But here, from the analytic side of the Kantian philosophy, comes the warning which tells us that all we can really know is the stream of sensation which passes through our mind and which derives the order and coherence it seems to possess from the laws of that mind. How can we transcend this apprehension of fleeting appearances, and attain knowledge of the One, the Real, and of our relations with It? To answer this question we must look a little deeper into the basis of this doctrine of the subjectivity of human knowledge. This subjectivity, when we examine it closely, does not (as it is often, I think, supposed) appear to be a special and inexplicable condition imposed in some external way on human consciousness. It is a condition absolutely bound up with the state of existence implied in being a Person, an ‘I.’ The moment the mind is able to turn inward upon itself and to separate the thing known or felt from that which knows and feels, in that moment the Thing stands a whole infinity away from the ‘I’; they are separated by the analytic faculty of the Ego and they can never _by that faculty_ be reunited. The state of being an ‘I’ is essentially a state of analytic consciousness. The intuitions of space and time are simply the instruments by which the analytic faculty works, for it is only by their relations in space and time that things in the world can be divided and distinguished by the intellect. This analytic faculty has, it must be noted, an unbounded power of disintegration. It does not spare even the Ego itself, which it reduces to a mere flux of sensations. There is no answer to its destructive logic except the sufficient one, that this boundless power of analysis in both directions, inward and outward, is simply a function inevitably bound up with being an ‘I’ at all—it is because of that function that I am an ‘I.’ Every being possessing ‘I’-hood must, _eo ipso_, be capable of reducing all external things to its own sensations, and of externalizing its own self. One cannot be an ‘I’ on any other terms. Now let us suppose that this analytic faculty did not exist, and that consciousness went on, as perhaps it does in beasts, by acts of pure intuition, without ever turning inward to regard itself, without ever making distinctions between external objects, save as a matter of unreasoned sense-responsiveness; what would the consequences be then? Clearly in that case object and subject would be one, and knowledge, _so far as it went_, would be absolute knowledge. But it would neither be true nor false, since without analysis and comparison there could be no criterion of truth and falsity. Nor, similarly, could the actions springing from this state of what may be called Impersonal Consciousness be either ethically good or bad in relation to the creature which performed them. In this state, things in space and time would be seen simply as they really are—as moments in the life of the Spirit.