[258] Compare "Die Welt a. W. u. V." vol. ii. chap. 22: "Objective View of the Intellect."
By our present realistic way of considering the matter therefore, we unexpectedly gain the _objective stand-point_ for Kant's great discoveries; and, by the road of empirico-physiological contemplation, we arrive at the point whence his transcendental-critical view starts. For Kant's view takes the subjective for its standpoint and considers consciousness as given. But from consciousness itself and its law and order, given _à priori_, that view arrives at the conclusion, that all which appears in that consciousness can be nothing more than mere phenomenon. From our realistic, exterior standpoint, on the contrary, which assumes the _objective_--all that exists in Nature--to be absolutely given, we see what the intellect is, as to its aim and origin, and to which class of phenomena it belongs, and we recognise (so far _à priori_) that it _must_ be limited to mere phenomena. We see too, that what presents itself in the intellect can at all times only be conditioned--chiefly _subjectively_--that is, can, together with the order of the nexus of its parts, only be a _mundus phenomenon_, which is likewise subjectively conditioned; but that it can never be a knowledge of things as they may be in themselves, or as they may be connected in themselves. For, in the nexus of Nature, we have found the faculty of knowing as a conditioned faculty, whose assertions, precisely on that account, cannot claim unconditioned validity. To anyone who has studied and understood the Critique of Pure Reason--to which our standpoint is essentially foreign--it must nevertheless still appear as if Nature had intended the intellect for a puzzle-glass to mislead us and were playing at hide-and-seek with us. But by our realistic objective road, _i.e._ by starting from the objective world as given, we have now come to the very same result at which Kant had arrived by the idealistic, subjective road, _i.e._ by examining the intellect itself and the way in which it constitutes consciousness. We now see that the world as representation hovers on the narrow line between the external cause (motive) and the effect evoked (act of the will), in beings having knowledge (animals), in which beings for the first time there occurs a distinct separation between motive and voluntary act. _Ita res accendent lumina rebus._ It is only when it is reached by two quite opposite roads, that the great result attained by Kant is distinctly seen; and when light is thus thrown upon it from both sides, his whole meaning becomes clear. Our objective standpoint is realistic and therefore conditioned, so far as, in taking for granted the existence of beings in Nature, it abstracts from the fact that their objective existence postulates an intellect, which contains them as its representation; but Kant's subjective and idealistic standpoint is likewise conditioned, inasmuch as he starts from the intelligence, which itself, however, presupposes Nature, in consequence of whose development as far as animal life that intelligence is for the first time enabled to make its appearance.--Keeping steadily to this realistic, objective standpoint of ours, we may also define Kant's theory as follows: After Locke, in order to know things in themselves, had abstracted the share of sensuous functions--called by him secondary qualities--from things as they appear, Kant with infinitely greater depth deducted from them the incomparably larger share of the cerebral function, which includes precisely what Locke calls primary qualities. But all I have done here has been to show why all this must necessarily be as it is, by indicating the place occupied by the intellect in the nexus of Nature, when we start realistically from the objective as given, but, in doing so, take the only thing of which we are quite directly conscious, the _will_--that true ποῦ στῶ of Metaphysics--for our support, as being what is primarily real, everything else being merely its phenomenon. What now follows serves to complete this.