Kant (q.v.) did much to overcome the one sidedness of these theories, and to give a more adequate account of the nature of knowledge. For, while he insists that knowledge must begin with experience, he points out that ex perience itself is a compound, implying both a given sense material and forms and prin ciples of organization on the part of the mind. By his doctrine that "thoughts without per ceptions are empty, while perceptions without thoughts are blind," he passed beyond the one sided views of both Rationalism and Empiri cism. By his transcendental method of inquiry he seeks to show what are the fundamental forms and categories which the mind employs in building up a coherent and universally valid system of experience. But, in spite of the great reform which he effected, he did not wholly succeed in reaching an organic view of experience. This was partly the result of pre supposition which he inherited from the past, and partly due to his own tendency to make hard and fast divisions and distinctions. There always remained for him an unresolved dualism within experience between the datum of sense and the forms of thought. Again, thought, as he conceives it, does not pass beyond subjec tivity and include in itself the nature of its object, but is occupied with bringing order and unity into sensations and mental repre sentations. Although these states of con sciousness, when thus acted upon by thought become objective in the sense that they are parts of a universal and necessary system, nevertheless they are still only "phenomena,' objects in the mind, while the world of real being (the things in themselves) remain in accessible to knowledge. The spirit of Kant's philosophy undoubtedly leads beyond any such absolute dualism. But from Kant's day to the present time this distinction has appeared the final word of philosophy to many thinkers who continue to accept the presuppositions and cate gories of the past century, and who fail to apply to this problem the organic and evolutionary conceptions which are now within their reach.
Modern epistemological investigation may be described as seeking to exhibit the organic unity of experience. To reach this result, new theories regarding the nature of the mind and its relation to objects are necessary. In the first place, the conception of the mind as made up of a number of distinct faculties must give place to the idea of the mind as a unitary sys tem of functions which mutually co-operate and determine each other in the progressive development of experience. Secondly, the mind can no longer be regarded as a system of merely subjective functions related only in an external and accidental way to the real world of objects. The course of philosophical dis cussion has rendered it evident that if we begin by defining experience in terms of mental proc esses there is no way of deriving from these the world of objects. If our epistemological theory is to he adequate to experience as we know it, objectivity must he included within it. Thought, that is, is real only as a relation to objects; by itself, and apart from the world of real objects, it has no reality. It is only by thus recognizing from the beginning the essen tial relation of subject and object that it is possible to exhibit the real organic unity of experience as a system of knowledge. It was Kant's successors in Germany, and pre eminently Hegel (q.v.), who first developed this organic view of experience. But partly on account of the form in which these systems were expressed, and partly as a result of the decline of philosophical interest, their most valuable and characteristic ideas failed for a long time to be appreciated. The credit of
freeing these fruitful ideas from the somewhat obscure and uninviting form in which they were presented in the German systems of a century ago, belongs in the main to the English neo-Hegelians and their co-laborers in Amer ica, among the latter of whom a place of honor must be given to Dr. William T. Harris, the late United States Commissioner of Education. The fundamental doctrine of these writers is that what is real is rational, i.e., knowable in terms of reason, and therefore that all forms of cognitive experience can be exhibited as organically interconnected as a system of ra tional ideas or meanings. Conscious experi ence is from the first regarded, not as a series of psychological states, but as taking the form of a judging activity whose function is to in terpret and reveal the nature of the objective world. Moreover, knowledge proceeds in its development through differentiation and inte gration in accordance with the fundamental laws of logical evolution. Its later and more highly developed forms are then to be under stood as the differentiation and systematization of its more elementary forms and functions. The final truth regarding the nature of the real world must accordingly correspond with the ideal of completely developed and per fectly rationalized experience. As representa tives of this general type of objective Idealism we may mention the late T. H. Green, Edward Caird, the late D. G. Ritchie, A. S. Pringle Pattison, B. Bosanquet, W. T. Harris, John Watson and Josiah Royce.
There are, however, prominent philosophical writers of the present day who employ to some extent Hegelian methods and principles in dealing with experience, but who yet main tain that the account of knowledge in terms of reason requires to be modified and supple mented in various ways. Two main points of view may be here mentioned, which have much in common, and which are both often empha sized by the same writers. On the one hand, it is claimed that logical thinking operates with universal concepts, and can therefore never do justice to the individual aspects of real objects. Thought, in other words, is con cerned only with universal relations, and is unable to apprehend the uniqueness and par ecularity of real existence; it gives us only descriptions of things in general terms, and has to receive as a datum from another form of knowing the particular facts which form its subject-matter. This latter aspect of real ity, it is maintained, can be apprehended only in some form of immediate exnerience. In fact, it is often maintained that logical ex perience must both start from and nags into direct intuition or feeling. In its beginning, logical thinking presupposes the awareness of objects in sense-perception; for it is claimed it is only in this way that thought comes into contact with individual things and gets a foot hold in reality. Again, since the total system of things must exist in individual form, the final synthesis of knowledge must transcend logical relations and be realized, if it can be attained at all, in immediate intuition — a mode of cognition that may perhaps be described as analogous to esthetic contemplation. Although the neo-Hegelian writers have not been back ward in meeting these arguments, and have successfully shown the difficulties involved in their opponents' antithesis of universal and in dividual, of thought and immediate knowinv yet the discussion cannot be regarded as closed at the present time.