Now, at the expense of seeming to plunge myself deeper in absurdity than I have already gone, I must say that the Kantian principle is by far more “transcendental” in the usual interpretation of that term—more _a priori_, more given to emphasising some special function of some special thought-power—than the Hegelian. As against the usual opinion that while some compromise between science and Kant is possible, the scientific spirit and Hegel are at antipodes, it appears to me that it is Kant who does violence to science, while Hegel (I speak of his essential method and not of any particular result) is the quintessence of the scientific spirit. Let me endeavor to give some reasons for this belief. Kant starts from the accepted scholastic conception of thought. Kant never dreams, for a moment, of questioning the existence of a special faculty of thought with its own peculiar and fixed forms. He states and restates that thought in itself exists apart from fact and occupies itself with fact given to it from without. Kant, it is true, gives the death-blow to scholasticism by pointing out that such a faculty of thought is purely analytic—that it simply unfolds the material given, whether that material be true or false, having no method of arriving at truth, and no test for determining truth. This fact once clearly recognised, dogmatic rationalism, or the attempt to get truth from the “logical” analysis of concepts was forever destroyed. The way was opened for an independent examination of the actual method of science. But while Kant revealed once for all the impossibility of getting truth, of laying hold of reality, by the scholastic method, he still retained that conception of thought. He denied, not its existence, but its worth as relates to truth. What was the result? Just this: when he came to his examination (criticism) of knowledge, it fell apart at once into two separate factors, an _a priori_ and _a posteriori_. For if Kant finds, as against the dogmatic rationalist, that formal thought cannot give knowledge, he also finds, as against the sceptical empiricist, that unrelated sensation cannot give knowledge. Here too, instead of denying, _in toto_, the existence of unrelated sensation, he contented himself with denying its functional value for knowledge. Unrelated sensation and formal thought are simply the complementary halves of each other. Admit the one, and the other is its necessary counterpart.