauungsvermögen). But with Mr. Lanigan's use of the term idea, we will not quarrel. We wish to discuss a question which is something more than a question of words. Kant divided the subjective forms which make up the appliances of thought into three classes; it was only to the forms inherent in what he calls the reason (vernunft) that he applied the term "idea." Mr. Lanigan applies it to all, without distinction, and we are content to follow him in this. Our main purpose is to make clear our view of the substance of that theory in which he has found the refutation of Hume, and the complement of the philosophy of Locke. From the details into which we have already entered, it will be evident that the theory is fairly described in the passage quoted above, as "the Kantian doctrine of the subjectivity of these ideas," that is, of space and time, "and other necessary ideas."

The subjectivity of an idea may mean more than one thing. It may mean that we have within ourselves the material object from which a certain idea is drawn; that our own nature supplies us with the best and most accessible embodiment of a certain notion, and that, contemplating the activity of our own being, we acquire the idea as we could not acquire it otherwise, if, indeed, we could otherwise acquire it at all. There are passages in Mr. Lanigan's work which seem to indicate that he at times understands in this sense the term subjectivity. For instance, he sums up his account of our idea of power in this sentence: 66 Here is the true origin of the idea of power, the consciousness of the faculty of willing, the ability to direct our thoughts to the production of any action, or the forbearance of any action proposed."+ It seems the purpose of the writer to state that the conscious exercise of our faculty of will is the origin of our idea of power in the sense that this consciousness is the most favourable material whence to draw this idea. It cannot be his meaning that the consciousness of our faculty of will is itself the idea of power; the concrete, personal sense of a living faculty, and the abstract, impersonal notion of power are widely different things. The use of the term subjectivity in the sense here indicated is, perhaps, more apparent in the following passage:

"How the idea of cause originates in the consciousness of our freedom in acts of volition, in the knowledge of the mind as a determining power capable of regulating and directing its operations, has been before explained. But, having thus got this idea of a connexion between our volitions and their effects, we transfer this idea to objects other than ourselves, and in thought connect them in like manner.”*

With the subjectivity of ideas thus explained, we should hardly have found it necessary to quarrel. The doctrine has been held by men of much eminence,† and in its ultimate consequences does not lead to much more than mere logical embarrassments. We will stay to point out one of these. According to the view Mr. Lanigan is defending, our faculties of perception discern in the objective world successive phenomena, but do not perceive the causal link which binds them together. We see phenomenon A and then phenomenon B-no more. We see a billiard-ball move across the table and come in contact with another: the first stands still, thereupon the other begins to move. This is all that observation discloses to us. Whence comes the notion of causality—that connecting band which our mind establishes between the one movement and the other? Hume denied altogether the existence of such a link, and held that our idea of cause is identical with our idea of uniformity of succession in phenomena. Mr. Lanigan admits that we perceive in things without us merely a first phenomenon and a second; the notion of cause is derived from another source, and then applied to those outer things; it originates "in the knowledge of the mind as a determining power, and then we transfer this idea to objects other than ourselves." Let us apply to this theory an argument which Mr. Lanigan has used with effect against Hume. If our notion of cause and effect is identical with our notion of the regular antecedence and sequence of phenomena, how, asks Mr. Lanigan, does it happen that we do not consider night the cause of day, or day the cause of night? To this question, it is clear, the philosophy of Hume can give no answer. Let us now put a like question to Mr. Lanigan himself. If the idea of cause is derived wholly from the mind, how comes it that " we transfer this idea to only a particular class of external phenomena, and refuse to transfer it to another class where the order of succession is quite as constant as in the first ?" Why do " we transfer this idea" to the case of the billiard-balls and refuse to apply it to the case of day and night? Do we see something in the first which puts it on a level with the case of our own conscious activity, and do we see that this something is wanting in the second? If we do not see thus much, we have no assignable reason for transferring our idea to one set of phenomena rather than to the other, nor, indeed, a reason for transferring our idea to any set of phenomena at all. If, + See Dublin Review, April, 1872, p. 282. P. 182.

* P. 206.

on the other hand, we see in external phenomena so much as this, we see in them that which makes them of kindred nature with our own conscious energy; we perceive in them the characteristics of active agents.

Looking at the matter thus, we are inclined to think that Mr. Lanigan and those who hold with him the subjectivity of ideas, as we are here interpreting it, have not met Hume's argument effectually. Supposing them to have proved our idea of cause to be wholly of subjective origin, they have not thereby solved the difficulty; they have only pushed it back a stage. They have still to explain what it is we detect in the outside world to which we are warranted in applying the idea thus generated. If that external something be not the objective correlative of the idea, we are not justified in applying our idea to it; if it be, we have apprehended objective causal relation before our idea is applied.

But to the "subjectivity of ideas," in the sense which we have hitherto attributed to it, we do not wish to make further objection. It is, we think, a theory which may be convicted of logical incoherence, but with graver defects we have no wish to charge it. But there is another doctrine covered by the phrase to which exception must be taken on more serious grounds. An idea may be of subjective origin, not in the sense that the material object, from which the mind draws it, falls within the range of consciousness, but in the sense that the idea exists in the mind antecedent to every act of thought; that it is a preformed, necessary element of the faculty of thought, set within the mind, to be called into use by the action of external things upon us, and to enter ready-made into our representations of external objects. In this theory, the thinking subject does not merely furnish the material upon which the mind works when creating that mental form which we call an idea; the mind possesses within itself the mental form created from the first, and it is only by applying the form thus inherent that it can at all represent external things. These preexistent mental forms may be fac-similes of the objects of the outer world, brought into play by the action upon us of those objects which they resemble. In this case they are the innate ideas of Plato. Or they may be mere hollow forms in which experiences obtained through the senses are cast, into which shapeless and chaotic impressions received from without are forced, and by which they are successively fashioned into objects of sensitive and of intellectual perception. Thus described, they are the intuition and thought-forms of Kant. It is with these we have now to do. The theory which attributes the origin of "universal and necessary ideas" to a mental mechanism of this kind is the theory which has won Mr. Lanigan's admiration, and in which he has found what is wanting to the theory of Locke.

We will try to make clear how much is involved in the doctrine to

which he thus gives allegiance. To do this it will be necessary to state still more in detail, for those who are unpractised in metaphysics, in what the doctrine of Kant really consists. Other philosophers have explained, with much variety in the explanation, that our ideas are true mental pictures of real things, created as required, by the mind itself. According to Kant, the idea or mental picture is present in the mind from the beginning; it is a portion of the mind, or, as Mr. Lanigan has it, a "condition governing" the mind. To put the matter more concisely, according to Kant's view, we do not draw our ideas from objects without us; we impress our pre-existent ideas upon external things. Those mental images which we suppose to represent the figures and forms of the outer world, are really images which are stored up within ourselves; the world looks to us as it does, only because we make it for ourselves what it looks. Take, for example, our notion of the properties of an equilateral triangle. We do not, according to the theory before us, obtain these notions by observing any visible geometrical figure, nor by any study of the ideas drawn from such an object. We do not draw them from anything real without us; they are forms of our own thought impressed upon an outside something which, thereby, becomes for us an object of knowledge. To use an expressive idiom, which we borrow from the German of Kant, "We do not think these qualities out of the object, we think them into it."

The reasoning by which Kant seeks to establish this theory is the same as that which we have already seen used to prove the insufficiency of the theory of Locke. Our experience deals only with particular things, or particular groups of things. Observing a particular object, we can observe it only as it is at one time and in one place. What we perceive in it cannot warrant a statement as to its mode of existence at other times and under other circumstances. Actual observation of its now existing state cannot justify an assertion which passes beyond its present condition, for its present condition is all that observation can possibly reach. If, then, observation and experience were our only means of acquiring knowledge, we could not lay down, with regard to the objects we have knowledge of, any statement which describes them for all time and for all places. As a matter of fact, however, we do at every moment make statements of this kind. The grounds for these

That I am rightly interpreting Kant will best appear from his own words: "Dem Ersten, der den gleichseitigen Triangel demonstrirte, dem ging ein Licht auf; denn er fand, dass er nicht dem, was er in der Figur sah, oder auch dem blossen Begriffe derselben nachspüren und gleichsam davon ihre Eigenschaften ablernen, sondern durch das, was er nach Begriffen selbst a priori hineindachte und darstellte (durch Construction), hervorbringen müsse, und das er, um sicher etwas a priori zu Wissen, der Sache nichts beilegen müsse, als was aus dem nothwendig folgte, was er seinem Begriffe gemäss selbst in sie gelegt hat." Kritik der reinen Vernunft.-S. 667.

far-reaching generalisations not being discernible in the objects as they are submitted to our notice, it follows that they are to be sought in ourselves, in the appliances and the laws of our thinking faculty. We do not think in this wise, because the objects presented to us force us so to think; clearly then, we are forced to think thus because there is something in ourselves which forbids us to think otherwise—the mind is deriving the forms of its thought from within, it is not adapting itself to the exigencies of things outside. Those immutable notions of time, space, unity, multitude, cause, effect and the like, which we weave into propositions eternally true, are not derived from our casual glimpses of the outer world, but from fixed, unchanging elements of thought within us. This is, in brief, the reasoning upon which Kant's whole system rests. We have already had to deal with this method of argument, and have pointed out wherein it is faulty. Our faculties of experience which first come in contact with outer things, do not discern in them any fixed, enduring characteristics; therefore, it is argued, our intellect cannot derive its notions of these characteristics through the channel of sensitive experience. This argument, it is plain, supposes that the intellect apprehends in the objects submitted to it only those characteristics which are accessible to sense. It supposes, as we have before pointed out, that the understanding is a mere register for the impressions of the lower faculty, that it has not an activity peculiar to itself, has not a power of its own by which it forms its own pictures of the objects which the senses present to it. Between the philosophy of Locke and the philosophy of Kant stands the philosophy of Aristotle, and until the theory of the Greek philosopher has been effectually set aside, there is absolutely no logical weight in the arguments by which the German philosopher seeks to make his own supreme. The arguments of Kant disprove the theory of Locke, they do not establish his own. They would avail for this purpose if he first showed that his own theory and that of Locke were the only theories possible as to the origin of our ideas. This he has not done, and this no one can ever do for him. And so, having swept away the system of Locke, he finds that a greater than Locke is in the way.

We grant that the faculties of sense do not apprehend more than the present conditions under which external objects exist, and we grant further that the intellect makes acquaintance with external objects only through the interposed faculties of sense. But does it hence follow that the intellect perceives in those objects only what the faculties of sense apprehend? As well might we say that the man who receives a telegram in cipher sees nothing more in it than the clerk who transmitted it. The understanding is a distinct faculty of apprehension, and may, nay must, exercise a special apprehensive power. It grasps the object presented to it in its own way, lays hold of something in the object which it alone can lay hold of. Supposing, for the nonce,