If this be Kantian philosophy--and it can quote chapter and verse in its favour--Kantian philosophy is one version of the great dogma of the relativity of knowledge. That unhappy phrase seems to have many meanings, but none of absolutely catholic acceptation. It may mean that knowledge of things states their relations--the way they behave in reference to this or that, in these or those circumstances; and that of an utterly unrelated and _absolutely_ isolated thing, our knowledge is and must be _nil._ Of a thing-in-itself we can know nothing; for there is nothing to know. It may mean that knowledge is relative to the recipient or the knower,--that it is not a product which can stand by itself, but needs a vehicle and an object in close relation. In this way, too, knowledge is relative to age and circumstances: grows from period to period, and may even decay. And thirdly, the relativity of knowledge may be taken to mean that we (and all human beings) can never know the reality; because we can only know the phenomenon, i. e. the modified, transmuted, reflected thing which has reconstituted an image of itself after passing the interfering medium. For, first of all, we must strip it--this 'image' so-called (the vulgar call it the 'thing')--of the secondary qualities (sound, colour, taste, resistance) which it has in the consciousness of a being dependent on his sense-organs: and then, we must get rid also of those quantitative attributes (figure, number, size) which it has in the consciousness of a spatially and temporally perceptive being;--and then;--but the prospect is too horrible to continue further and face the Gorgon's head in the outer darkness, where man denudes appearance in the hope to meet reality. The fact is, there are too many strands in the web which Kant is weaving, for him or perhaps for any man to keep them all well in hand and lose none of the symmetry of the pattern he designs. To be just, we must, in dealing with him as with any other philosopher, try to keep in view the unity of that design instead of insisting too minutely and too definitely upon its occasional defects. It is easy to work the pun that a 'critical' philosophy must itself expect to be criticised; it is more important to remember that by a criticism Kant meant an attempt to steer a course between the always enticing extremes of dogmatism and scepticism,--an attempt to be fair, i. e. just to both sides, and yet neither to sink into the systematised placidity of the former, nor to rove in a mere guerilla warfare with the latter. And it is the mere privateer who in the popular sense of the word is the mere critic.