have been appalling to Pythagoras and Plato; for what the Koenigsberg professor advances concerning both the existence and the non-existence of this matter,[1] and of its intuitive reality, and of its phenomenal illusion, and of its essential forms, time and space, and of the labour that the mind exercises upon this equivocal being, which, always being engendered, never, however, exists; all this, taught in the mysteries, was only clearly revealed to the initiate. Listen a moment to what has transpired in India: it is the fundamental axiom of the Vedantic school, the illustrious disciples of Vyasa and of Sankarâchârya, an axiom in accordance with the dogmas of the sacred books.
Matter exists [say these philosophers], but not of an existence
such as is imagined by the vulgar; it exists but it has no essence
independent of intellectual perceptions; for existence and perceptibility
are, in this case, convertible terms. The sage knows
that appearances and their exterior sensations are purely illusory
and that they would vanish into nothingness, if the Divine energy
which alone sustains them was for an instant suspended.[2]
I beg the disciples of Kant to give attention to this
passage, and to remember what Plato has said of the same,
that, sometimes matter exists and sometimes it does not
exist[3]; as Justin the martyr, and Cyril of Alexandria have
reproached him for it; and as Plutarch and Chalcidius
have strongly remarked it,[4] in seeking to excuse this apparent
contradiction.
Let us endeavour now to call attention to the point where Kant is led astray. This point, in the philosophical course that this savant meant to pursue, seemed at first of very slight importance; but the deviation that it causes,
