ject to what has been called the fundamental category of our mind, the category of Causality, that is, the necessity under which we are, if we think at all, of referring every impression or sensation of ours to a cause, changing it thereby into an external object. Thus sweetness, redness, coldness, or heat, which represent at first passive states of the subject only, are changed through an inherent necessity of our mind of accepting everything as effect and cause, into a cause, or into what we call an object outside ourselves. Instead of saying, as we should say while only impressed, that we are hot or cold, or that we feel sweet or red, we add that we are so because of something else, and we then proceed to say that this something else outside us is sweet, or red, or cold, or hot, such as sweet (sugar), a red (rose), cold (ice), hot (fire). What this something else' is, and whether it is anything at all outside us, are questions which do not concern us here. If we must have a name for it, Kant's Ding an sich seems the least objectionable, particularly if we define it as no more than 'the transcendental ground of the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold in the object of experience 1.'

The forms of space and time then follow by themselves, for we cannot but look upon all that is outside us as perceived and measured from the central standpoint of each individual ego, i.e. as being in Space; while we must likewise look upon all that passes within us as perceived and measured from the momentary standpoint occupied by each individual ego, i.e. in Time. The individual percipient must constitute both the Here and the Now for all that is

1 T. H. Green, Works, vol. ii. p. 24.

to be perceived, otherwise the percepts would not be his percepts. This is what Kant meant when he said: If I take away all thought from an empirical cognition, there remains no cognition whatever of an object, for nothing is thought by mere intuition, and the fact of my senses being affected gives me nothing that relates to any object.' Instead therefore of saying that we cannot think in sight or see in thought, we should rather say that we never see without thought nor think without sight or the shadows of sight.

Percepts inseparable from

Concepts.

But though in this sense all real percepts, being representations in time and space, or images, or phantasmata, are already our own work, they are still more so if we consider that in actual thought percepts always participate in the nature of concepts. Most philosophers draw a sharp line of separation between percepts and concepts, because percepts are always representations of single objects, and because it is an old maxim of philosophy that there is no knowledge of single things. Nevertheless, as in the case of impressions, we may here also admit a kind of eocene period, during which percepts gradually rise towards the sphere of concepts, though the admission of such a period is again more the result of reasoning than of actual experience. The very moment we become conscious of a percept, or of an individual object, we have to comprehend it under something else, and thus to begin to conceive it, even if it be only under the most general categories of our mind. Sokrates, the moment he is named, ceases to be a mere percept.

1 'There is no perception without an intellectual interpretation of sensation.' T. H. Green, Works, vol. ii. p. 176.

He may be a mere individual, and the sign by which we know him may be a mere nomen proprium; but for all that, it is a name, and a name always involves a concept, even if it be so general as person, or living thing, or being. Any green, as soon as it is perceived as this green, is ipso facto perceived as like unto other greens, and as unlike yellow or blue; it is conceived as something which we afterwards call colour.

So that here again we arrive at the conclusion with which we started, namely that though sensations, percepts, and concepts may be distinguished, they are within our own mind one and indivisible. We can never know sensations except as percepts, we can never know of percepts except as incipient concepts. Each concept contains as its ingredients both percepts and sensations, but neither of these have any separate existence except as the causes of a concept. Sensations, once planted on the soil of our mind, grow into percepts and concepts, but the three can as little be torn asunder as a flower can be torn from the stem, or the stem from its seed. The three are one, and, if separated, they cease to be what they are; they die and may be preserved as withered flowers, but nothing can revive them except a new spring, or a new creative act of the mind. To quote Herder's words, though with a wider meaning, 'Our whole soul acts everywhere as one and undivided1.'

It has often been said that animals have sensations Percepts of and percepts, but that one ought not to Animals. ascribe to them the possession of concepts. Of the conventional animal of the philo

1 Noiré, Ursprung der Sprache, p. 47.

sopher this may be quite true. We have a right to conclude by analogy that it is so, provided only that we are always prepared to admit that we do not know in the least how animals philosophise, and how an ox recognises his stable-door. With this proviso I am quite ready to admit that animals may have percepts, and that they share in common with man what Kant calls the power of sensuous intuition, nay, in a certain sense what Schopenhauer calls the fundamental category of causality. Whether the absence of concepts would impart to the mental activity of animals a superiority over our mind, or an inferiority, is not a question which concerns us at present; all we have to admit is that their minds, stored with sensations and percepts only, would probably act in a way different from our own. In the mind of man percepts, pur et simple, do not exist; they are always tinged with the first rays of the dawn which precedes the full sunrise of conceptual light. And a percept which, as in man, can become a concept, is different by this very fact from a percept which, as in animals, can never grow into anything else; but what the exact difference may be no human understanding can possibly fathom, though all the more ample room is left to conjecture and fancy 1.

It is pleasant to find sometimes the results of hard philosophical labour, the work of centuries

1 Mich dünkt, der Mensch würde sich, (so wie das sprachlose Thier, das in der äusseren Welt, wie in einem dunkeln, betäubenden Wellen-Meere schwimmt), ebenfalls in dem vollgestirnten Himmel der äussern Anschauung dumpf verlieren, wenn er das verworrene Leuchten nicht durch Sprache in Sternbilder abtheilte, und sich durch diese das Ganze in Theile für das Bewusstsein auflösete.' Jean Paul.

separableness

and

of thought, anticipated with the utmost simplicity An Anticipa by early philosophers, by men who hardly tion of the in- knew that they were philosophers. Thus, of Sensation, in explaining a passage in the KauPerception, shitaki Upanishad (III. 7), the Indian Conception. commentator says: The organs of sense cannot exist without pragñâ, i. e. consciousness, nor can the objects of sense be obtained without the organs of sense. Therefore, on the principle that when one thing cannot exist without another, the two are said to be identical, the objects of sense, being never found without the organs of sense, are identical with them, and the organs of sense, being never found without praguâ or consciousness, are identical with it.' He gives as illustrations of what he here means by identity, that cloth, being never seen without threads, is identical with them, and that the false perception of silver, being never found without the mother-of-pearl, is identical with it.

Now what is all this but a simple anticipation of what I have been trying to establish, that sensations

are impossible without percepts, and percepts with

out concepts, just as the cloth is impossible without the threads, and the threads without the wool? That the objects of the senses are identical with the senses is a statement which goes beyond our present purpose, for we want to prove no more than that they are inseparable; but this passage from an Indian commentator is curious at all events as an anticipation of the most advanced views of European idealism.

We now come to the third and most important and most fiercely contested question, namely, whether concepts can exist without words. If the question