difficult to understand why one form of classification should be more applicable than another, and we end at the same time in reducing knowledge to nothing more than a creation of the subject totally devoid of any objective meaning. Or must we admit data to be possessed of characteristics and a physiognomy of their own which act as a stimulus to the activity of thought in certain directions? If this be granted, we cannot explain how these stimuli which have their source in the impenetrable heart of things can, by some happy accident, be moulded without any difficulty by the human intellect. This uncertain equivocal position of neo-Kantian philosophy left a painful sense of doubt in the mind which no flight of imagination, even though inspired by genius, and no feeling, however lofty and poetical, could entirely dispel.
7. Riehl’s Monism. — Riehl, while retaining the
unknowable residuum of the thing in itself, has
endeavoured to invest science with objective validity
by substituting a monistic conception for the
subjectivism of the neo-Kantists. The harmony between
the activity of thought and the processes of the real,
which could not be explained by Kantism pure and
simple unless the sensible objects were to be regarded
as a creation of the mind, thus returning to the theories
of romantic idealism, is, according to Riehl, accounted
for by the identity of the unknowable source, in which
the streams of thought and objective reality both take
their rise, and from which they pursue their course along
parallel lines. The unifying activity of the human mind,
the one and only true a priori, is not purely formal, but
has its objective correlative in the unity of nature, the
ruling idea of scientific research. The intuitive forms
and the categories are not a priori, but are constructed
by the synthetic activity of thought, which is ever
striving to reduce the changeful world of individual
perceptions to a reality possessed of social value; they
express necessary conditions, because experience in its
manifold forms acquires characteristics of universal
