with which we have not kept in touch, yet follows us through
the infinite complications of our reasonings and invariably justifies
them. That is the fact. Kant has set it in clear light. But the
explanation of the fact, we believe, must be sought in a different
direction to that which Kant followed.

Intelligence, as Kant represents it to us, is bathed in an atmosphere of
spatiality to which it is as inseparably united as the living body to
the air it breathes. Our perceptions reach us only after having passed
through this atmosphere. They have been impregnated in advance by our
geometry, so that our faculty of thinking only finds again in matter the
mathematical properties which our faculty of perceiving has already
deposed there. We are assured, therefore, of seeing matter yield itself
with docility to our reasonings; but this matter, in all that it has
that is intelligible, is our own work; of the reality "in itself" we
know nothing and never shall know anything, since we only get its
refraction through the forms of our faculty of perceiving. So that if we
claim to affirm something of it, at once there rises the contrary
affirmation, equally demonstrable, equally plausible. The ideality of
space is proved directly by the analysis of knowledge indirectly by the
antinomies to which the opposite theory leads. Such is the governing
idea of the Kantian criticism. It has inspired Kant with a peremptory
refutation of "empiricist" theories of knowledge. It is, in our opinion,
definitive in what it denies. But, in what it affirms, does it give us
the solution of the problem?

With Kant, space is given as a ready-made form of our perceptive
faculty--a veritable _deus ex machina_, of which we see neither how it
arises, nor why it is what it is rather than anything else.
"Things-in-themselves" are also given, of which he claims that we can
know nothing: by what right, then, can he affirm their existence, even
as "problematic"? If the unknowable reality projects into our perceptive
faculty a "sensuous manifold" capable of fitting into it exactly, is it
not, by that very fact, in part known? And when we examine this exact
fitting, shall we not be led, in one point at least, to suppose a
pre-established harmony between things and our mind--an idle hypothesis,
which Kant was right in wishing to avoid? At bottom, it is for not
having distinguished degrees in spatiality that he has had to take space
ready-made as given--whence the q