When, however, Kant came to work out the implications of the theory, a number of conflicting considerations were allowed to intrude. In consequence of his unfortunate mode of dealing with the so-called faculties of sensibility and thought in isolation from one another, the central principle tended in his treatment to be lost from sight. While insisting that experience is possible only as a synthetic combination in the unity of consciousness, and that nothing can enter into experience save what is in harmony with the conditions of such combination, he would have it that the matter of experience was extraneously given, and that it was the given data which constituted the elements of the synthesis. Con sequently, the objects of knowledge could only be phenomena,— appearances possibly of realities not thus built up of sensuous material, but appearances which in any case are essentially distinct from that of which they are appearances. As a result, the realm of reality and the world of sense-objects fall asunder; and a baffling mode of existence comes to be assigned to phenomena as distinct from things-in-themselves. The weakest position of the Kantian theory comes here to light. The conception of pres entations as given to the mind is irreconcilable with the notion of the unity of consciousness as a universal principle, which was not itself an existent entity that could be acted upon, or influenced by, other existent entities.
There are in the Kantian writings trends of reflection tending in a direction radically opposed to the subjectivism of Berkeley. Particularly, for example, in dealing with the notion of the whole of experience as adapted to human reason, Kant was led to a much more concrete determination of the nature of the unity in cognition than appears often permissible on the basis of his teaching. The relation of universal to particular, he here argues, is a relation only possible for intelligence. Represented as a relation of things-in-themselves, of things taken apart from the synthesis of mind and its objects, such a relation is meaningless. And in the idea of the adaptation of the particulars of experience to reason, it is in fact implied that the arrangement, order, dis tribution of those particulars is determined in accordance with the general principles necessary to secure the adaptation in question. We frame for ourselves, therefore, in all our procedure under the regulative principle of the unity of reason, the conception of the ground of things as an intelligence wherein the universal is not formed from, but is determinative of, the particulars. Kant himself would allow, it is true, no more than subjective possi bility to this thought of an "intuitive understanding," whose pro cedure is not that merely of apprehending particular things by the help of general notions but of producing, by reason of its notions, the particulars which exemplify and realise them.
But in the hands more especially of Hegel (1770-1831) what Kant thus hints at was elaborated into the conception of abso lute thought as exhibiting itself in the whole detailed structure of experience. Rejecting in toto the assumption of things-in-them selves as beyond the realm of the knowable, Hegel repudiated no less the Kantian view of knowable things as phenomena. A dis tinction between the real and the phenomenal might, indeed, be drawn, but it was a distinction between features that fall within the realm of experience and not between that which is without and that which is within it.
By "thought," however, in this context is not to be understood the mere result of the subjective activity of thinking on the part of the finite mind. The thought relations which were regarded as giving the intelligible aspect of reality were taken to be objective in character. And this position, it was claimed, is in no way incom patible with what, as mere matter of fact, is and must be admitted in respect to thinking and knowing as modes of the finite mind's activity. As portions of the total world of reality these subjective activities have their function; in and through them the world of intelligible reality finds expression; but the fact that they are portions of that world in no way invalidates the view that the essential relations of all reality are relations of thought.
In describing the universals which form the necessary and essential framework, so to speak, of real fact "thoughts," Hegel was desirous of emphasising the consideration that they are de pendent upon Mind or Self-consciousness as their ultimate ground, that they are, in truth, the unfolding in abstract terms of the very structure of Mind. And as thus dependent, they are not to be conceived as disconnected and independent generalities, but as constituting of themselves a system, any portion of which must evince itself as unintelligible and contradictory if regarded apart from its relation to the rest. In trying to exhibit the contents of this organic system and the mode of their interdependence, Hegel was doing no more than disentangling from concrete reality, as he viewed it, its indispensable elements.