and environment, person and situation. These two natural conditions must normally come together, like flint and steel, before the spark of experience will fly. But scepticism requires me to take the spark itself as my point of departure, since it alone lives morally and lights up with its vital flame the scene I seem to discover. This spark is single, though changeful. Experience has no conditions for a critic of knowledge who proceeds transcendentally, that is, from the vantage-ground of experience itself. To urge, therefore, that a self or ego is presupposed in experience, or even must have created experience by its absolute fiat, is curiously to fail in critical thinking, and to renounce the transcendental method. All transcendental system-makers are in fact false to the very principle by which they criticise dogmatism; a principle which admits of no system, tolerates no belief, but recalls the universe at every moment into the absolute experience which posits it here and now.
This backsliding of transcendentalism, when it forgets itself so far as to assign conditions to experience, might have no serious consequences, if transcendentalism were clearly recognised to be simply a romantic episode in reflection, a sort of poetic madness, and no necessary step in the life of reason. That its professed scepticism should so soon turn into mythology would then seem appropriate in such a disease of genius. But the delusion becomes troublesome to the serious critic of knowledge when it perhaps inclines him to imagine that, in asserting that experience is a product, and has two terms, he is describing the inner nature of experience, and not merely its external conditions, as natural history reports them. He may then be tempted to assign a metaphysical status and logical necessity to a merely material fact. Instead of the body, which is the true “subject” in experience, he may think he finds an absolute ego, and instead of the
