T. H. GEEEN, PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS, II. 95

sweeping implication of his words, for he goes on to say in his next paragraph :" We have consciousness, then, of such object or subject. ... Is it, then, the ' thing-in-itself ' ? Yes, accord- ing to Kant, it is that ' thing-in-itself ' which renders possible

• nature in the formal sense'. It seems as if, when he wrote the

first edition of the Critique, he was coming to regard this as the sole ' thing-in-itself,' but the final view, into which he had settled down when he wrote the Prolegomena, was that there was another 1 thing-in-itself,' which renders nature possible in the material sense, the cause of our sensations." This is an admission eminently satisfactory to the historical student, because it dis- poses incidentally of the view by which the ascription of Hegelian positions to Kant is sometimes justified, viz., that, beginning with certain untenable presuppositions, Kant gradually wrote himself clear and left them behind, though they remain stranded here and there upon his pages like glacial relics of a prehistoric time. But this is so far from being the case that Kant, as he proceeded, settled more and more into a view which dogmatically asserted the most obnoxious of these presuppositions. In fact, the view which ' sympathetic development ' ascribes to Kant is one which we may base upon a few passages of his writings, but which I gravely doubt whether Kant ever so much as thought of, even in writing these very passages. This is evident enough (as virtually admitted by Green) in the case of the transcendental object, but {though it may appear more shocking to say so) there seems equally little reason to doubt that the doctrine of Kant's English followers on the subject of the transcendental Ego departs equally widely from anything that ever entered into the mind of Kant himself. Green, for example, expressly identifies the unchanging subject of thought the " eternal self " which makes one " cosmos of experience " with God, the absolute or divine self-conscious- ness. Now I am not here discussing whether such an identifica- tion is or is not necessary in the interests of consistent thinking, but surely, in view of other integral parts of his system, we cannot imagine such an idea to have been present to Kant himself. God was conceived by Kant in the deistic fashion of last century as a completely transcendent Being, whose main function, according to the Kantian ethics, is to superintend the ultimate adjustment of happiness to virtue. We search Kant in vain for any rap- prochement of the human consciousness and the divine. He even makes light of the unity of apperception, calling it ' a merely logi- cal unity,' and ' the poorest idea of all'. For, even in the case of the human subject, this unity does not represent for Kant the noumenal existence of the man. Just as he retained a thoroughly mechanical conception of God, so he seems to have believed, somewhat as Locke did, in a quasi-substantial existence of numerically separate persons, as things-in-themselves, whose function, as it were, the unity of apperception may be conceived in each case to be. It will be understood that I do not for a moment put forward this