ABSTRACT
I have tried to make evident here how the drive towards unlimited generality of principle encounters the limiting requirement of intelligibility in application and how perverse, in spite of its brilliance, is Kant's treatment of their impact. For of course the general principle that any perceptual awareness we may have of independently existing things is causally dependent on those things affecting whatever powers of awareness we possess, is acceptable; and the empirical content we give it is acceptable too. The latter is nothing but the specific form, increasingly filled in as knowledge advances, which, as things are, the general truth assumes. But Kant perversely and inconsistently pays the general principle the excessive honour of regarding it as stating a truth on its own, a truth such that no empirical content which might, in any world, be given to the principle could possibly be a specific instance or case of just that truth; so that the truth must have its own, non-empirical field of application, while we, for our part, must be content with representing it, in experience, with what is really only its shadow.
