, his
lectures
upon logic, pedagogy, etc.
Windelband - History of Philosophy
Y.
,
2 vols. , 1889. ]
C. Cantoni, Em. Kant (3 yols. ). Milan, 1879-1884. \V. Wallace, Kant. Oxford, Edin. , and Lond. 1882. J. B. Meyer, Kant's Psychologic. Berlin, 1870.
The pre-eminent position of the Konigsberg philosopher rests upon the fact that he took up into himself the various motives of thought in the literature of the Enlightenment, and by their recipro cal supplementation matured a completely new conception of the problem and procedure of philosophy. He passed through the school of the Wolffian metaphysics and through an acquaintance with the German popular philosophers; he plunged into Hume's profound statement of problems, and was enthusiastic for Rousseau's gospel of Nature ; the mathematical rigour of the Newtonian natural philosophy, the fineness of the psychological analysis of the origin of human ideas and volitions found in English literature, Deism from Toland and Shaftesbury to Voltaire, the honourable spirit of freedom with which the French Enlightenment urged the improve ment of political and social conditions, — all these had found iu the young Kant a true co-worker, full of conviction, who with a rich knowledge of the world and admirable sagacity, and also, where it was in place, with taste and wit, though far from all self-compla cency and boasting, united typically within himself the best features of the Enlightenment.
But it was in connection with the difficulties of the problem oj knowledge that he wrought out from all these foundation elements the work which gave him his peculiar significance. The more he
632
Chap. 1. ] The Critique of Reason. 538
had originally prized metaphysics just because it claimed to give scien tific certainty to moral and religious convictions, the more lasting was its working upon him when he was forced to become convinced by his own progressive criticism in his constant search for truth, how little the rationalistic school system satisfied that claim which it made. But the more, also, was his vision sharpened for the limitations of that philosophy which empiricism developed by the aid of psychological method. In studying David Hume this came to his consciousness in such a degree that he grasped eagerly for the aid which the Nouveaux Estate of Leibniz seemed to offer toward making a metaphysical science possible. But the epistemological system, which he erected upon the principle of virtual innateness - extended to mathematics (cf. pp. 465 f. and 485 f. ), very soon proved its untenability, and this led him to the tedious investigations
which occupied him in the period from 1770 to 1780, and which found their conclusion in the Critique of Pure Reason.
The essentially new and decisive in this was that Kant recog nised the inadequacy of the psychological method for the solution of
and completely separated the questions which surround the origin and the actual development of man's rational activities, from those which relate to their mine. He shared with the Enlightenment the tendency to take the starting-point of his investigations, not in our apprehension of things, which is influenced by most various presuppositions, but in considering the reason itself; but he found in this latter
point of view universal judgments which extend beyond all expe rience, whose validity can neither be made dependent upon the exhibition of their actual formation in consciousness, nor grounded upon any form of innateness. It is his task to fix upon these judg ments throughout the entire circuit of human rational activity, in order from their content itself and from their relations to the system of the rational life determined by them, to understand their authority or the limits of their claims.
This task Kant designated as the Critique of Reason, and this method as the critical or transcendental method; the subject-matter to which this method was to be applied he considered to be the investigation as to the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori. 1
• Cf. the beginning of the transcendental deduction of the pure conceptions of the undemanding In the Critique of Pure Keasnn, II. 118 fl.
* This expression took form gradually in connection with the origination of the Kr. d. r. V. through the importance which the conception of synthesis acquired Cf. } 38. Kant develops the above general formula in his introduc tion to the Critique in the following way : Judgment* are analytical when the relation of the predicate to the tubjvct, which \s therein asserted, ha* its ground
philosophical problems,1 permanently
5*4 The German PkUotvphy. [Pakt VL
This rest* upon the fundamental insight that the validity of the principles of reason is entirely independent of how they rise in the empirical consciousness (whether of the individual or of the race). All philosophy is dogmatic, which seeks to prove or eren merely to judge of this validity by showing the genesis of those principles out of elements of sensation, or by their innateness, whatever the metaphysical assumptions in the case may be. The critical method, or transcendental philosophy, examines the form in which these principles actually make their appearance, in connection with the capacity which they possess of being employed universally and necessarily in experience.
From this there followed for Kant the task of a systematic inves tigation of reason's functions in order to fix upon their principles, and to examine the validity of these ; for the critical method, which was first gained in epistemology, extended its significance of itself to the other spheres of the reason's activity. But here the newly acquired scheme of psychological division (cf. p. 512, note 6) proved authoritative for his analysis and treatment ofphilosophical problems. As thinking, feeling, and Killing were distinguished as the funda mental forms in which reason expresses itself, so the criticism of reason must keep to the division thus given ; it examined separately the principles of knowledge, of morality, and of the working of things upon the reason through the medium of feeling, — a province inde pendent of the other two.
Kant's doctrine is accordingly divided into a theoretical, a practi cal, and an cesthetical part, and his main works are the three Critiques, of the Pure Reason, of the Practical Reason, and of the Judgment.
Immanuel Kant, born April 22, 1724, at Konigsberg. Prussia, the son of a saddler, was educated at the Pietistic Collegium Fridericianum, and attended in 1740 the University of his native city to study theology ; but subjects of natural science and philosophy gradually attracted him. After concluding his studies, he was a private teacher in various families in the vicinity of Konigs berg from 1746 to 1755, habilitated in the autumn of 1755 as Privatdocent in
in the concept itself which forms the subject ("explicative judgments"); synthetical, when this is not the case, so that the addition of the predicate to the subject must have its ground in something else which is logically different from both ("ampliative judgments"). This ground is, in the case of syn thetical judgments a posteriori ("judgments of perception. " cf. Prolegom ena, § 18, III. 215 f. ), the act of perception itself; in the case of synthetical judgments a priori, on the contrary, i. e. of the universal principles employed for the interpretation of experience, it is something else ; what it is is just that which is to be sought. A priori is, with Kant, not a psychological, but a purely epistemological mark ; it means not a chronological priority to experience, but a universality and necessity of validity in principles of reason which really tran scends all experience, and is not capable of being proved by any experience [i. e. ■alogical, not a chronological priority]. No one who does not make this clear to himself has any hope of understanding Kant.
Chap, i. j Tfie Critique of Reaton. 585
the philosophical faculty of Konigsberg University, and was made full Professor there in 1770. The cheerful, brilliant animation and versatility of his middle years gave place with time to an earnest, rigorous conception of life and to the control of a strict consciousness of duty, which manifested itself in his unremit ting labour upon bis great philosophical task, In his masterful fulfilment of the duties of his academic profession, and in the inflexible rectitude of his life, which was not without a shade of the pedantic. The uniform course of his solitary and modest scholar's life was not disturbed by the brilliancy of the fame that fell upon his life's evening, and only transiently by the dark shadow, that the hatred of orthodoxy, which had obtained control under Frederick William II. , threatened to cast upon his path by a prohibition upon his philosophy. He died from weakness of old age on the 12th of February, 1804.
Kant's life and personality after his earlier works has been drawn most completely by Kuno Fischer (Gesch. A neueren Philos. , III. and IV. , 4th ed. Heidelb. 181*0) ; E. Arnoldt has treated of his youth and the first part of his activity as a teacher (Konigsberg, 1882); [J. H. W. Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, Lond. 1882].
The change which was taking place in the philosopher toward the end of the seventh decade of the eighteenth century appears especially in his activity as a writer. His earlier "pre-critical" works (of which those most important philosophically have been already cited, p. 446) are distinguished by easy- flowing, graceful presentation, and present themselves as admirable occasional writings of a man of fine thought who is well versed in the world. His later works show the laboriousness of his thought and the pressure of the contending motifs, both in the form of the investigation with its circumstantial heaviness and artificial architectonic structure, and in the formation of his sentences, which are highly involved, and frequently interrupted by restriction. Minerva frightened away the graces ; but instead, the devout tone of a deep thought and an earnest conviction which here and there rises to powerful pathos and weighty expression hovers over his later writings.
For Kant's theoretical development, the antithesis between the Leibnizo- Wolfflan metaphysics and the Newtonian natural philosophy was at the begin ning of decisive importance. The former had been brought to his attention at the University by Knutzen (cf. p. 444), the latter by Teske, and in his growing alienation from the philosophical school-system, his interest for natural science, to which for the time he seemed to desire to devote himself entirely, co-operated strongly. His first treatise, 1747, was entitled Thought* upon the True Estima tion of the Vis Viva, a controverted question between Cartesian and I. eibnizian physicists ; bis great work upon the General Xatural History and Theory of the Hearens was a natural science production of the first rank, and besides
■mall articles, his promotion treatise, De Igne (1766), which propounded a hypothesis as to imponderables, belongs here. His activity as a teacher also showed, even on into his later period, a preference for the subjects of natural sciences, especially for physical geography and anthropology.
In theoretical philosophy Kant passed through many reversals (mancherlei Umkippungen) of his standpoint (cf. §{ 83 and 34). At the beginning (in the Physical Monadology) he had sought to adjust the opposition between Leibniz
and Newton, in their doctrine of space, by the ordinary distinction of thini;s-iii- themaelves (which are to be known metaphysically), and phenomena, or things as they appear (which are to be investigated physically) ; he then (in the writ ings after 1760) attained to the insight that a metaphysics in the sense of rationalism is Impossible, that philosophy and mathematics must have diametri cally opposed methods, and that philosophy as the empirical knowledge of the given cannot step beyond the circle of experience. But while he allowed him self to be comforted by Voltaire and Rousseau for this falling away of meta physical insight, through the instrumentality of the "natural feeling" for the right and holy, he was still working with Lambert at an improvement of the method of metaphysics, and when he found this, as he hoped, by the aid of Leibniz's Xoureaux Kssais, he constructed in bold lines the mystico-dogmatic system of his Inaugural Dissertation.
The progress from there on to the System of Criticism is obscure and contro verted. Cf. concerning this development, in "which the time in which he was influenced by Hume and the direction which that influence took are especially
536 German Philosophy : Kant's Critique. [Part VL
in question, the following: Fr. Michelis, Kant vor und nach 1770 (Braunsberg, 1871) ; Fr. Paulsen, Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der kantischen Erkenntnisstheorie (Leips. 1875) ; A. Riehl, Geschichte und Methode da phi- losophischen Kriticismus (Leips. ; 15. Erdmann, Kant's Kriticismus
1876) f
(Leips. 1878) ; W. Windelband, Die verschiedenen Phasen der kantischen
Lehre vom Ding-an-sich ( Vierteljahrschr. wissenseh. Philos. ,
the writings by K. Dieterich on Kant's relation to Newton and Rousseau under the title Die kantisehe Philosophie in ihrtr inneren Entwicklungsgeschichte, Freiburg i. B. 1886.
From the adjustment of the various tendencies of Kant's thought proceeded the " Doomsday-book " of German philosophy, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kiga, 1781). It received a series of changes in the second edition (1787), and these became the object of very vigorous controversies after attention had been
called to them by Schelllng ( W. , V. 196) and Jacobi ( W. , II. 291). Cf. concern ing this, the writings cited above. H. Vaihinger, Commentar zu K. K. d. r. V. (Vol. Stuttgart, 1887 [Vol. II. , 1892]), has diligently collected the literature. Separate editions of the Kritik, by K. Kehrbach, upon the basis of the first edi tion, and by B. Erdmann [and E. Adickes] upon the basis of the second edition. [Eng. tr. of the Critique (2d ed. ), by Meiklejohn, in the Bohn Library, and by Max Mliller (text of 1st ed. with supplements giving changes of 2d ed. ), Lond. 1881 Paraphrase and Commentary by Mahaffy and Bernard, 2d ed. , Lond. and N. Y. 1889 partial translations in J. H. Stirling's Text-book to Kant, and in Watson's Selections, Lond. and N. Y. 1888. This last contains also ex tracts from the ethical writings and from the Critique of Judgment. ]
1876).
Cf. also
The additional main writings of Kant in his critical period are Prolegomena zu einer jeden kUnftigen Metaphysik, 1783 Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785 Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschafl, 1785 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788 Kritik der Vrtheilskraft, 1790 Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793 Zum ewigen Frie- den, 1796 Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Rechts- und Tugendlehre, 1797 Der Streit der FakultSten, 1798 [Eng. tr. of the Prolegomena, by Mahaffy and Bernard, Lond. and N. Y. 1889; of the Prolegomena and Metaphysical Founda tions of Natural Science, by Bax, Bohn Library of the ethical writings, includ ing the first part of the Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason, by T. K Abbott, 4th ed. , Lond. 1889 of the Critique of Judgment, by J. H. Bernard, Lond. and N. Y. 1892; of the Philosophy of Law, by W. Hastie, Edin. 1887; Principles of Politics, including the essay on Perpetual Peace, by W. Hastie, Edin. 1891. The contents of Kant's Essays and Treatises, vols. , Lond. 1798,
F. W. Schubert (12 vols. , Leips. 1833 ff. ), G. Hanenstein (10 vols. , Leips. 1838 f. , and recently vols. , Leips. 1867 ff. ), and J. v. Kirchmann (in the Philos. Biblioth. ). 1 They contain, besides his smaller articles, etc.
, his lectures upon logic, pedagogy, etc. , and his letters. A survey of all that has been written by Kant (including also the manuscript of the Transition from Meta physics to Physics, which without value for the interpretation of his critical system) found in Ueberweg- Heinze, III. 24 there, too, the voluminous literature cited with great completeness. Of this we can give here only a choice of the best and most instructive survey of the more, valuable literature, arranged according to its material, offered by the article Kant, by W. Windel band in Ersch und Gruber's Enc. [The Journal of Speculative Philosophy contains numerous articles upon Kant. We may mention also Adamson, The Philosophy of Kant, Edin. 1879; art. Kant, in Enc. Brit. , by the same author; arts, in Mind, Vol. VI. , by J. Watson, and in Philos. Review, 1893, by J. G. Schurmann. — E. Adickes has begun an exhaustive bibliography of the German literature in the Philos. Review, 1893. ]
The citations refer to the older Hartenstein edition In the case of many works the convenient editions by K. Kehrbach (Reclam. Bib. ) make easy the transfer of the citations to the other editions.
given in Ueberweg, II. 138 (Eng. tr. )].
Complete editions of his works have been prepared by K. Kosenkranz and
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Chap. 1, § 38. ] Object of Knowledge. 637
§ 38. The Object of Knowledge.
Erh. Schtnid, Kritik der reinen Vernunft im Grundrisse. Jena, 1786.
H. Cohen, Kant'$ Theorie der Erfahrung. Berlin, 1871.
A. Holder, Darttellung der kantischen Erkenntnissthcorie. Tubingen, 1873.
A. Stadler, Die Grundsatxe der reinen Erkenntnisstheorie in der kantUchen
Philosuphie. Leips. 1876.
Job. Volkelt, /. Kani't Erkenntnisstheorie naeh ihren Grundprincipien analysirt.
Leips. 1879.
E. Pfleiderer, Kantischer Kriticismus und englisehe Philosophic Tubingen,
1881.
J. Hutchinson Stirling, Text-Book to Kant. Edin. and Lond. 1881.
Seb. Turbiglio, Analisi, Storia, Critica delta Bagione Pura. Rome, 1881. G. 8. Morris, Kant's Critique of Pure Beaton, Chicago, 1882.
Fr. Staudinger, Xoumena. Darmstadt, 1884.
[K. Fischer's Criticism of Kant, trans, by Hough. Lond. 1888. ]
[J. Watson, Kant and his English Critics. Lond. 1886. ]
[H. Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kant's Kritik d. r. Vernunft, II. (on the
^Esthetic). Stuttgart, 1892. ]
Kant's theory of knowledge followed with tenacious consistency from the statement which modern Terminism had given to problems
of knowledge (cf. pp. 466 and 482). The philosopher had grown up
in the naive realism of the Wolffian school, which without close scrutiny regarded logical necessity and reality as identical ; and his liberation from the ban of this school consisted in his seeing the impossibility of determining out of " pure reason," i. e. through mere logical operations with conceptions, anything whatever as to the ) existence1 or the causal relation* of real things. The metaphysi cians are the architects of many a world of thought in the air;' but their structures have no relation to reality. Kant now sought this
relation first in the conceptions given through experience, since the genetic connection of these with the reality to be known by science seemed immediately evident, but he was shaken from this "dog matic slumber" by Hume,4 who demonstrated that precisely the constitutive Forms of the conceptional knowledge of reality, espec ially the Form of causality, are not given in perception, but are
• Cf. Kant's Sole Possthlr Prooffor thr Existence of God.
* Cf. the Essay on Srgntive Magnitudes, especially the conclusion (W. , I.
ma. ).
•DreamsofaGhoMSeer,I. 3; W. ,III. 7. V
* In connection with this frequently mentioned confession of Kant, It is for the most part disregarded that he characterised as " dogmatic " not only rationalism, but also the empiricism of the earlier theory of knowledge, and that the classical passage at which he uses this expression (in the preface to the Prolegomena, W. , III. 170 f. ) does not contrast Hume with Wolff, but with
Locke, Rekl. and Hvattie only. The dogmatism from which, therefore, Kant declared that he luul been freed throuch Hume vas that of empiricism.
538 German Philosophy : Kant's Critique. [Past VI.
products of the mechanism of association without any demonstrable relation to the real. Reality was not to be known from the "given" conceptions, either. And then Kant, prompted by Leibniz, deliber ated once more whether the purified conception of virtual innate- ness, with the aid of the " pre-established harmony " grounded in God between the monad which knows and the monad which is to be known, might not solve the mystery of the relation of thought and
Being, and in his Inaugural Dissertation he had convinced himself that this was the solution of the problem. But cool reflection soon showed that this pre-established harmony was a metaphysical assumption, incapable of proof and unable to support a scientific system of philosophy. So it appeared that neither empiricism nor rationalism had solved the cardinal question, — the relation of knowl edge to its object, in what does it consist and on what does it rest ? '
1. Kant's own, long-weighed answer to this question is the Critique of Pure Reason. In its final systematic form, which found an ana lytical explication in the Prolegomena, his criticism proceeds from the fact of the actual presence of synthetic judgments a priori in three theoretical sciences ; viz. in mathematics, in pure natural science, and in metaphysics; and the design is to examine their claims to universal and necessary validity.
In this formulation of the problem the insight into the nature of reason's activity, which Kant had gained in the course of his critical ' development, came into play. This activity is synthesis, i. e. the
uniting or unifying of a manifold. * This conception of synthesis 3 is a new element which separates the Critique from the Inaugural Dis sertation ; in it Kant found the common element between the Forms of the sensibility and those of the understanding, which in his exDosition of 1770 were regarded as entirely separate, in accordance with their characteristic attributes of receptivity and spontaneity respectively. 4 It now appeared that the synthesis of the theoretical
' Kant's letter to Marcus Here, Feb. 21, 1772.
5 This frequently repeated definition makes the fundamental conception of of the critical doctrine of knowledge appear in closest proximity to the funda mental metaphysical conception of the Monadology. Cf. § 31, 11.
8 Which is introduced in the Transcendental Analytic in connection with the doctrine of the categories. Sections 10 and 15 (of the first edition of the Critique).
4 Hence the conception of synthesis in the present form of the Critique of Pure Season comes in collision with the psychological presuppositions which passed over to the Critique out of the German working-over of the Inaugural Dissertation, which forms the Transcendental ^Esthetic and the beginning of the Transcendental Logic (this was originally to have appeared immediately after 1770 under the title Limits of the Sensibility and of the Understanding). In
the Prolegomena these psychological presuppositions became obliterated. Earlier, sensibility and understanding were set over against each other as receptivity and spontaneity ; but space and time, the pure Forms of the sensi
Chap. 1, $ 38. ] Object of Knowledge : Synthesis. 539 ■
reason completes itself in three stages : the combination of sensa tions into perceptions takes place in the Forms of space and time ; the combination of the perceptions into experience of the natural world of reality takes place by means of concepts of the understand ing; the combination of judgments of experience into metaphysical knowledge takes place by means of general principles, which Kant calls Ideas. These three stages of the knowing activity develop, therefore, as different Forms of synthesis, of which each higher stage has the lower for its content. The critique of reason has to investigate what the especial Forms of this synthesis are in each stage, and in what their universal and necessary validity consists.
2. As regards mathematics, the conception of the Inaugural Dis- ■ sertation fits aptly, in the main, into the critique of reason. Mathe matical propositions are synthetic ; they rest in the last resort upon construction in pure perception, not upon the development of con ceptions. Their necessity and universal validity, which cannot be established by any experience, is, therefore, to be explained only if an a priori priurjjilp of perception lies at their basis. Kant, there
fore, shows that the general ideas of space and time, to which all insights of geometry and arithmetic relate, are " pure Forms of per ception " or " perceptions a priori. " The ideas of the one infinite space and of the one infinite time do not rest upon th4 combination of empirical perceptions of finite spaces and times; (but with the very attributes of limit in the " beside-of-one-anotheit" and " after- one-another" (co-existence and succession), the whole of space and the whole of time respectively are already involved in the empirical perception of particular space and time magnitudes, which can accord ingly be presented to the mind only as parts of space in general and of time in general. Space and time cannot be "concepts," since they relate to an object which is only a single, unique object, and which is not thought as complete, but is involved in an infinite synthesis ; and further, they are related to the ideas of finite magni tudes, not as class-concepts are to their particular examples, but as the whole to the part. If they are, accordingly, pure perceptions
(Anscliauungen), i. e. perceptions not founded upon empirical percep tions ( Wahrnehrnungen), but lying at the basis of all empirical per ceptions,1 then they are, as such, necessary ; for we can indeed think
bility, were Indeed the principles of the synthetical ordering of the sensations, and thus belonged under the general conception of synthesis, i. e. spontaneous unity of the manifold. Thus the conception of synthesis burst the psychological schema of the Inaugural Dutertatinn.
1 Here once more it must be recalled that it is but a perverted and completely erroneous conception of Kant to conceive of this " lying at the basis of" or - preceding," as referring to time. The natMtrn, which holds space and time
540 German Philosophy : Kant' i Critique. [Part VL
everything away from them, but cannot think them away. They are the given Forms of pure perception from which we cannot escape, the laws of relations, in which alone we can mentally represent with synthetic unity the manifold of sensations. And further, space is the form of the outer sense, time that of the inner sense ; all objects of the particular senses are perceived as spatial, all objects of self- perception as in time. "
If, then, space and time are the
ous receptivity," cognitions determined by these two kinds of per ception without any regard to the particular empirical content, possess universal and necessary validity for the entire compass of all that we can perceive and experience. In the realm of the sensi bility, — so the " Transcendental ^Esthetic " teaches, — the only object of a priori knowledge is the Form of the synthesis of the man ifold given through sensation, — the law of arrangement in space and time. But the universality and necessity of this knowledge is intel ligible only if space and time are nothing but the necessary Forms oj man's sensuous perception. If they possessed a reality independent of the functions of perception, the a priori character of mathematical knowledge would be impossible. Were space and time themselves things or real properties and relations of things, then we could know of them only through experience, and, therefore, never in a univer sal and necessary way. This last mode of knowledge is possible only if they are nothing but the Form under which all things in our perception must appear. 1 According to this principle the a priori and the phenomenal become for Kant interchangeable conceptions.
The only universal and necessary element in man's knowledge is the Form under which things appear in it. Rationalism limits itself to the Form, and holds good even for this only at the price of the " subjectivity " of the same.
3. While Kant would thus have the spatial and chronological re lations of objects of perception regarded as wholly a mode of mental representation, which does not coincide with the reality of things themselves, he distinguished this conception of their ideality very exactly from that " subjectivity of the qualities of sense " which was held by him, as by all philosophy after Descartes and Locke, to be self-evident. * And the point at issue here again is solely the ground of the phenomenality. As regards colour, taste, etc. , the phenome- nality had been based, since the time of Protagoras and Democritus,
to be inborn ideas, is un-Kantian throughout, and stands in contradiction tc express declarations of the philosopher (cf. , e. g. , above, p. 465 f. ).
1 This thought is developed with especial clearness in the Prolegomena, 1 8. * Cf. Critique, § 3, b. W. , II. 68.
unchangeable Form of our sensu
Chap. 1, J 38. ] Object of Knowledge : Space and Time. 541
upon the difference and relativity of impressions ; for the Forms of space and time, Kant deduces their phenomenality precisely from ) their invariability. For him, therefore, the qualities of sense offered only an individual and contingent mode of representation ; while the Forms of space and time, on the other hand, present
a universal and necessary mode in which things appear. All that
contains, is, indeed, not the true essence of things, but an appearance or phenomenon ; but the contents of sensation are " phenomena" in quite another sense than that in which the Forms of space and time are such; the former have worth only as the states of the individual subject, the latter as " objective " Forms of perception for all. Even on this ground, therefore, Kant, too, sees the task of natural science to lie in the reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative, in which alone necessity and universal validity can be found upon a mathematical basis, agreeing in this with
Democritus and Galileo; but he differed from his predecessors in holding that, philosophically considered, even the mathematical mode of representing Nature can be regarded only as an appearance and phenomenon, though in the deeper sense of the word. Sensation gives an individual idea, mathematical theory gives a necessary, universally valid perception of the actual world; but both are merely different stages of the phenomenal appearance, behind which the true thing-in-itself remains unknown. Space and time hold without exception for all objects of perception, but for nothing beyond ; they have " empirical reality " and " transcendental ideality,"
4. The main advance of the Critique of Reason beyond the Inau gural Dissertation consists in the fact that these same principles are extended in a completely parallel investigation to the question as to the epistemological value which belongs to the synthetic Forms of the activity of the understanding. 1
Natural science needs besides its mathematical basis a number of general principles as to the connection of things. These principles, such as that every change must have its cause, are of a synthetic nature, but, at the same time, are not caj>able of being established by experience, though they come to consciousness through experi ence, are applied to experience, and find there their confirmation. Of such principles a few have indeed been incidentally propounded and treated hitherto, and it remains for the Critique itself to dis cover the "system of principles," but it is clear that without this basis the knowledge of Nature would be deprived of its necessary
1 ThU parallelism is seen most plainly by comparing ff 0 and 14 of (he Prolegomena.
perception
542 German Philosophy : Kant's Critique. [Pakt VL
and univerSal validity. For " Nature " is not merely an aggregate of spatial and temporal Forms, of corporeal shapes and motions, but a connected system, which we perceive through our senses, but thinh at the same time through conceptions. Kant calls the faculty of thinking the manifold of perception in synthetic unity, the Understanding; and the categories or pure conceptions of Understand ing are the Forms of the synthesis of the Understanding, just as space and time are the Forms of the synthesis of perception.
If now Nature, as object of our knowledge, were a real connected system of things, independent of the functions of our reason, we could know of it only through experience and never o priori; a uni versal and necessary knowledge of Nature is possible only if our conceptional Forms of synthesis determine Nature itself. If Nature prescribed laws to our understanding, we should have only an empirical, inadequate knowledge ; an a priori knowledge of Nature is therefore possible only ifthe case be reversed and our understanding prescnbes laws to Nature.
2 vols. , 1889. ]
C. Cantoni, Em. Kant (3 yols. ). Milan, 1879-1884. \V. Wallace, Kant. Oxford, Edin. , and Lond. 1882. J. B. Meyer, Kant's Psychologic. Berlin, 1870.
The pre-eminent position of the Konigsberg philosopher rests upon the fact that he took up into himself the various motives of thought in the literature of the Enlightenment, and by their recipro cal supplementation matured a completely new conception of the problem and procedure of philosophy. He passed through the school of the Wolffian metaphysics and through an acquaintance with the German popular philosophers; he plunged into Hume's profound statement of problems, and was enthusiastic for Rousseau's gospel of Nature ; the mathematical rigour of the Newtonian natural philosophy, the fineness of the psychological analysis of the origin of human ideas and volitions found in English literature, Deism from Toland and Shaftesbury to Voltaire, the honourable spirit of freedom with which the French Enlightenment urged the improve ment of political and social conditions, — all these had found iu the young Kant a true co-worker, full of conviction, who with a rich knowledge of the world and admirable sagacity, and also, where it was in place, with taste and wit, though far from all self-compla cency and boasting, united typically within himself the best features of the Enlightenment.
But it was in connection with the difficulties of the problem oj knowledge that he wrought out from all these foundation elements the work which gave him his peculiar significance. The more he
632
Chap. 1. ] The Critique of Reason. 538
had originally prized metaphysics just because it claimed to give scien tific certainty to moral and religious convictions, the more lasting was its working upon him when he was forced to become convinced by his own progressive criticism in his constant search for truth, how little the rationalistic school system satisfied that claim which it made. But the more, also, was his vision sharpened for the limitations of that philosophy which empiricism developed by the aid of psychological method. In studying David Hume this came to his consciousness in such a degree that he grasped eagerly for the aid which the Nouveaux Estate of Leibniz seemed to offer toward making a metaphysical science possible. But the epistemological system, which he erected upon the principle of virtual innateness - extended to mathematics (cf. pp. 465 f. and 485 f. ), very soon proved its untenability, and this led him to the tedious investigations
which occupied him in the period from 1770 to 1780, and which found their conclusion in the Critique of Pure Reason.
The essentially new and decisive in this was that Kant recog nised the inadequacy of the psychological method for the solution of
and completely separated the questions which surround the origin and the actual development of man's rational activities, from those which relate to their mine. He shared with the Enlightenment the tendency to take the starting-point of his investigations, not in our apprehension of things, which is influenced by most various presuppositions, but in considering the reason itself; but he found in this latter
point of view universal judgments which extend beyond all expe rience, whose validity can neither be made dependent upon the exhibition of their actual formation in consciousness, nor grounded upon any form of innateness. It is his task to fix upon these judg ments throughout the entire circuit of human rational activity, in order from their content itself and from their relations to the system of the rational life determined by them, to understand their authority or the limits of their claims.
This task Kant designated as the Critique of Reason, and this method as the critical or transcendental method; the subject-matter to which this method was to be applied he considered to be the investigation as to the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori. 1
• Cf. the beginning of the transcendental deduction of the pure conceptions of the undemanding In the Critique of Pure Keasnn, II. 118 fl.
* This expression took form gradually in connection with the origination of the Kr. d. r. V. through the importance which the conception of synthesis acquired Cf. } 38. Kant develops the above general formula in his introduc tion to the Critique in the following way : Judgment* are analytical when the relation of the predicate to the tubjvct, which \s therein asserted, ha* its ground
philosophical problems,1 permanently
5*4 The German PkUotvphy. [Pakt VL
This rest* upon the fundamental insight that the validity of the principles of reason is entirely independent of how they rise in the empirical consciousness (whether of the individual or of the race). All philosophy is dogmatic, which seeks to prove or eren merely to judge of this validity by showing the genesis of those principles out of elements of sensation, or by their innateness, whatever the metaphysical assumptions in the case may be. The critical method, or transcendental philosophy, examines the form in which these principles actually make their appearance, in connection with the capacity which they possess of being employed universally and necessarily in experience.
From this there followed for Kant the task of a systematic inves tigation of reason's functions in order to fix upon their principles, and to examine the validity of these ; for the critical method, which was first gained in epistemology, extended its significance of itself to the other spheres of the reason's activity. But here the newly acquired scheme of psychological division (cf. p. 512, note 6) proved authoritative for his analysis and treatment ofphilosophical problems. As thinking, feeling, and Killing were distinguished as the funda mental forms in which reason expresses itself, so the criticism of reason must keep to the division thus given ; it examined separately the principles of knowledge, of morality, and of the working of things upon the reason through the medium of feeling, — a province inde pendent of the other two.
Kant's doctrine is accordingly divided into a theoretical, a practi cal, and an cesthetical part, and his main works are the three Critiques, of the Pure Reason, of the Practical Reason, and of the Judgment.
Immanuel Kant, born April 22, 1724, at Konigsberg. Prussia, the son of a saddler, was educated at the Pietistic Collegium Fridericianum, and attended in 1740 the University of his native city to study theology ; but subjects of natural science and philosophy gradually attracted him. After concluding his studies, he was a private teacher in various families in the vicinity of Konigs berg from 1746 to 1755, habilitated in the autumn of 1755 as Privatdocent in
in the concept itself which forms the subject ("explicative judgments"); synthetical, when this is not the case, so that the addition of the predicate to the subject must have its ground in something else which is logically different from both ("ampliative judgments"). This ground is, in the case of syn thetical judgments a posteriori ("judgments of perception. " cf. Prolegom ena, § 18, III. 215 f. ), the act of perception itself; in the case of synthetical judgments a priori, on the contrary, i. e. of the universal principles employed for the interpretation of experience, it is something else ; what it is is just that which is to be sought. A priori is, with Kant, not a psychological, but a purely epistemological mark ; it means not a chronological priority to experience, but a universality and necessity of validity in principles of reason which really tran scends all experience, and is not capable of being proved by any experience [i. e. ■alogical, not a chronological priority]. No one who does not make this clear to himself has any hope of understanding Kant.
Chap, i. j Tfie Critique of Reaton. 585
the philosophical faculty of Konigsberg University, and was made full Professor there in 1770. The cheerful, brilliant animation and versatility of his middle years gave place with time to an earnest, rigorous conception of life and to the control of a strict consciousness of duty, which manifested itself in his unremit ting labour upon bis great philosophical task, In his masterful fulfilment of the duties of his academic profession, and in the inflexible rectitude of his life, which was not without a shade of the pedantic. The uniform course of his solitary and modest scholar's life was not disturbed by the brilliancy of the fame that fell upon his life's evening, and only transiently by the dark shadow, that the hatred of orthodoxy, which had obtained control under Frederick William II. , threatened to cast upon his path by a prohibition upon his philosophy. He died from weakness of old age on the 12th of February, 1804.
Kant's life and personality after his earlier works has been drawn most completely by Kuno Fischer (Gesch. A neueren Philos. , III. and IV. , 4th ed. Heidelb. 181*0) ; E. Arnoldt has treated of his youth and the first part of his activity as a teacher (Konigsberg, 1882); [J. H. W. Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, Lond. 1882].
The change which was taking place in the philosopher toward the end of the seventh decade of the eighteenth century appears especially in his activity as a writer. His earlier "pre-critical" works (of which those most important philosophically have been already cited, p. 446) are distinguished by easy- flowing, graceful presentation, and present themselves as admirable occasional writings of a man of fine thought who is well versed in the world. His later works show the laboriousness of his thought and the pressure of the contending motifs, both in the form of the investigation with its circumstantial heaviness and artificial architectonic structure, and in the formation of his sentences, which are highly involved, and frequently interrupted by restriction. Minerva frightened away the graces ; but instead, the devout tone of a deep thought and an earnest conviction which here and there rises to powerful pathos and weighty expression hovers over his later writings.
For Kant's theoretical development, the antithesis between the Leibnizo- Wolfflan metaphysics and the Newtonian natural philosophy was at the begin ning of decisive importance. The former had been brought to his attention at the University by Knutzen (cf. p. 444), the latter by Teske, and in his growing alienation from the philosophical school-system, his interest for natural science, to which for the time he seemed to desire to devote himself entirely, co-operated strongly. His first treatise, 1747, was entitled Thought* upon the True Estima tion of the Vis Viva, a controverted question between Cartesian and I. eibnizian physicists ; bis great work upon the General Xatural History and Theory of the Hearens was a natural science production of the first rank, and besides
■mall articles, his promotion treatise, De Igne (1766), which propounded a hypothesis as to imponderables, belongs here. His activity as a teacher also showed, even on into his later period, a preference for the subjects of natural sciences, especially for physical geography and anthropology.
In theoretical philosophy Kant passed through many reversals (mancherlei Umkippungen) of his standpoint (cf. §{ 83 and 34). At the beginning (in the Physical Monadology) he had sought to adjust the opposition between Leibniz
and Newton, in their doctrine of space, by the ordinary distinction of thini;s-iii- themaelves (which are to be known metaphysically), and phenomena, or things as they appear (which are to be investigated physically) ; he then (in the writ ings after 1760) attained to the insight that a metaphysics in the sense of rationalism is Impossible, that philosophy and mathematics must have diametri cally opposed methods, and that philosophy as the empirical knowledge of the given cannot step beyond the circle of experience. But while he allowed him self to be comforted by Voltaire and Rousseau for this falling away of meta physical insight, through the instrumentality of the "natural feeling" for the right and holy, he was still working with Lambert at an improvement of the method of metaphysics, and when he found this, as he hoped, by the aid of Leibniz's Xoureaux Kssais, he constructed in bold lines the mystico-dogmatic system of his Inaugural Dissertation.
The progress from there on to the System of Criticism is obscure and contro verted. Cf. concerning this development, in "which the time in which he was influenced by Hume and the direction which that influence took are especially
536 German Philosophy : Kant's Critique. [Part VL
in question, the following: Fr. Michelis, Kant vor und nach 1770 (Braunsberg, 1871) ; Fr. Paulsen, Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der kantischen Erkenntnisstheorie (Leips. 1875) ; A. Riehl, Geschichte und Methode da phi- losophischen Kriticismus (Leips. ; 15. Erdmann, Kant's Kriticismus
1876) f
(Leips. 1878) ; W. Windelband, Die verschiedenen Phasen der kantischen
Lehre vom Ding-an-sich ( Vierteljahrschr. wissenseh. Philos. ,
the writings by K. Dieterich on Kant's relation to Newton and Rousseau under the title Die kantisehe Philosophie in ihrtr inneren Entwicklungsgeschichte, Freiburg i. B. 1886.
From the adjustment of the various tendencies of Kant's thought proceeded the " Doomsday-book " of German philosophy, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kiga, 1781). It received a series of changes in the second edition (1787), and these became the object of very vigorous controversies after attention had been
called to them by Schelllng ( W. , V. 196) and Jacobi ( W. , II. 291). Cf. concern ing this, the writings cited above. H. Vaihinger, Commentar zu K. K. d. r. V. (Vol. Stuttgart, 1887 [Vol. II. , 1892]), has diligently collected the literature. Separate editions of the Kritik, by K. Kehrbach, upon the basis of the first edi tion, and by B. Erdmann [and E. Adickes] upon the basis of the second edition. [Eng. tr. of the Critique (2d ed. ), by Meiklejohn, in the Bohn Library, and by Max Mliller (text of 1st ed. with supplements giving changes of 2d ed. ), Lond. 1881 Paraphrase and Commentary by Mahaffy and Bernard, 2d ed. , Lond. and N. Y. 1889 partial translations in J. H. Stirling's Text-book to Kant, and in Watson's Selections, Lond. and N. Y. 1888. This last contains also ex tracts from the ethical writings and from the Critique of Judgment. ]
1876).
Cf. also
The additional main writings of Kant in his critical period are Prolegomena zu einer jeden kUnftigen Metaphysik, 1783 Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785 Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschafl, 1785 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788 Kritik der Vrtheilskraft, 1790 Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793 Zum ewigen Frie- den, 1796 Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Rechts- und Tugendlehre, 1797 Der Streit der FakultSten, 1798 [Eng. tr. of the Prolegomena, by Mahaffy and Bernard, Lond. and N. Y. 1889; of the Prolegomena and Metaphysical Founda tions of Natural Science, by Bax, Bohn Library of the ethical writings, includ ing the first part of the Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason, by T. K Abbott, 4th ed. , Lond. 1889 of the Critique of Judgment, by J. H. Bernard, Lond. and N. Y. 1892; of the Philosophy of Law, by W. Hastie, Edin. 1887; Principles of Politics, including the essay on Perpetual Peace, by W. Hastie, Edin. 1891. The contents of Kant's Essays and Treatises, vols. , Lond. 1798,
F. W. Schubert (12 vols. , Leips. 1833 ff. ), G. Hanenstein (10 vols. , Leips. 1838 f. , and recently vols. , Leips. 1867 ff. ), and J. v. Kirchmann (in the Philos. Biblioth. ). 1 They contain, besides his smaller articles, etc.
, his lectures upon logic, pedagogy, etc. , and his letters. A survey of all that has been written by Kant (including also the manuscript of the Transition from Meta physics to Physics, which without value for the interpretation of his critical system) found in Ueberweg- Heinze, III. 24 there, too, the voluminous literature cited with great completeness. Of this we can give here only a choice of the best and most instructive survey of the more, valuable literature, arranged according to its material, offered by the article Kant, by W. Windel band in Ersch und Gruber's Enc. [The Journal of Speculative Philosophy contains numerous articles upon Kant. We may mention also Adamson, The Philosophy of Kant, Edin. 1879; art. Kant, in Enc. Brit. , by the same author; arts, in Mind, Vol. VI. , by J. Watson, and in Philos. Review, 1893, by J. G. Schurmann. — E. Adickes has begun an exhaustive bibliography of the German literature in the Philos. Review, 1893. ]
The citations refer to the older Hartenstein edition In the case of many works the convenient editions by K. Kehrbach (Reclam. Bib. ) make easy the transfer of the citations to the other editions.
given in Ueberweg, II. 138 (Eng. tr. )].
Complete editions of his works have been prepared by K. Kosenkranz and
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Chap. 1, § 38. ] Object of Knowledge. 637
§ 38. The Object of Knowledge.
Erh. Schtnid, Kritik der reinen Vernunft im Grundrisse. Jena, 1786.
H. Cohen, Kant'$ Theorie der Erfahrung. Berlin, 1871.
A. Holder, Darttellung der kantischen Erkenntnissthcorie. Tubingen, 1873.
A. Stadler, Die Grundsatxe der reinen Erkenntnisstheorie in der kantUchen
Philosuphie. Leips. 1876.
Job. Volkelt, /. Kani't Erkenntnisstheorie naeh ihren Grundprincipien analysirt.
Leips. 1879.
E. Pfleiderer, Kantischer Kriticismus und englisehe Philosophic Tubingen,
1881.
J. Hutchinson Stirling, Text-Book to Kant. Edin. and Lond. 1881.
Seb. Turbiglio, Analisi, Storia, Critica delta Bagione Pura. Rome, 1881. G. 8. Morris, Kant's Critique of Pure Beaton, Chicago, 1882.
Fr. Staudinger, Xoumena. Darmstadt, 1884.
[K. Fischer's Criticism of Kant, trans, by Hough. Lond. 1888. ]
[J. Watson, Kant and his English Critics. Lond. 1886. ]
[H. Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kant's Kritik d. r. Vernunft, II. (on the
^Esthetic). Stuttgart, 1892. ]
Kant's theory of knowledge followed with tenacious consistency from the statement which modern Terminism had given to problems
of knowledge (cf. pp. 466 and 482). The philosopher had grown up
in the naive realism of the Wolffian school, which without close scrutiny regarded logical necessity and reality as identical ; and his liberation from the ban of this school consisted in his seeing the impossibility of determining out of " pure reason," i. e. through mere logical operations with conceptions, anything whatever as to the ) existence1 or the causal relation* of real things. The metaphysi cians are the architects of many a world of thought in the air;' but their structures have no relation to reality. Kant now sought this
relation first in the conceptions given through experience, since the genetic connection of these with the reality to be known by science seemed immediately evident, but he was shaken from this "dog matic slumber" by Hume,4 who demonstrated that precisely the constitutive Forms of the conceptional knowledge of reality, espec ially the Form of causality, are not given in perception, but are
• Cf. Kant's Sole Possthlr Prooffor thr Existence of God.
* Cf. the Essay on Srgntive Magnitudes, especially the conclusion (W. , I.
ma. ).
•DreamsofaGhoMSeer,I. 3; W. ,III. 7. V
* In connection with this frequently mentioned confession of Kant, It is for the most part disregarded that he characterised as " dogmatic " not only rationalism, but also the empiricism of the earlier theory of knowledge, and that the classical passage at which he uses this expression (in the preface to the Prolegomena, W. , III. 170 f. ) does not contrast Hume with Wolff, but with
Locke, Rekl. and Hvattie only. The dogmatism from which, therefore, Kant declared that he luul been freed throuch Hume vas that of empiricism.
538 German Philosophy : Kant's Critique. [Past VI.
products of the mechanism of association without any demonstrable relation to the real. Reality was not to be known from the "given" conceptions, either. And then Kant, prompted by Leibniz, deliber ated once more whether the purified conception of virtual innate- ness, with the aid of the " pre-established harmony " grounded in God between the monad which knows and the monad which is to be known, might not solve the mystery of the relation of thought and
Being, and in his Inaugural Dissertation he had convinced himself that this was the solution of the problem. But cool reflection soon showed that this pre-established harmony was a metaphysical assumption, incapable of proof and unable to support a scientific system of philosophy. So it appeared that neither empiricism nor rationalism had solved the cardinal question, — the relation of knowl edge to its object, in what does it consist and on what does it rest ? '
1. Kant's own, long-weighed answer to this question is the Critique of Pure Reason. In its final systematic form, which found an ana lytical explication in the Prolegomena, his criticism proceeds from the fact of the actual presence of synthetic judgments a priori in three theoretical sciences ; viz. in mathematics, in pure natural science, and in metaphysics; and the design is to examine their claims to universal and necessary validity.
In this formulation of the problem the insight into the nature of reason's activity, which Kant had gained in the course of his critical ' development, came into play. This activity is synthesis, i. e. the
uniting or unifying of a manifold. * This conception of synthesis 3 is a new element which separates the Critique from the Inaugural Dis sertation ; in it Kant found the common element between the Forms of the sensibility and those of the understanding, which in his exDosition of 1770 were regarded as entirely separate, in accordance with their characteristic attributes of receptivity and spontaneity respectively. 4 It now appeared that the synthesis of the theoretical
' Kant's letter to Marcus Here, Feb. 21, 1772.
5 This frequently repeated definition makes the fundamental conception of of the critical doctrine of knowledge appear in closest proximity to the funda mental metaphysical conception of the Monadology. Cf. § 31, 11.
8 Which is introduced in the Transcendental Analytic in connection with the doctrine of the categories. Sections 10 and 15 (of the first edition of the Critique).
4 Hence the conception of synthesis in the present form of the Critique of Pure Season comes in collision with the psychological presuppositions which passed over to the Critique out of the German working-over of the Inaugural Dissertation, which forms the Transcendental ^Esthetic and the beginning of the Transcendental Logic (this was originally to have appeared immediately after 1770 under the title Limits of the Sensibility and of the Understanding). In
the Prolegomena these psychological presuppositions became obliterated. Earlier, sensibility and understanding were set over against each other as receptivity and spontaneity ; but space and time, the pure Forms of the sensi
Chap. 1, $ 38. ] Object of Knowledge : Synthesis. 539 ■
reason completes itself in three stages : the combination of sensa tions into perceptions takes place in the Forms of space and time ; the combination of the perceptions into experience of the natural world of reality takes place by means of concepts of the understand ing; the combination of judgments of experience into metaphysical knowledge takes place by means of general principles, which Kant calls Ideas. These three stages of the knowing activity develop, therefore, as different Forms of synthesis, of which each higher stage has the lower for its content. The critique of reason has to investigate what the especial Forms of this synthesis are in each stage, and in what their universal and necessary validity consists.
2. As regards mathematics, the conception of the Inaugural Dis- ■ sertation fits aptly, in the main, into the critique of reason. Mathe matical propositions are synthetic ; they rest in the last resort upon construction in pure perception, not upon the development of con ceptions. Their necessity and universal validity, which cannot be established by any experience, is, therefore, to be explained only if an a priori priurjjilp of perception lies at their basis. Kant, there
fore, shows that the general ideas of space and time, to which all insights of geometry and arithmetic relate, are " pure Forms of per ception " or " perceptions a priori. " The ideas of the one infinite space and of the one infinite time do not rest upon th4 combination of empirical perceptions of finite spaces and times; (but with the very attributes of limit in the " beside-of-one-anotheit" and " after- one-another" (co-existence and succession), the whole of space and the whole of time respectively are already involved in the empirical perception of particular space and time magnitudes, which can accord ingly be presented to the mind only as parts of space in general and of time in general. Space and time cannot be "concepts," since they relate to an object which is only a single, unique object, and which is not thought as complete, but is involved in an infinite synthesis ; and further, they are related to the ideas of finite magni tudes, not as class-concepts are to their particular examples, but as the whole to the part. If they are, accordingly, pure perceptions
(Anscliauungen), i. e. perceptions not founded upon empirical percep tions ( Wahrnehrnungen), but lying at the basis of all empirical per ceptions,1 then they are, as such, necessary ; for we can indeed think
bility, were Indeed the principles of the synthetical ordering of the sensations, and thus belonged under the general conception of synthesis, i. e. spontaneous unity of the manifold. Thus the conception of synthesis burst the psychological schema of the Inaugural Dutertatinn.
1 Here once more it must be recalled that it is but a perverted and completely erroneous conception of Kant to conceive of this " lying at the basis of" or - preceding," as referring to time. The natMtrn, which holds space and time
540 German Philosophy : Kant' i Critique. [Part VL
everything away from them, but cannot think them away. They are the given Forms of pure perception from which we cannot escape, the laws of relations, in which alone we can mentally represent with synthetic unity the manifold of sensations. And further, space is the form of the outer sense, time that of the inner sense ; all objects of the particular senses are perceived as spatial, all objects of self- perception as in time. "
If, then, space and time are the
ous receptivity," cognitions determined by these two kinds of per ception without any regard to the particular empirical content, possess universal and necessary validity for the entire compass of all that we can perceive and experience. In the realm of the sensi bility, — so the " Transcendental ^Esthetic " teaches, — the only object of a priori knowledge is the Form of the synthesis of the man ifold given through sensation, — the law of arrangement in space and time. But the universality and necessity of this knowledge is intel ligible only if space and time are nothing but the necessary Forms oj man's sensuous perception. If they possessed a reality independent of the functions of perception, the a priori character of mathematical knowledge would be impossible. Were space and time themselves things or real properties and relations of things, then we could know of them only through experience, and, therefore, never in a univer sal and necessary way. This last mode of knowledge is possible only if they are nothing but the Form under which all things in our perception must appear. 1 According to this principle the a priori and the phenomenal become for Kant interchangeable conceptions.
The only universal and necessary element in man's knowledge is the Form under which things appear in it. Rationalism limits itself to the Form, and holds good even for this only at the price of the " subjectivity " of the same.
3. While Kant would thus have the spatial and chronological re lations of objects of perception regarded as wholly a mode of mental representation, which does not coincide with the reality of things themselves, he distinguished this conception of their ideality very exactly from that " subjectivity of the qualities of sense " which was held by him, as by all philosophy after Descartes and Locke, to be self-evident. * And the point at issue here again is solely the ground of the phenomenality. As regards colour, taste, etc. , the phenome- nality had been based, since the time of Protagoras and Democritus,
to be inborn ideas, is un-Kantian throughout, and stands in contradiction tc express declarations of the philosopher (cf. , e. g. , above, p. 465 f. ).
1 This thought is developed with especial clearness in the Prolegomena, 1 8. * Cf. Critique, § 3, b. W. , II. 68.
unchangeable Form of our sensu
Chap. 1, J 38. ] Object of Knowledge : Space and Time. 541
upon the difference and relativity of impressions ; for the Forms of space and time, Kant deduces their phenomenality precisely from ) their invariability. For him, therefore, the qualities of sense offered only an individual and contingent mode of representation ; while the Forms of space and time, on the other hand, present
a universal and necessary mode in which things appear. All that
contains, is, indeed, not the true essence of things, but an appearance or phenomenon ; but the contents of sensation are " phenomena" in quite another sense than that in which the Forms of space and time are such; the former have worth only as the states of the individual subject, the latter as " objective " Forms of perception for all. Even on this ground, therefore, Kant, too, sees the task of natural science to lie in the reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative, in which alone necessity and universal validity can be found upon a mathematical basis, agreeing in this with
Democritus and Galileo; but he differed from his predecessors in holding that, philosophically considered, even the mathematical mode of representing Nature can be regarded only as an appearance and phenomenon, though in the deeper sense of the word. Sensation gives an individual idea, mathematical theory gives a necessary, universally valid perception of the actual world; but both are merely different stages of the phenomenal appearance, behind which the true thing-in-itself remains unknown. Space and time hold without exception for all objects of perception, but for nothing beyond ; they have " empirical reality " and " transcendental ideality,"
4. The main advance of the Critique of Reason beyond the Inau gural Dissertation consists in the fact that these same principles are extended in a completely parallel investigation to the question as to the epistemological value which belongs to the synthetic Forms of the activity of the understanding. 1
Natural science needs besides its mathematical basis a number of general principles as to the connection of things. These principles, such as that every change must have its cause, are of a synthetic nature, but, at the same time, are not caj>able of being established by experience, though they come to consciousness through experi ence, are applied to experience, and find there their confirmation. Of such principles a few have indeed been incidentally propounded and treated hitherto, and it remains for the Critique itself to dis cover the "system of principles," but it is clear that without this basis the knowledge of Nature would be deprived of its necessary
1 ThU parallelism is seen most plainly by comparing ff 0 and 14 of (he Prolegomena.
perception
542 German Philosophy : Kant's Critique. [Pakt VL
and univerSal validity. For " Nature " is not merely an aggregate of spatial and temporal Forms, of corporeal shapes and motions, but a connected system, which we perceive through our senses, but thinh at the same time through conceptions. Kant calls the faculty of thinking the manifold of perception in synthetic unity, the Understanding; and the categories or pure conceptions of Understand ing are the Forms of the synthesis of the Understanding, just as space and time are the Forms of the synthesis of perception.
If now Nature, as object of our knowledge, were a real connected system of things, independent of the functions of our reason, we could know of it only through experience and never o priori; a uni versal and necessary knowledge of Nature is possible only if our conceptional Forms of synthesis determine Nature itself. If Nature prescribed laws to our understanding, we should have only an empirical, inadequate knowledge ; an a priori knowledge of Nature is therefore possible only ifthe case be reversed and our understanding prescnbes laws to Nature.
