as Hume's had
been of Locke's or Locke's of Hobbes's. And the very fact that the
metaphysical residuum practically disappeared--for the weak
reconstruction in the second Critique may be dismissed as
irrelevant--renders the work essentially valid, essentially a
description of something real. It is therefore a great source of
instruction and a good compendium or store-house for the problems of
mind. But the work has been much overestimated. It is the product of a
confused though laborious mind. It contains contradictions not merely
incidental, such as any great novel work must retain (since no man can
at once remodel his whole vocabulary and opinions) but contradictions
absolutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that between the
transcendental function of intellect and its limited authority, or that
between the efficacy of things-in-themselves and their unknowability.
Kant's assumptions and his conclusions, his superstitions and his
wisdom, alternate without neutralising each other.

[Sidenote: Incoherences.]

That experience is a product of two factors is an assumption made by
Kant. It rests on a psychological analogy, namely on the fact that
organ and stimulus are both necessary to sensation. That experience is
the substance or matter of nature, which is a construction in thought,
is Kant's conclusion, based on intrinsic logical analysis. Here
experience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and without
conditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkable
objects. The relation between the transcendental function of experience
and its empirical causes Kant never understood. The transcendentalism
which--if we have it at all--must be fundamental, he made derivative;
and the realism, which must then be derivative, he made absolute.
Therefore his metaphysics remained fabulous and his idealism sceptical
or malicious.

Ask what can be meant by "conditions of experience" and Kant's
bewildering puzzle solves itself at the word. Condition, like cause, is
a term that covers a confusion between dialectical and natural
connections. The conditions of experience, in the dialectical sense, are
the characteristics a thing must have to deserve the name of experience;
in other words, its conditions are its nominal essence. If experience be
used in a loose sense to mean any given fact or consciousness in
general, the condition of experience is merely immediacy. If it be used,
as it often is in empirical writers, for