MECHANISM UNDERMINED.--How did this affect the mechanical theory? The connection is obvious. Mechanism is nothing but one of the forms of thought that the mind imposes on phenomena. Just as Copernicus had discovered that it is due to our position on the earth that the heavenly bodies _appear_ to move round us, so Kant had discovered that it is due to the nature of our senses and understanding that we perceive things in space and time, and understand them as being mechanically determined. The space and time, and the mechanical determinism are not in the things, _but in our minds_. The fact is that we can only grasp things under these forms. Space, time, mechanical causation are forms and laws, _not_ of nature, _but of the human intellect_, which is so constituted as to see things in this way. Thus those axioms of science and of mathematics which lie at the base of all exact knowledge, and which had hitherto been regarded as _objective_, i.e. as inherent in the nature of things, were shewn by Kant to be, as a matter of fact, _subjective_, that is (in Kant's own phrase) "they express the conditions under which alone we are able to apprehend or understand the object." Thus all knowledge is conditioned by our nature, by the framework, so to speak, not only of our senses but of our minds. In this way the mechanical view was outflanked; that view certainly seems to us inevitable and certain, but this is due to the constitution of our minds; the world seems to us to be determined, just as it seems blue to a person wearing blue spectacles. But there is no sufficient reason for supposing that it _is_ either determined or blue. The law of mechanical causation is an axiom, but it is a subjective axiom. APPEARANCE AND REALITY.--This may not seem much of an advance on Hume's position. Human knowledge still seems precarious, if we assume the mind to be a kind of dictator which imposes its own laws upon nature. And Kant indeed frankly admitted that neither our senses nor our reason were able to reveal to us things as they _are_, but only things as they _seem_; we grasp _appearance_, not _reality_, and (to use Kant's phraseology) _phenomena_ not _noumena_. Thus Kant cut away the ground from under all rationalistic _dogmatism_; he shewed its presumptuous futility. THE PATHWAY TO REALITY.--Kant, however, did not remain satisfied with the negative results of his critical philosophy, valuable as these were. Reality, it is true, lies out of range of the human reason, but it is not entirely inaccessible to us, and scepticism about the ultimate nature of things is not the necessary corollary of Kant's, as it was of Hume's, philosophy. Kant drew a distinction between the "Theoretical Reason," which his _Critique of Pure Reason_ had dealt with, and the "Practical Reason," which he discusses in his _Critique of Practical Reason_ (1788).