Kant (The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant)

KANT by A. D. L I N D S A Y Master of Balliol College, Oxford

GREENWOOD PRESS, PUBLISHERS WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT

Originally published in 1934 by Ernest Benn, Ltd., London First Greenwood Reprinting 1970 Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 76-109970 SBN 8371-4433-6 Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS CHAP.

TAGE

I. K A N T ' S L I F E II.

i

K A N T ' S PRE-CRITICAL WRITINGS AND H I S R E L A TION TO H I S PREDECESSORS

III.

.

.

.

14

.

37

T H E CRITIQUE OF P U R E R E A S O N —

(i) Its Style and Method

.

.

.

(2) The Prefaces

43

(3) The Introduction .

.

.

.

.

57

(4) The E s t h e t i c

66

(5) The Metaphysical Deduction, or the Discovery of the Categories

.

I (6) The Transcendental Deduction

IV.

•

•

79

.

.

87

.

121

{7) The Analytic of Principles

.

.

(8) The Dialectic

.

.

.

.

.136

KANT'S ETHICS—

(i) Ethical Theory

162

(2) " Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone"

203

V. T H E CRITIQUE OF J U D G E M E N T —

(i) The Place of the Third Critique in the Critical Philosophy

.

.

.

.

215 ^

(2) The Critique of E s t h e t i c Judgement

.

236

(3) The Critique o'f Teleological Judgement

.

255

(4) The Upshot of the Critical System

.

271

.

289

.

VI. T H E INFLUENCE OF K A N T ' S PHILOSOPHY

INDEX

.

.

.

. \7

.

.

.

•^oy

REFERENCES " THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON " (FIRST EDITION)

A

" THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON " (SECOND EDITION)

B

" THE CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON "

R.

" THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT " .

.

C. of Pr. .

C. of J.

" FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS "

. F. P.

" METAPHYSIC OF MORALS " .

.

.

.

M. of M.

" RELIGION WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF REASON ALONE " "BERLIN

EDITION

SCHRIFTEN

OF

KANT'S

"

R

GESAMMELTE B. E.

vu

PREFACE I HAVE in part of this book fulfilled an obligation of long standing : the obligation to publish lectures which I gave as Shaw Fellow of the University of Edinburgh nearly thirty years ago. These lectures were on Kant's Critique of Judgement, and have formed the basis of the fifth chapter. The third chapter, that occupied with the Critique of Pure Reason, is the outcome of many years' lecturing, and it would be impossible to mention all the works which have helped me in my study of Kant during these years. I should, however, wish to mention with especial gratitude Alois Riehl's Geschichte des Kriticismus and Professor Kemp Smith's Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. That I have ventured to differ in some respects from Professor Kemp Smith's interpretation does not make me less sensible of all I owe to it. To him and to Messrs. Macmillan I also owe acknowledgement for leave to use his translation in my quotations from the Critique of Pure Reason, and to Mr. Justice Meredith and the Delegates of the Oxford University Press I owe a similar acknowledgement with regard to my quotations from the Critique of Judgement. I ought to note that in these latter I have Mr. Justice Meredith's leave to translate Zweckmässigkeit by " purposiveness " rather than by " finality." In writing this book I owe much to the editor of this series, Professor Stocks, to Mr. C. G. Stone, to Professor H. J. Paton, and to my colleague Mr. C. R. Morris. Mr. Morris has given me invaluable help also in the correction of the proofs. All that I have to say of Kant's life is derived from Karl Vorländer's great work, Immanuel Kant, Der Mann und Das Werk. My debt to Professor ix

PREFACE

X

Clement Webb in the section on Kant's philosophy of religion will be obvious. Above all, I should like to acknowledge my debt to Kants Leben und Lehre, the work of Professor Ernst Cassirer, one of the greatest of Kantian scholars, whom we have now the honour of welcoming as a teacher in this University. A. D. LINDSAY. BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD.

I KANT'S LIFE was born at Königsberg on the 22nd of April 1724. His father, Johann Georg Kant, was a saddler who had come to Königsberg from Memel. Kant's own account of his grandfather was that he was a Scotsman, one of the many Scots who emigrated to the Baltic provinces and Sweden in the end of the seventeenth century. It is pleasant for a Scotsman to fancy that some of the characteristics which distinguish Kant from other German philosophers—his caution, his lifelong dislike of what he called Schwärmerei, and his dry humour—may have come from his Scots ancestry. But even if such fancies were not usually rather idle, recent investigation has cast considerable doubt on Kant's story of his Scots ancestry, and his German biographers are at one in thinking Kant's personality typical of East Prussia. .The important thing about his origin is that he came of poor, respectable people, who were brought up and lived in a tradition of piety, with a strong sense of independence and a respect for education. Their independence and their piety were as typical of East Prussia as of Scotland in those days. Kant's mother was of South German stock—her father had come from Nürnberg—and there is a savour of sweetness and gentle piety in all we know of her. She died when Kant was fourteen, but the impression she made on her son never left him. " I shall never forget my mother," he said when he was sixty. " She planted and nourished the first seeds of good in me ; she opened my heart to the influences of nature ; she awakened and widened my ideas, and her teachings have had an enduring, healing influence on my life." IMMANUEL KANT

A

1

PREFACE

X

Clement Webb in the section on Kant's philosophy of religion will be obvious. Above all, I should like to acknowledge my debt to Kants Leben und Lehre, the work of Professor Ernst Cassirer, one of the greatest of Kantian scholars, whom we have now the honour of welcoming as a teacher in this University. A. D. LINDSAY. BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD.

I KANT'S LIFE IMMANUEL KANT was born at Königsberg on the 22nd of April 1724. His father, Johann Georg Kant, was a saddler who had come to Königsberg from Memel. Kant's own account of his grandfather was that he was a Scotsman, one of the many Scots who emigrated to the Baltic provinces and Sweden in the end of the seventeenth century. It is pleasant for a Scotsman to fancy that some of the characteristics which distinguish Kant from other German philosophers—his caution, his lifelong dislike of what he called Schwärmerei, and his dry humour—may have come from his Scots ancestry. But even if such fancies were not usually rather idle, recent investigation has cast considerable doubt on Kant's story of his Scots ancestry, and his German biographers are at one in thinking Kant's personality typical of East Prussia. The important thing about his origin is that he came of poor, respectable people, who were brought up and lived in a tradition of piety, with a strong sense of independence and a respect for education. Their independence and their piety were as typical of East Prussia as of Scotland in those days. Kant's mother was of South German stock—her father had come from Nürnberg—and there is a savour of sweetness and gentle piety in all we know of her. She died when Kant was fourteen, but the impression she made on her son never left him. " I shall never forget my mother," he said when he was sixty. " She planted and nourished the first seeds of good in me ; she opened my heart to the influences of nature ; she awakened and widened my ideas, and her teachings have had an enduring, healing influence on my life." A

1

KANT Nine children were born to the parents, but only five outlived them : Immanuel (the fourth child of the family), a sister older than himself, and a brother and two sisters younger. Kant's parents were Pietists—religion was an essential part of their everyday life—and they sent him at the age of eight to a school, the Collegium Fridericianum, organized on Pietistic principles. In the school what had once been a living religion had been turned into a dead mechanism, and Kant got frpm his school-days a dislike of regulated piety as active as his admiration of the simple piety of his parents.) " People may say of Pietism what they will," he "said in old age. " Those in whom it was sincere were worthy of honour. They possessed the highest thing that man can have—-the quiet, the content, the inner peace, which no suffering can disturb. No need, no persecution could disturb them : no quarreller could move them to anger or hate. In a word, even the mere onlooker must against his will have been compelled to respect them. I remember a dispute which broke out between the harnessmakers and the saddlers, in which my father suffered pretty severely. But, nevertheless, my parents behaved in this dispute in such a spirit of reconciliation and love to their opponents that, though I was only a child at the time, the memory of it has never left me." But of his school-days he always spoke with dislike, and he could never put up with the exercises of religion. He learned at school to read and write Latin well, and to appreciate Latin literature, particularly the Satirists, but little else— only a smattering of Greek, for example. In 1740 Kant matriculated at the University of Königsberg, where he spent the next six years. He seems to have got some financial assistance from an uncle, but largely to have supported himself—mainly by coaching more well-to-do fellow-students, and to some slight extent, as we learn with some surprise, by his regular winnings at billiards and cards, in both of which he excelled. It is interesting to know that he kept up his billiards in later 2

KANT'S LIFE

3

life, but that he gave up cards because he could not stand the slowness and deliberateness with which his partners played. German universities were, in the middle of the eighteenth century, much more elementary institutions than they are now. Even some forty years later, when Kant was a professor, an edict of Frederick the Great enjoined on the professors of Königsberg, with the exception of Kant, that their lectures were not to be other than a commentary on a textbook. Königsberg was one of the most undistinguished of the German universities, and, with one exception, its professors were undistinguished men. The exception was the " extraordinary " Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Martin Knutzen. He was a Wolffian, but also a man of considerable scientific attainments. He lectured in higher mathematics, physics, and astronoriryT äs well as in philosophy, and was a great reader. He lent Kant Newton, and gave him the run of his library. It was from him (and through his help) that Kant got his interest in natural science, and that he showed himself in his first work, written in 1746, abreast of the latest scientific literature. But perhapsfthe most noticeable fact about Kant's university career was that he went his own way at the university. The Government, which looked on the university merely as a training ground for the professions, had laid down that every student must enroll himself as a member of one of the higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine. But Kant ignored the order, and attended lectures in all faculties as his interests led him. His last two years at the university must have been largely years of private research1! He had made up his mind that whatever the difficulties he was going to devote himself to learning. As he says in the Preface to his student treatise, " I have already set before myself the path which I will tread. I am going on my course, and nothing shall stop me from persisting in it." When Kant had finished his university career as a

KANT 4 student, there was as yetreopening forhimas a university teacher. He turned to the one means by which poor students like himself could earn a living—becoming a family tutor in'the house of one or other of the squirearchy of East Prussia. His father died in 1746. His younger brother was taken into the house of his uncle, and his sisters were married or out in service. There was nothing to keep him in Königsberg, and he spent the next eight years as house tutor in three different posts in East Prussia. We hear very little of him in these years. The post of family tuxor was regarded as a servile and thankless job. But Kant won the esteem of the families with whom he lived, and he laid in these years the foundations of his encyclopaedic knowledge. Kant returned to Königsberg in 1755, received the equivalent of what would now be a Doctorate for a dissertation on a scientific subject—De Igne—and published, on the occasion of his being given permission to set up as a Privatdozent, a Latin dissertation : A New Explanation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge. He had already in the year before published two dissertations which made his name widely known in Germany, one on the retardation of the earth's motion around its axis, and the other A Physical Discussion of the Question Whether the Earth is Growing Old. These studies led to the publication of a larger work, which appeared in 1755 : General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. Kant's lectures were unusually well attended from the beginning, and his writings soon made him the most distinguished man at the University of Königsberg. Yet he remained without promotion, a Privatdozent from 1755 to 1770. That meant for him in those fifteen years a life of great poverty and an immense amount of work. He lectured in logic, metaphysics, ethics, mathematics, physics, and anthropology—never less than sixteen hours a week, and sometimes as many as twenty-eight hours. He had hopes in 1756 of succeeding Martin Knutzen, but

KANT'S LIFE

5 owing to the poverty of the Prussian Government at first, and the Russian occupation of East Prussia later, his teacher's post was not filled up. In 1764 he was offered, but refused, the Professorship of Poetry at Königsberg. In 1765 he was made Assistant Librarian at the University. In 1769 he was offered, but refused, a Professorship at Erlangen ; and in 1770 he refused a similar request to go to Jena. Finally, in 1770, when he was forty-seven years old, he was made Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Königsberg—the post which he held till his death in 1804. A life uneventful enough in external happenings. The events that mattered in Kant's life were the influences which affected his thought—his early introduction to Newton, already described : his first reading of Rousseau in 1762 : Hume " waking him from his dogmatic slumbers " some time in the 'sixties : his rediscovery of Leibniz in the late 'sixties : above all, the great revolution in his thought which made him formulate the problem of the Critique, and spend the twelve years from 1769 to 1781 in thinking out the first Critique, and devote his whole ' energies to working out the results of his discovery, producing in the wonderful ten years, from 1781 to 1790, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic, the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgement. He was a man who, for all his poverty and the obscurity of his position up to 1770, had felt all the influences of the eighteenth century. He was brought up in its Pietism : he learned its rationalism at the university : he had a remarkable mastery over its science : he knew and was to some extent the inspiration of the forerunners of the German romantic movement: he was, like Voltaire, profoundly moved by the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Rousseau made him a Radical, prepared to be an enthusiastic admirer of the American Revolution, and

6

KANT

even in old age a steady defender of the French. Rousseau also made him an educational reformer of considerable practical zeal. He was an omnivorous reader, with all-round interests and an insatiable appetite for facts. He was also something of a figure in Königsberg society. It is surprising, in view of the traditional account of Kant as the pedantic student, by whose appearance on the street the citizens of Königsberg set their watches, to learn that one of his friends in 1764 expressed, the fear that Kant's social distractions might keep him from doing the philosophical work of which he was capable. He had friends among both the Russian and the Prussian garrisons, and in the country houses round Königsberg, but his greatest friends were merchants in Königsberg. He clearly had social talents of a high order. Fait from 1770 on Kant was a man with a mission '—the problem of the Critique of Pure Reason possessed him, and he dedicated his life to the working out of all that it proved to involve. To this he devoted all his energies :/4ie refused a pressing invitation from the Prussian Minister of Education, von Zedlitz, to go to Halle : he husbanded his strength with the utmost care, and gradually became the austere, rather pedantic old bachelor of the traditional picture. But if we are to realize what went to the making of the Critiques, we have to think not of Kant as he was known when he had 1 done his work and had become famous, but of the younger Kant, whom Vorländer has called " der galante Magister." Something also should be said of Kant as a lecturer. His hearers thought Kant the man and the lecturer a much greater man than Kant the author of the Critique of Pure Reason—not to say far more intelligible. His lectures, as has been noticed, were extraordinarily popular. The fashionable world of the place and time went to hear Kant lecture on anthropology as some years ago the fashionable world went to hear Bergson. These lectures on anthropology

KANT'S LIFE

7 were an invention of Kant's, intended, he says, to guard students against the habit of theorizing without facts. How mistaken is the ordinary view of Kant as a thinker, entirely occupied with the a priori and the abstract and never doing justice to the empirical fact, these sentences in the programme for his lectures of 1765-6 should prove :— " As I recognized at the very beginning of my career as a teacher that it was a great disadvantage to the studies of young men that they learnt to reason before they possessed sufficient historical knowledge to make them understand the part played by experience, I therefore resolved to make the history of the present condition of the earth, or geography understood in the widest sense, into an agreeable and easy description which should prepare them for a practical use of their reason, and serve to inspire in them the delight of enlarging their knowledge in matters of this kind." These elementary lectures then were meant to prepare the way for the strictly philosophical studies. The lectures on these subjects were, of course, less elementary and less popular. They took the then usual form of a commentary on an orthodox textbook ; and if anyone will now read Baumgarten's textbook on metaphysics, he will wonder how anything so repulsively formal could be made into an attractive lecture. But from all accounts Kant sat very loose to his textbook. " He did not follow closely the compendium which he used as the basis of his lectures. The abundance of his knowledge led him often into digressions from his main subject, digressions which were always very interesting. When he noticed that he had digressed too far, he would break off with an ' and so on,' and come back to the main subject. His lectures were spiced with wit and humour, with quotations and references to interesting writers, and sometimes with stories, which were always to the point. He disliked it when his pupils took notes. It disturbed him when he noticed that important points were neglected and unimportant ones carefully written down." This last sentence will, I am

8

KANT

sure, dispel in the mind of anyone who is himself a lecturer any lingering doubt he may have as to Kant's being human ! " H e was always warning his students against mere repetition. ' You will not learn from me philosophy, but how to philosophize—not thoughts to repeat, but how to think. Think for yourselves, inquire for yourselves, stand on your own feet,' were expressions he was always using." Small wonder, when these were his principles and practice, that Kant was esteemed by all who heard him to be a great teacher ! This notice of Kant's lectures may be concluded with Herder's famous account of him. " I have enjoyed the happiness of knowing a philosopher who was my teacher. He had in the prime of his life the gay sprightliness of a young man, and* this he kept, I believe, till his grey old age. His open brow, built for thought, was the seat of undisturbed contentment and joy : there flowed from his lips a discourse that was rich in thought. Jest and wit and humour were always at his command, and his lecture was both instructive and the most fascinating entertainment. With the same zest with which he examined Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Crusius, and Hume, or expounded the science of the physicists, Kepler or Newton, he took, up the writings of Rousseau which were then appearing, Emile and Helotse, and every discovery in natural science with which he made acquaintance, gave an appreciation of them, and came back always to an original knowledge of nature and of the moral worth of man. The history of man, of peoples, and of nature, science, mathematics, and experience were the sources from which he made his lectures and discourses live. Nothing worth knowing was indifferent to him. No cabal, no sect, no prejudice, no foolish respect of great names had the smallest power over him compared with the discovery and the explanation of truth. By his own example and by a pleasant compulsion he made us think for ourselves : despotism was alien to his nature. This man,. whom I name with the greatest thankfulness and reverence, is: Immanuel Kant."

KANT'S LIFE

9 The record of Kant's life, after he was appointed professor, is, as has been said, little but a record of his publications. Once he had conceived his Critical task, he bent all his efforts to the accomplishment of it. His health was never good, and the consciousness of all he had to do made him gradually adopt a more and more ordered regime. He was called at quarter to five, had his " happiest hour of the day " between five and six, drinking tea, smoking his daily pipe of tobacco, and thinking over his work for the day. From six to seven he prepared his lectures ; he lectured from seven to nine or seven to ten, and then wrote till half-past eleven. His one meal was at twelve— a hearty meal to which he always invited three or four friends. The meal was kept going with lively conversation till four, and sometimes later. Kant was a great conversationalist, and a celebrated story-teller. After dinner came his regular walk, and then reading till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. For all this studied devotion to his work, he kept up his interest in the outside world. He was an eager reader of newspapers and was always anxious to discuss political events with his friends. His political theory, as we shall see, was a theoretical republicanism combined with a firm conviction that it could never be right to disobey the law, and in his own life he combined the most radical sympathies with a scrupulous obedience to the commands of the Prussian Government. He was a warm sympathizer with the American Revolution, and, what was more unusual, a warm and persistent sympathizer with the French Revolution, even in its later stages. He did come once in conflict with the Government. Frederick the Great had steadily supported the " Aufklärung," but on his death in 1786 a reaction came with the succession of Frederick William the Second to the throne. In 1788, in the place of Kant's friend and supporter, von Zedlitz, to whom the Critique of Pure Reason had been dedicated, a certain Wöllner, known only for the rigidity of his Lutheran orthodoxy, was appointed Minister of A I

10

KANT

Justice. He began by publishing an edict against the dangerous rationalism of the " Aufklärung," accompanied by a warning that the existing toleration would only last if every one concerned with religious teaching conducted themselves with scrupulous caution. This edict produced little effect, and was followed in the end of the year by the establishment of a censorship. In these earlier stages the reaction left Kant and Kantianism alone. A certain section of orthodox opinion considered that .Kant's philosophy—" removing knowledge to make room for faith "— strengthened father than undermined orthodox belief. The outbreak and alarming progress of the French Revolution, however, changed the situation, and made every kind of rationalism suspect. In 1791 an Immediate-Examination-Commission was set up, and was reported to have advised the King to forbid Kant to publish anything further. Kant took the opportunity to make his position clear by publishing an article entitled, On the Failure of all Philosophical Attempts at a Theodicy, in which he remarked that " Job for all his piety would certainly have suffered at the hands of every synod, inquisition, or supervising council there had ever been, with, of course, one exception." In the autumn of 1791 the Censorship Commission was strengthened and given more extensive powers. In 1792 Kant published as a separate article what was afterwards to be the first part of his Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone. It was entitled, On the Radical Evil in Human Nature. It was published in the Berlin Monthly, which had been removed to Jena to escape the operations of the censorship ; but Kant, nevertheless, submitted it to the Censor. He passed it on the ground that, like Kant's other writings, it was not intended for and could not be appreciated by all readers, but only by thoughtful scholars, capable of inquiring into the* truth and of appreciating distinctions. The second part of the same work, On the Conflict of the Good Principle with the Evil, was three months later submitted to the censorship, but this time permission

KANT'S LIFE

ii

to publish was refused, on the ground that its contents " attacked biblical theology." Kant then completed the whole work, and submitted it for the approval of the theological faculty of Königsberg and the philosophical faculty of Jena. These having been obtained, he published it in the spring of 1793. Rumours of the King's intention to deal with Kant increased, and in October 1794 a royal order of cabinet was published : " Our highest person has for some time seen with great displeasure how your philosophy is misused to misrepresent and depreciate many of the chief and fundamental principles of Holy Scripture and of Christianity, how you yourself have done this in your book, Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, and in other, smaller treatises. We hoped better of you, as you must be aware what little responsibility you have shown of your duty as a teacher of the young, and how regardless you have been of our sovereign purposes, with which you are perfectly well acquainted. We demand of you the most conscientious fulfilment of your duties, and inform you that on pain of our highest displeasure you commit no offences of this kind in the future, but rather so use all your thought and talents that our sovereign intention be more and more realized. If, on the contrary, you persevere in your behaviour, you have infallibly to expect disagreeable consequences." Kant replied, defending his doctrine from the accusations .brought against it, and saying of himself : " For myself, as I have always and earnestly commended to other professors of religion a conscientious sincerity in not pretending to or recommending to others as articles of faith anything that they are not certain for themselves, so I have in composing my writings always pictured the sincere conscience as a judge standing at my side to keep far from me not only soul-corrupting error but every careless expression which might give offence. And now, in my seventy-first year, when I cannot help remembering that it may well be that I shall shortly have to give

12

KANT

account for all this before a Judge of the world who knows what is in men's hearts, I can candidly say that the responsibility I have for my teaching I realize with the fullest conscientiousness," and then concluded with a promise: " As for the second point, that I am not in the future to let myself be guilty of any of the perversion or depreciation of Christianity of which I am accused : I think that the safest way to avoid the least reproach on that head is, as Your Majesty's most loyal subject, solemnly to declare that I will abst'ain in lectures or in writing from all public discourses on religion, whether natural or revealed." He did not consent to repudiate anything he had written or to promise to write in a different way, but he held that he was bound to abstain from expressing his views, if the King should so command him. He had already in a letter some months previously said to a correspondent : " I f new laws order me to do what is not against my principles, I will precisely obey them. I will obey, even if they forbid me to make known my principles as I have done in the past." A memorandum written at the time sums up his position as follows : " To recant or deny one's convictions is contemptible, but to be silent in a case like the present is the duty of a subject; and though all that one says must be true, it is not necessarily one's duty to say in public all that is true." He did not think himself bound by this promise after Frederick William was dead, and in 1798 he published a treatise on The Conflict of the Faculties in which he discussed at length the principles he considered to be at stake in a dispute between free inquiry and orthodoxy. Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone was Kant's last great original work. His tractate on Everlasting Peace, published in 1795, is original, a remarkable anticipation of the principles on which the League of Nations depends, but it is only a tractate. The much more, considerable Metaphysic of Morals (1797) is full of interest, both as to Kant's ethical and his political views, but it

it

KANT'S LIFE

13 contains nothing that is not the working out of the fundamental principles of his Ethics as published in 1785. He was indeed, in the last years of his life, engaged on a great work which was " to round off his critical system," but it was never finished. He gave his last course of lectures in the summer of 1796. He announced lectures for the next three semesters, but with the warning " modo per valetudinem seniumque liceat," and he was not ever well enough to deliver them. He had by dint of care and conscientiousness enabled a naturally rather weak constitution to bear the immense intellectual effort of the years which produced the Critical system. After 1796 his health gradually declined till his death on 12th February 1804, at the age of nearly eighty.

II KANT'S PRE-CRITICAL WRITINGS AND HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS KANT himself regarded his Critical philosophy as the result of a resolution in his thought. The well-known reference to " the remembrance of Hume waking him from his dogmatic slumbers " is evidence oi how, after 1770, he regarded his earlier writings. They are not then to be looked on as part of the philosophy of Kant. But they show us the various steps by which Kant came from the philosophical position of his student days to the Critical problem, and they also, more particularly, show the various contemporary influences which were of most importance in his thought. We are accustomed—and with justice—to think of modern philosophy up to Kant as being divided into two schools, usually described as the Continental Rationalists 1 and the English empiricists, each a school of three great names-—Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz among the rationalists, and Locke, Berkeley, and Hume among the empiricists. And as Rationalism culminated in Leibniz and Empiricism in Hume, we think of Kant as the philosopher who made a new start by a synthesis of Leibniz _and Hume. That is no doubt a rough truth, but, like most rough truths, misleading, and for two reasons. In the first place, Kant was influenced not by what his predecessors wrote, but by what he had read of them, or by what had got into the thought of the time with which he was acquainted. That means, on the one hand, that for Kant the Continental tradition hardly included Spinoza (who, until interest in him was revived by Jacobi and the 14

KANT'S PRE-CRITICAL WRITINGS

15

German romantics, was only a horrid example), and included, at least up till 1765, a very inadequate Leibniz. Leibniz as we know him was not known in the eighteenth century at all. His criticism of Locke in the New Essays on the Human Understanding was only published in 1765, and the first at all adequate edition of his works appeared in 1768. The Leibniz whom Kant knew before that date was the Leibniz of the Monadology and the Theodicy, a Leibniz easily smoothed down by Wolff. On the other hand, Kant's knowledge of the English empiricists was very imperfect. He did not read English, and their works were not all translated. He clearly knew and was influenced by and admired Locke, although he always differed from him. He seems to have had only a secondhand acquaintance with Berkeley. He knew him as the subjective idealist, "the good Berkeley," but not as the forerunner of Hume. He apparently knew Hume's Inquiry, but not his Treatise. He got the notion of Criticism from Locke, though he rejected Locke's form of it, and he got from both Locke and Hume, but especially from Hume, a challenge to dogmatism and to all metaphysics, which had a profound effect upon his thought. But there is no evidence that he ever grasped what has beert called the psychological atomism of the English empiricists, or realized the difficulty into which Hume's thoroughgoing atomism had got Hume's own position. It will be argued later that if we look at Kant as though he were trying to solve the problems of the Hume we know, we shall certainly misunderstand Kant's position. In the second place, the opposition which Kant set himself to reconcile, the opponents to both of whom in his earlier years (and indeed always) he was trying to do justice, were not Leibniz and Locke, but Leibniz and Newton. Kant, as we have seen, knew and studied Newton from his student days. His first writings, as we shall see, were a working out of Newtonian principles, and he very soon became conscious of an inconsistency between these principles and the philosophy of Leibniz. As he came to

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know more of Leibniz this opposition only took a sharper form. This difference between Leibniz and Newton was not a difference between one philosopher and another (although in the eighteenth century the distinction between philosophy and science with which we are familiar had not been clearly drawn—it was indeed owing to Kant's work that it was drawn), it was a difference between two interpretations of the methods and presuppositions of the new sciences, and also a contrast between the presuppositions of the new sciences and of metaphysics. For Kant the results of English Empiricism as embodied in Hume could never be more than a challenging paradox. For they were inconsistent, not only with metaphysics as it then existed, but with the mathematical principles of the sciences. But the more he came to understand the presuppositions ot Newton's work, the more did he feel the conflict between these and the presuppositions not simply of the Wolffian metaphysics, or of any kind of metaphysics at all, but their conflict with the principles underlying morals and religion. ^Thus the great problem of modern philosophy—how to reconcile the thoroughgoing mechanical view of the world implied in the new sciences with human freedom or with the reality of any kind of moral purpose—was raised in Kant's mind with peculiar forceA Philosophy since Descartes had been trying to do two things—to understand the principles and method underlying the new sciences whose remarkable success had already won them much of that prestige they have enjoyed ever since ; and to discover how these principles and this method applied to the /understanding of man's nature and purposes. Kant was i far too serious a moralist to have accepted the reduction of morals to a natural science in the manner propounded by Hume and worked out afterwards by the utilitarians. But he had no need to consider Hume's success in reducing morality to a natural science, because Hume had only reached that result by a clearly inadequate and impossible analysis of science. He is, therefore, always concerned with Hume's scientific scepticism, and not with his ethical

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17 theory. But the Continental rationalism had reached, in the Wolffian philosophy he had learned as a student—the reigning philosophy throughout Germany—a reconciliation between the new sciences and the principles of morality and religion. Newton taught Kant the shallowness and inadequacy of that reconciliation on the scientific side : his own nature and Rousseau taught him its insufficiency on the moral side. The more successful he was, therefore, in his appreciation of the principles and methods of the new sciences, the firmer the grasp which Rousseau gave him of the fundamental principles of morals, the more inadequate did that reconciliation appear. Or, to put it in another way,/the more successful he was in answering the first question with which modern philosophy was concerned, the more difficult and far-reaching did he make the second. He was more in earnest both about the principles of natural science and about the authenticity of moral obligation than any of his predecessors. The history of Kant's thought up to 1770, when the Critical problem was first stated, is then a history of his growing sense of the inadequacy of the Wolffian reconciliation between science and morality, and his growing sense of the imperative necessity of such a reconciliation. It will be well, then, to begin with some account of the Wolffian reconciliation, and the best way to do that will be to give some account of the orthodox textbook which Kant always used in his lectures—Baumgarten's Meta•physica.

Baumgarten defines metaphysics as the science of the first principles of human knowledge, and divides it into ontology, cosmology, psychology, and natural theology. Ontology is the science of the more general predicates of being, and these are universal internal predicates, universal disjunctive predicates, and relative predicates. The first universal internal predicate is the jxgsible, which on analysis produces the laws of contradiction, of excluded middle, and of identity. The second is connexion, which yields the principle of sufficient reason, ana tKe

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principle that every possible is both reason and reasoned, or both ground and consequent. The third universal internal predicate is being. " Every being is possible, has a sufficient reason, and a consequent. All determinations of being are either essentials or attributes, or modes or relations." The modes of being are not determined by its essence, and, therefore, the existence of any being which has modes is not determined by its ,essence. Baumgarten, therefore, while professing to derive the principle of sufficient reason from the principle of contradiction, really distinguishes between those universal properties which he thinks are necessary as deducible from essence and those which are not so deducible but are only compossible. This distinction between essence and modes runs through all Baumgarten's account of nature and mind inasmuch as it applies to all beings except to God. It corresponds roughly to the distinction between internal determinations and external. But though Baumgarten uses it for all it is worth, he never faces its fundamental character. For he persists in holding that though modes and existence, and what we may generally call " matter of factness," are not necessary and not deducible from essence, and while he therefore finds rooms not only for free will and spontaneity, but for the contingent and the miraculous, yet he makes no real distinction between the way in which we know this matter of factness and the way in which we know what is necessary : he makes nothing of the distinction between perception and understanding. The principle of sufficient reason is conceived with such an amplitude of vagueness that it can cover the most matter-of-fact and contingent circumstances and yet be derivable from the principle of contradiction. But if it were really so derivable, then all intelligibility would be of the same kind, and the distinction between the necessary and the contingent would only be a distinction in our knowledge. But this would imply a distinction between truth and reality which we are not allowed. The sixth internal general predicate of being (the fourth

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and fifth being unity and order) is truth. " Metaphysical truth is the order of many in one." " Every being is transcendentally true." " The truth of every being is clearly knowable, therefore every being is objectively certain." The last of these predicates is evidence of a still more fundamental ambiguity. It is " the perfect," and it is thus defined : " I f many taken together constitute the sufficient reason of one, and they agree, this agreement is perfection," and from this is further concluded : " the essentials of every being agree in its essence and attributes. Therefore, every being is transcendentally perfect. Good is that which implies perfection. Therefore, every being is transcendentally good." We find later, when we come to the disjunctive predicates of being—" necessary and contingent," " changeable and unchangeable," " real and negative," " singular and universal," " total and partial "—that the contingent implies imperfection, and negation : that negation, being the opposite of reality, is evil, and that every finite substance, being so far contingent, is also evil. Goodness and badness thus are defined as metaphysical qualities—they mean presence or absence of reality or absence or presence of negation : and yet at other times they are used to mean what is ordinarily meant by good or bad. The distinction! between the principle of contradiction and that of sufficient 1 reason is sometimes used as the distinction between logical j and moral necessity : that which is according to the I principle of sufficient reason is what must be if the universe is to be as perfect as it could be, in the moral sense of the word perfect. The hypothetical possibility of miracles is proved in a much later section by the following argument. " Suppose in the most perfect world a natural event—as natural about to follow according to the order of nature and compossible with other things. Suppose under the same circumstances a supernatural event, as such about to happen against all the order of nature, compossible with other things but better than the natural." Then according

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to " the law of the best in the world " the supernatural will follow. That is an argument which holds that the order of nature as discoverable by science must yield to the goodness of God. Yet at other times this goodness or perfection is nothing more than reality. This is not all. For the principle of sufficient reason has to account, not only for purposive activity, but for the working of the laws of the natural sciences as contrasted with mathematics. Temporal and spatial determinations are never for a Leibnizian internal determinations : they are modes, and therefore metaphysically contingent and pertaining to existence. The principle implicit in them is, therefore, the principle of sufficient reason. These difficulties come to a -head in Baumgarten's account of cause. " Existence is a mode of a contingent and hence of a finite being. Hence it is not sufficiently determined by the essence of a contingent and finite being, and therefore not by its attributes. Therefore, in the internal determinations of a contingent and finite being there is not a sufficient reason for its existence. But a sufficient reason is necessary for the existence of a contingent and finite being. Therefore, a finite and contingent being cannot exist unless as caused by something outside itself. Therefore, existence does not inhere in it by its own force ; hence an alien force posited without a finite and contingent being is the sufficient reason of existence inhering in a finite and contingent being. Therefore, a substance posited without it acts on it by producing existence in it. Hence every real contingent and finite being is an effect and has an efficient cause." Causes are then classified as " the useful and other kinds of causes," and other kinds of causes include impulsive, final, material, and formal causes. It is obvious enough how Baumgarten's account of the necessity of the causal principle is open to Hume's objection that most proofs of such a principle beg the question. What is perhaps more significant is that all these causes are external relations, are supposed to be distinct, and yet

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no clear explanation is given of their distinction. As befits one who believes in the best of all possible worlds, Baumgarten tries to have the best of all worlds. He recognizes that there is a difference between logical necessity, moral necessity, and physical necessity ; he sees that the world must be such that these principles are somehow reconcilable : but the reconciliation is effected by blurring the edges of all the distinctions, so that they pass insensibly into one another and justice is done to no one of them. In such a system logic and science, morality and religion, are given an apparent reconciliation without real scope being given to the demands of science or of morality or religion. Not much need be said about the remaining parts of the Metaphysica. General cosmology is defined as " the science 1 of the general predicates of the world—either empirical, as j derived more from experience, or rational, as derived from ' the notion of the world. It is rightly referred to meta-; physics as containing the first principles of psychology, theology, physics, teleology, and practical philosophy. Cosmology teaches the notion, the parts, and the perfection of the world." But this distinction between empirical and rational cosmology is not reflected in any clear distinction of method. The doctrine of monads is expounded, partly as an account of the logical meaning of substance, partly as an account of the elementary principles of physics, though the original argument which led to the doctrine of preestablished harmony was that, as the monads " have no windows " and can have no direct relations to one another, a miraculous pre-established harmony must be postulated to account for what happens; yet that doctrine is declared not to be inconsistent with the influence of substances on one another, nor with the action of body on spirit or of spirit on body. As we have seen, the natural order of nature and the supernatural are reconciled by the notion of the necessary perfection of the world. " The number of supernatural miracles in the most perfect of worlds is the same as the

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number of possible things which cannot equally well be brought about naturally and according to the order of nature, neither more nor less." Psychology, the science of the general principles of the soul, is also divided into an empirical and a rational part, but it is here also difficult to see what distinguishes empirical from rational psychology. The sections on the immortality of the human soul and on the state of the soul after death are no doubt with reason in the non-empirical part, but it is a surprise to find a section on the souls of animals there also. The last part, natural theology, is much the longest of the four. " Natural theology is the knowledge of God in so far as it can be attained without faith." It begins with a statement of the ontological proof. God is defined as the most perfect being, and that is defined as " that in whom there is the greatest agreement in number and greatness as there can be agreement in number and greatness in any being." Therefore, the most perfect being is the most real being, and as " existence is a reality compossible with essence and other realities, the most perfect being has existence." Yet " God is outside the world, and the world is not an essential nor the essence nor an attribute nor a mode nor a modification nor an accident of God." " The theology of Spinoza is an error," and clearly to be avoided at all costs. The proof of the existence of God is the central point in knowledge, and is altogether certain. " If God were not actual, the principle of contradiction, the first principle both of the form and the matter in all our demonstrations, would be false. Therefore, though many sciences could be completely demonstrated without the use of any theological premises, they would not be, nor would they or their objects be even possible, if God were not actual." Baumgarten then proceeds to expound at length " the mind of God," his will, creation, and its end, the providence of God, the divine decrees and the nature of revelation— all an astonishing example of " how far ben " with the

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Almighty man can get " without faith " and by reason alone, and an edifying proof of the consonance of the unaided operations of reason with orthodox eighteenthcentury Lutheranism. Such was the philosophy in which Kant was brought up, which he went on admiring for its systematic character. More strangely still, he went on using Baumgarten as the foundation of his teaching. Its virtue, of course, is its well-meaning comprehensiveness, its holding on to the principles which have to be reconciled. Its weakness is its fundamental shallowness and ambiguity. Anyone who was as much in earnest with either science or morality as was Kant was bound to be dissatisfied with its account of both and its reconciliation between them. Kant's first works were, with one exception, concerned with scientific problems. While still a student, he published an attempt to reconcile the conflict between the Leibnizians and Newton on the nature of force, under the title of Thoughts on the True Conservation of Living Forces. Of the two theses written in connexion with his doctorate, one was scientific, the other metaphysical. He wrote on the retardation of the earth's rotation and on the question of the age of the earth, on the theory of the winds and on the relativity of motion, and in the Monadologia Physica he treated a question which wa^ as vexed then as it is now—the nature of the atom. But his most important work of this period was The General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, published in 1755. It is best known from the fact that in it Kant proposed the nebular hypothesis afterwards rediscovered by Laplace. But for our purposes the most important thing about this cosmogony of Kant's is the spirit that inspires it. He used Newton's principles to push back, or rather to sweep away, the limits which Newton had left, where scientific hypothesis stopped and the hypothesis of special creation took its place. He enunciated then clearly the principle which he expounds at length in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason—that scientific discovery can

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recognize no limits within its own sphere. " The Empiricist will never allow, therefore, that any epoch of nature is to be taken as the absolutely first, or that any limit of his insight into the extent of nature is to be regarded as the widest possible. Nor does he permit any transition from the objects of nature—which he can analyse through observation and mathematics, and synthetically determine in intuitions (the extended)—to those which neither sense nor imagination can ever represent in concreto (the simple). Nor will he admit the legitimacy of assuming in nature itself any power that operates independently of the laws of nature (freedom), and so of encroaching upon-the business of the understanding, which is that of investigating, according to necessary rules, the origin of appearances. And lastly, he will not grant that a cause ought ever to be sought outside nature in an original being." l For it is to be noticed about all this early work of Kant's that he was not even in this strictly a scientist. He had not the mathematical equipment nor the necessary means of observation and experiment, though he had a great deal of what goes to make a great scientist. He displays in , these works a remarkable power of synthesizing facts and ! seeing what they come to—of grasping underlying tendencies and principles—which all went to make him the first man who really understood the principles and methods of the new sciences. From 1756 to 1762 Kant published nothing. In 1762 appeared The Only Possible Proof of the Existence of God, a work which he describes as " the result of long reflexion," and The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, described by him as the work of a few hours. The explanation of this interval is not hard to conjecture. The earlier works on scientific subjects, certainly the greatest of them, The Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, had been the work of his years as a family tutor. For the first few years after he returned to Königsberg, the time in which he was not actually teaching must have been almost entirely 1

A 469; B 497.

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occupied with preparation for his numerous and varied courses of lectures, and it would take about five or six years before he got his head above water. His mind must have been occupied in these years with the problems discussed in The Only Possible Proof of the Existence of God, for it is Kant's answer to the question raised by the Lisbon earthquake. It was that which turned him from questions of scientific method to the questioning of the optimism of the Wolffian philosophy. The treatise is largely an attack on false teleology—on the notion that the world exists for the good of man. It is a criticism of all attempts to prove the existence of God by the obvious incursions of a special providence or the obvious care of the universe for human purposes. It rejects alike Descartes' ontological proof and the argument from design. The only possible proof of God's existence must be something which assures us of reality, is enforced by our scientific knowledge, and is yet proof against such shocks as that which set Kant questioning. Kant finds his proof in the existence of universal law and in the necessary dependence of science and mathematical calculation upon reality. The positive part of the treatise did not satisfy Kant for long, but the negative part, the rejection of the ontological proof and of the argument from design, remained fundamental for him. When the Only Possible Proof was finished, Kant was given an opportunity to work out the further implications of his understanding of the principles and method of the natural sciences, and to develop his already aroused interest in method and in metaphysical problems. In 1763 the Berlin Academy of Sciences offered a prize for an essay on the question, " Are the metaphysical sciences capable of the same evidence as are the mathematical ? " or, to state the problem in full, " The question is—whether metaphysical truths in general, and especially the first principles of natural theology and of morals, are capable of just the same certain demonstration as are the truths of geometry : and, if they-are not so capable, what is the peculiar nature

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of their certainty, what kind of degree of certainty can be arrived a t : and whether this degree is sufficient for full conviction." Kant's treatise, under the title of Enquiry into the Certainty of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals, was published in the Proceedings of the Academy in 1764. It did not obtain the prize, which was awarded to a treatise by Moses Mendelssohn, but it was highly commended. Kant sets himself to answer the question of the Academy by asking it in a rather different way—not " Are the methods of metaphysics like those of geometry ? " but " Are they more alike, or rather ought they to be, more alike, the methods of geometry or the methods of physics ? " The change in the form of the question is significant. The fruits of Kant's concern with scientific questions have been a knowledge that physics, although it uses mathematics, is essentially different from it, and the difference consists in its relation to experience. Kant's argument in sum is that metaphysics had in the past made the mistake of thinking that it ought to be like mathematics. But the certainty of mathematics comes from the mind's construction, from its independence of the impressions of experience. The figures with which geometry deals arise in and with the act of construction. That is why geometry rightly, begins with definitions. But the physics which began with definitions and attempted to grasp the real essences of force and matter and movement, and deduce consequences from such conceptions, had made no progress. The physics of the past century, whose success all were admiring, had begun with definite quantitative measurements of phenomena. It started with the complicated but measured facts, and asked whether they could be brought under a single complex of functions. Jput in metaphysics we have to do with a reality which we ao not construct; we cannot begin with definitions : we must begin with experience. We shall, therefore, profit most if we study the method of physics\ And so Kant says, in * language very like that of the preface to the second edition

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of the Critique of Pure Reason, " The question before us is of such a kind that, were it satisfactorily solved, the higher philosophy would thereby acquire a definite structure. When we are certain of the method according to which the highest possible certainty can be obtained in this kind of knowledge, and the nature of our conviction of it is understood, then, instead of the eternal shiftings of opinion and schools, an unchangeable rule of doctrine will unite thinkers in their labours : just as Newton's method in natural science turned the unstable nature of physical hypotheses into a certain method according to experience and geometry." That is Kant's ideal for metaphysics— an ideal to which he held throughout. Metaphysics must alter its character if it is " to tread the sure path of a science." But at this stage he hardly gets beyond the ideal. " Metaphysics is beyond doubt the most difficult of human inquiries ; but no one has yet really written a metaphysic." Of one thing he is sure, that the existing method of metaphysics is hopeless, and he reinforced this general conclusion in two particular treatises, On the False Subtlefy of the Four Syllogistic Figures, and On the Conception" of Negative Quantity in Natural Knowledge, in both of which he contrasted the principles of syllogistic logic with the methods, by which knowledge was obtained in the physical sciences. He is already also concerned about the question of causality, and convinced that our knowledge of that relation cannot be the same as our knowledge of ground and consequent. Hume is beginning to work in him. If Kant by 1762 (for that was the date at which most of. the prize essay was written) has got the length of saying, " Let us examine by what revolution Newton made physics into a science, and see whether metaphysics may profit by his example," he has got very near to stating the Critical problem. But it took some years more before that problem assumed the form which produced the Critical philosophy. There are two stages yet to come—the first a negative stage marked by the publication in 1766 of

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Dreams of a Ghost-seer illustrated by Dreams of a Metaphysician, the second the stage of the Dissertation of 1770, when Kant seems to himself to have found a distinction which will make metaphysics in the old sense possible, and yet allow it to follow a new and more fruitful method. The Dreams of a Ghost-seer is a curious book. It was published anonymously, though there was never any secret of the authorship. But no one at the time could make out what Kant was after. The book seemed such an unexpected sequel to his prize essay. Its general upshot may be shortly described. Kant had had the curiosity to buy and study Swedenborg's Arcana Ccelestia. He came to the conclusion that the facts described in it were not founded on any principles of evidence, and that its systematic reasoning had no foundation in experimental reality. That to his mind disposed of Swedenborg. But he then asked himself, " In what respect are the systems of metaphysics any better than these despised extravagances ? " and came to the conclusion that metaphysics, as it then existed, for all its superiority of tone, had as little foundation in reality as the system of Swedenborg. This work of Kant's is ordinarily regarded as evidence of how far Kant went in agreement with Hume, and there is little doubt that he was influenced by Hume in writing the book. But from its main position Kant never departed, though in his next work he seems to raise again the possibility of something like metaphysics in the old sense. Kant committed himself in the Dreams of a Ghost-seer once for all to what the Germans call a Diesseitigkeitslehre, or a denial of knowledge of what transcends experience. That does not mean that he was ever an Empiricist in the narrower sense of that word. ' He never doubted that experience contains a priori elements, or that there were involved in experience principles which pointed beyond experience. But he held that all our knowledge, even of moral principles and of what ought to be, starts with what is implicit in our actual experience. Kant, as we shall see, held that morality implied the

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reality of the transcendental, of God and of immortality, but he did not hold that we know the existence of God or the immortality of the soul and thence deduce what we ought to do—as though from a direct knowledge of the transcendent we could conclude something about our duties in this world. He held rather that we began with our knowledge of our duty and its nature, and found that to imply transcendent realities which we could not directly know. Kant's next work, however, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and of the Intelligible World, was a sequel to The Dreams of a Ghost-seer as unexpected as that had been to the prize essay of 1763. This treatise, with which he inaugurated his Professorship, seems in what it has to say of the intelligible world to show a revived belief in metaphysics. There can be little doubt that Cassirer is right in attributing this change, at least in emphasis, to Kant's study of Leibniz. As has been noticed at the beginning of this chapter, Leibniz' New Essays on the Human Understanding was first published in 1765, more than fifty years after they were written, and Duten's edition of Leibniz, containing among other things the correspondence between Clarke and Leibniz, was published in 1768. We know that Kant studied these works as soon as they appeared, and then for the first time got an understanding of the real Leibniz. From Leibniz' criticism of Locke iti the New Essays, Kant got a new conception of the nature of the intelligible. The intelligible is known in the mind's awareness of its own activity. It is there and nof in sensible experience that we apprehend the nature of such concepts as necessity, substance, unity, cause, which the English Empiricists have found such difficulty in discovering in experience. From Leibniz also Kant derived the distinction between knowledge of things in themselves, which is given in pure intellectual concepts and knowledge of phenomena, and the conception that space and time are concerned with phenomena not with things in themselves. But while the Dissertation is grounded on the belief

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that Leibniz was right in his controversy with Locke, its original contribution was the outcome of Kant's judgement on the issue between Leibniz and Newton, which had been especially the subject of the Clarke-Leibniz correspondence. There Kant thought that no clear decision between one $ide or the other was possible. He was convinced on the One hand that Leibniz' conception of space and time was inconsistent with the certainty of mathematics, that Newton was right in his statement of how the mathematician must conceive space and time. On the other hand, he agreed with'Leibniz against Newton on the impossible consequences which followed from supposing space and time to be properties of things in themselves. Mathematics had to be vindicated against the metaphysics of Leibniz, and metaphysics to be made independent of mathematics. Kant was prepared with Leibniz to hold that space and time were phenomenal as long as that did not involve, as it had with Leibniz, that they were confused representations. His solution of the dilemma is a distinction among a priori principles. Space and time are a priori, but they are also sensible. They are to be distinguished as forms of intuition from purely intellectual concepts. There are, therefore, two kinds of pure knowledge : the one is knowledge of the relations of the intelligible world; its purely intellectual concepts reveal the nature of things : the other is knowledge of the principles by which we order the sensible. This account of space and time as forms of intuition recurs in the Critique of Pure Reason Jn the ^Esthetic where we shall discuss it. What is important to notice in the meantime is that Kant thought in the Dissertation that he had solved the conflict between metaphysics and mathematics in a characteristic way, by separating the spheres of application of the principles of the two inquiries, and that he seemed to have saved the validity of Leibnizian metaphysics by taking mathematics with space and time out of its range, confining metaphysics to the apprehension of intellectual relations implied in the mind's activity.

KANT'S PRE-CRITICAL WRITINGS 31 This solution of difficulties has obviously been bought at a price. A distinction between knowledge of things as they are and knowledge of things as they appear is understandable if considered as a contrast between an immediate and an indirect knowledge of the same things. But Kant's doctrine, that time and space are forms of sensibility and not properties of things in themselves, seems to have saved the exactness of mathematical knowledge at the expense' of its objectivity \ If what Kant has called the intellectual concepts give us knowledge of things as they are, our knowledge of space and time must be knowledge of something subjective or unreal, But, as the mathematician Lambert objected, even if, as idealists had maintained, space is thought to be unreal, time cannot possibly be so regarded, for the self is certainly in time. Kant answered that objection in the Critique, but he could not answer it as long as he held to the position of the Dissertation that it is in our consciousness of the mind's activity that we come to know things as they really are. Lambert's criticism, therefore, made him review not his account of what he had called sensible principles, space and time, but his account of intellectual principles. His new reading of Leibniz had enabled him to see where a priori concepts like substance and cause could come from. We apprehend them, as has been said, in being conscious of the mind's activity. But that leaves unsolved the question of how the principles discoverable in the mind's activity can apply to objects—a problem which Leibniz had rather indicated than solved in his doctrine of preestablished harmony. This consideration it was which led Kant to what he always calls the Critical problem, and his approach to it can best be seen in his letters to his friend and former pupil, Marcus Herz. In a letter, written in June 1771, after excusing himself for not having answered letters about the Dissertation which he had had from Herz and Mendelssohn and Lambert, he says: " The fact that I have completely failed to convince men of such insight is a proof that my theories are defective—certainly

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in clearness of demonstration ; possibly the defect is more serious. Now long experience has taught me that in the matters which are before me insight cannot be forced : over-pressure only makes matters worse. A good long time is necessary, in which each concept can be regarded in all possible relations and in the widest possible connexions, with intervals between each examination of i t ; and while this is going on the spirit of scepticism must be awake and try whether what has been thought out will stand against the keenest doubt. This is how I have been employing the time in a way which may have incurred the danger of a reproach of impoliteness. The real cause of my delay was my respect for the judgements of both these scholars. You know how important it is, not only in knowledge in general but in men's highest purposes to have a certain and clear insight into the distinction between that which rests upon the subjective principles of the human faculties of the soul, whether the faculty of sensibility or of understanding and that which applies directly to objects. If one can avoid the demand for a perfect system, it will be found that the inquiries made in following this general principle in the widest application verify one another. I am, therefore, now busy on a work which, under the title of The Bounds of Sensibility and Reason, will work out somewhat elaborately the relations of the basic principles and laws determined before experience of the world of the senses to the subjects involved in the theory of taste, metaphysics, and moral theory. I have worked through all the material this last winter, have considered all the points that have occurred to me .in their mutual relations, but have only just now got clear about the plan." This is the first mention of what is to become the Critique of Pure Reason. It will be noticed that the plan proposes for a single work what it took all three Critiques to achieve. The next letter to Herz is longer and more important. It is dated 21st February 1772. " When you complain of my entirely failing to answer

KANT'S PRE-CRITICAL WRITINGS 33 your letters, I cannot deny the justice of your complaint; but when you draw unpleasant inferences from this fact, I wish I could remind you of your own knowledge of my way of thinking. But, instead of excusing myself, I shall give you a short account of how I have been busy with my thoughts, and so in busy hours have put off writing. After you left Königsberg, in the intervals between business and the recreations which are so necessary to me, I reflected again on the plan of the considerations which we had discussed, to see their connexions with philosophy in general and the rest of knowledge and to grasp their extent and limitations. I had already gone a good way in distinguishing between the sensible and the intellectual in moral theory and in the fundamental principles following therefrom. I had also some time ago sketched, in a manner with which I was fairly satisfied, the principles of feeling and taste and the faculty of reflective judgement with their effects, the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful, and so could now make the plan for a work which should have some such title as The Bounds of Sensibility and Reason- I intended it to have two parts, one theoretical, the other practical. The first was to be in two sections : (1) Phenomenology in general; (2) Metaphysics, considered only in its general nature and method. The second part also had two sections : (1) General principles of feeling, taste, and the desires of the senses; (2) The first principles of morality. When I thought through the theoretical part in its whole compass and in the mutual relations of all its parts, I remarked that something essential was still lacking—something which I in my long metaphysical inquiries had, like others, left unregarded, which, in fact, was the key to all the mysteries of a metaphysic which had so far not understood itself. This was the problem. I asked myself, what is the ground on which rests the relation between that in us which is called a presentation and the object. If the presentation contains only the manner in which the subject is affected by the object, then one can easily understand that it corresponds to the B

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object as an effect corresponds to its cause, and how this determination of our mind can represent something, i.e. have an object. That is—passive or sensible presentations have an understandable relation to objects, and on these lines the principles which are derived from the nature of our soul have an understandable validity applied to all things in so far as they are to be objects of the senses. In the same way, if what in us is called presentation were active in regard to the object, that is, if the object itself were brought into being because of the presentation—as we suppose that the knowledge which God has is the original of things : there again the conformity of those presentations with objects is understandable. In short, the possibility at least is understandable either of an archetypal intellect—where things depend upon the intuition of the intellect—or of an ectypal intellect, which gets the data for its logical activities from the sensible intuition of things. But our understanding is through its presentations not the cause of the object (except in morality where good purposes are), nor is the object the cause of the understanding's presentations—not in a real sense. The pure concepts of the understanding consequently cannot be abstracted from the impressions of the senses nor express the passive receptivity of presentations through the senses, but must have their sources in the nature of the soul, but not in the nature of the soul either so far as it is affected by the object or in so far as it produces the object. In the Dissertation I had contented myself with a merely negative account of the nature of intellectual presentations, in saying that they are not modifications of the mind by the object. But I passed over in silence the question as to how a presentation which referred to an object was possible without its being in any way affected by the object. I had said : sensible presentations represent things as they appear, intellectual presentations represent things as they are. But, then, how were these things to be given to us if not in the manner in which they affect us ; and if such intellectual presentations

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depend upon our own inner activity, whence comes the agreement which they claim to have with objects, which objects are yet not produced by these presentations ; and how do the axioms of pure reason about objects agree with these objects, if this agreement can get no help from experience ? In mathematics this can be explained : the objects are for us quantities, and can be represented as quantities only because we produce the presentation of them by taking one a number of times. Therefore, the concepts of quantity make themselves, and these principles can be made out a priori. But in relations of quality how can my understanding form entirely a priori of itself concepts of things with which things have necessarily got to agree ; how can it set forth real principles about the possibility of objects with which experience must agree truly, which principles are yet independent of experience ? This is the question behind which there lies a mystery about our faculty of understanding, as to how it gets this agreement with things in themselves. " Plato assumed a previous spiritual intuition of divinity as the original source of the pure concepts and principles of the understanding : Malebranche a still existing everactive intuition of this original being. Various moralists have assumed the same in regard to the primary moral laws. Crusius supposed there were certain implanted rules of judging and concepts which God had planted in the soul, of such a nature as to harmonize with things. Of which systems the former might be called an influxus hyperfhysicus, the latter an intellectual pre-established harmony. But the deus ex machina is the worst hypothesis which could be chosen when we are determining the origin and validity of our acts of knowledge. Not only does it involve inquiries in a circle, but it offers every opportunity for ingenious or foolish nonsense. "While I was thus looking for the sources of intellectual knowledge without which the nature and bounds of metaphysics cannot be determined, I managed to divide this scientific inquiry into essentially different sections, and

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tried to reduce transcendental philosophy, i.e. all the concepts of quite pure reason, to a definite number of categories. But I did not follow Aristotle, who put the categories as he found them in his ten predicables one after another, with no principle of arrangement. I tried to show how they divided themselves in classes according to a few principles of the understanding. Without now explaining at length the whole course of the inquiry up to its reaching the purpose set before it, I can say that I have achieved the substance of my intention and am now in a position to offer a Critique of Pure Reason, which deals with the nature of theoretical as well as of practical knowledge, so far as it is purely intellectual. The first part contains the sources, method, and bounds of metaphysics ; the second part will work out the pure principles of morality, and the first part should be published within three months." In the second of these letters the main problems of the Critique of Pure Reason are already stated, and Kant was, as the letter shows, at the time confident that the statement of his results would not take him long. But the complexity of the problem grew as he grappled with its solution. In 1772 it was to take him a few months. In the end of 1773 he is still engaged on it, but it is to appear after next Easter. In 1776 he has worked out what are to be the divisions of the first Critique, but is conscious that he has still much work to do before he can publish. Part of his Easter programme, a Critique of practical principles and of taste, has been in the meantime abandoned and is going to be the subject of two separate works, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement. Finally, in 1780, he took alarm over this long delay, thought that if he did not get his ideas written out at once he might never do so, and wrote out the Critique of Pure Reason in, as he tells us, about four or five months. It was published in 1781.

Ill THE CRITIQUE

OF PURE

REASON

(i) ITS STYLE AND METHOD

THE Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most illuminating books in the world when one understands it/ but it is also peculiarly baffling to understand. GoethTsaid that to read the Critique was like stepping into a brightly lighted room; but that is not the impression it gives the ordinary reader, nor are most readers willing to acknowledge that they are bewildered through an excess of light. Ever since it has been published it has been commented on, and the process of commenting on it has produced differing schools of interpretation. Kantian interpretation is in very much the position in which Kant describes metaphysics to be. It has certainly not reached " the sure path of a science," and as one dogmatic interpretation of what Kant meant is opposed by another, the place of both is taken by a scepticism which says that the book is so muddled and confused that it is not worth understanding. It is of course true that different generations interpret great men differently, as they come to view their work with different needs and different prepossessions, but there are certain features of the Critique which are responsible for a good deal of this difficulty in finding out what Kant meant. It owes some of its difficulties to the time and the manner in which it was thought out and written, and some to the general characteristics of Kant's way of thinking. The Critique was published in 1781, when Kant was fifty-seven years old. He had been working at it for eleven years—since 1770, when he was forty-six. In those eleven years he published practically nothing. He regarded the

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Critique as a complete break with his former thought. So it was : no one now pays any attention to the pre-Critical works of Kant, except to trace in them the tendencies in Kant's thought which prepared the way for the Critique. They are only of historical importance. Kant himself regarded them as of no importance. On the other hand, in those years which produced the Critique he was concerned with the problems with which not only the Critique of Pure Reason, but the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement are concerned. It was only as the complications of the first part of his work became more evident that he confined himself to the logical problems with which the first Critique is now concerned, and resolved to discuss the moral and aesthetic problems in separate works. But he regarded all the work he did from the Critique onwards—i.e. from 1781 to, say, 1793, the date of his last great original work {Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone)—as forming a unity. If we look at the dates of publication in these years, we see what years of continuous and rapid publication they were: 1781. Critique of Pure Reason. 1783. Prolegomena to any Future Metaphyic. 1785. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. 1786. Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science. 1787. Critique of Pure Reason (second edition). 1788. Critique of Practical Reason. 1790. Critique of Judgement. 1793. Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone. This late development of Kant's genius is one of the most remarkable things about him, distinguishing him from most other philosophers. Berkeley and Hume wrote their most important works in the early twenties. Descartes was about thirty when he wrote the Discourse. When Kant published the Dissertation in 1770, he had been teaching philosophy as a Privatdozent in Königsberg for

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fifteen years. He had lectured continuously throughout that time on logic and metaphysics, and he had published some dozen treatises, which had won him the reputation of being one of the most important of German philosophical writers at the time. The Critique o/_P«r^_^ww„jpifflstitiitßdr^a£airdiiig to Kant,L ä revoI^ionJn_philosophical thought. It claimed to show that the whole methTöcFöFpTülös^öpTiizing" wliich was acclffied atlfre^tinTe" WaY Breik^away from what Kant called dosmadcjt^tepTrysicsT" But it was also a revolution in his own, thought—aJuraakaway from the assumptions he had accepted and the. methods he "had" pursued through fifteen years' teaching. Yet during all the years in which the Critique was being thought out, he was going on lecturing mainly on the old lines, expounding the old metaphysics. The inevitable result of this situation was that Kant took a long time to see just how far his new discoveries were taking him : that he went on using old language, or language in old senses, which was inconsistent with his new thought: that this revolution is never complete—always going a little further but always muddled up with old assumptions and old language. No one nowadays can possibly accept all that Kant says, because if he agrees with the main thing Kant has to say—if he understands the main principles of his teaching—he cannot put it in Kant's way, or accept some of the presuppositions which Kant carries into his thinking without really making them alive. The Kantian student is forced to say sooner or later that, whatever Kant may have said in this or that place, this is what he really meant—or to dismiss certain elements in Kant's teaching as pre-critical. The only way of understanding Kant is to make up your mind what the main thing he has to say is (and that in the circumstances has in it an element of judgement, involving as it does appreciation of the general tendencies of the work), and to make that the key to the interpretation of the details. Secondly, the circumstances in which the Critique was

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written aggravated this situation. It was thought over for eleven years. As we have seen, Kant originally thought he could publish the Critique in a year or two. Year after year passed, and he was still not satisfied with his work, but he began to be alarmed at this continued delay, and felt that he must get the Critique done at all costs. He then wrote it out—or rather put it together—in four or five months. What that necessarily meant was not that, having thought and pondered for eleven years, he sat down and composed, as well as wrote it all out, from the beginning. He must have written an average of about five pages a day at a time when he was lecturing about fifteen hours a week. He used (as he was bound to do) material gradually collected as he worked on his problem for those years. The Critique, although it was written in so short a time, embodies different stages which Kant's thought had reached during twelve years. Kantian commentators have devoted much ingenuity to mapping the various stages in Kant's development of his Critical philosophy, and to distinguishing the different strata of thought represented in various parts of the Critique. That there is something in this Kantian higher criticism is clear. Kant, as he worked, wrote down differing attempts to solve his problem. He had a quite deliberate way of working by trying out all kinds of suggestions. As he came to write the Critique he would be sure to embody much of the writing he had done in his years of preparation, and often this would be expressed in a way in which he would not have expressed it at a later date. Nevertheless, this type of criticism has been overdone. Arguments which are confidently assigned to an early stage of Kant's critical thought, and supposed to have been afterwards abandoned, have a way of turning up in his later works when the explanation put forward for their presence in the first Critique is no longer valid. But, in any case, the peculiar circumstances of the composition of the Critique are not the only or a sufficient explanation of its apparent inconsistencies. They do not

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explain, for example, the curious presence of alternative arguments in some parts of the Critique. Any detailed commentary will distinguish in certain parts of the Critique, particularly in the ^Esthetic, the Deduction and the discussion on causation, alternative arguments— sometimes as many as five or six for the same position. They are sometimes not consistent with one another, and their existence side by side is not explained by the circumstances of the composition of the Critique. We are inclined to say of any one of these arguments : " If it is sound, it should be enough. Why should Kant put in the others ? If it is not sound, why should it be there ? " That these different arguments had occurred to him at different times, and were written on some of the sheets before him, is no explanation why Kant should not in the final composition choose the argument which then seemed to him best, and have done with it. The explanation of the peculiar characteristics of the Critique is, then, to be found elsewhere, and it is not far to seek if we remember what Kant meant by saying that philosophy with him was criticism; and if we recall the account of his manner of lecturing, and remember that he had been lecturing from fifteen to thirty hours a week for about twenty-five years, when he came to write the Critique, and was lecturing all the time that it was being written. Kant's contemporaries found his lectures extremely intelligible, and the Critique very difficult, and he says himself that he deliberately wrote the Critique in as systematic a manner as possible. In the second edition he explains that the method of the Critique was modelled on that of Wolff. " In the execution of the plan prescribed by the Critique, that is, in the future system of metaphysics, we have, therefore, to follow the strict method of the celebrated Wolff, the greatest of all the dogmatic philosophers. He was the first to show by example (and by his example he awakened that spirit of thoroughness which is not extinct in Germany) how the secure progress of a B I

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science is to be attained only through orderly establishment of principles, clear determination of concepts, insistence upon strictness of proof, and avoidance of venturesome, non-conscientious steps in our inferences."1 Kant, in his lectures, as we have seen, used Baumgarten as a textbook, and could then no doubt leave that arid work to supply the system and thoroughness while he devoted himself to making his class understand. The class who listened to Kant and, we may surmise, did not pay too much attention to Baumgarten, avoided the powder and got only the jam. But the Critique had to do what his lecturing and Baumgarten had done together. He had to introduce into his writing the element which in his lecturing had been supplied by a textbook. Hence he could not write as he had lectured. Further, and this is the important point, Kant, for all that he says, could not possibly follow the method of Wolff or Baumgarten. For he could not, as he had pointed out long before in the Prize Essay, begin with definitions and deduce his doctrine rigidly from them. For him, philosophy was criticism, i.e. the mind's reflexion on its ownroperaUoriS—HrarTmowledgeT of a priori concepts is knowledge of our own activities in thinking. He is, therefore, dealing with what can only be understood by those who have gone through the same process of reflexion as the author, vln philosophy, as Kant understands it, we are becoming aware of and reflecting on what we are doing when we think and act and make judgements about the beautiful. A great deal of the exposition of the Critique must, then, be devoted to making his readers perform the process of reflexion necessary to the apprehension of what Kant is talking about. Kant, as we saw, used to tell his class that he tried to teach them " not philosophy but to philosophize." Like any good teacher, he tried that in all sorts of ways. The advice of an old to a young lecturer, " Say nothing and say it nine times," is a paradoxical way of stating this need for trying various ways to make 1

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one's hearers perform the mental operation necessary if they are to apprehend what is being talked about. This surely is the explanation of the alternative arguments. It is as though Kant were saying : " If that will not make you see it, perhaps this will." But if the alternative arguments and the different ways of expressing, say, the relation between the thing in itself and appearances, which are such a puzzle to Kant's commentators, correspond to Kant's method in lecturing, what corresponds to the systematic textbook ? Kant clearly attached enormous importance to the need of finding a principle of completeness and system in his philosophical criticism. His solution is that if we will really reflect on the operations of the mind in thinking, we shall see that reason is a unity, that it is by its very nature systematic, and that once we apprehend the nature of rational activity, it will display itself as a complete system. Kant spared no pains to find a principle from which a full list of his categories and a complete division of the functions of reason could be discovered, and he thought he had found a clue to his problem in the results of the traditional logic. From formal logic used, as he says, as a guiding thread, he derived a plan which governs not only the first but all three Critiques. He attached enormous importance to what is called his architectonic, and is never tired of congratulating himself on its final and systematic nature. The consistency with which he holds on to this general scheme is as remarkable as his inconsistency in detail. Such is probably the explanation of that curious combination of consistency as a whole and inconsistency in detail which readers of the Critique are apt to find very baffling. (2) THE PREFACES

The Prefaces, especially the Preface to the Second Edition, give what may be called the plot of the Critique of Pure Reason, as the Introduction gives the Table of

KANT 44 Contents. Kant was one of the most systematic of thinkers. Though he is often inconsistent in details, he has always a firm grasp of the general thesis, a thesis which is continued in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement. The reader, if he is to avoid being lost in the details of Kant's arguments, will do well to get from the prefaces a clear understanding of the outline of the plot. The plot, as the prefaces present it, may be described as follows : Human reason is for ever puzzled by problems which it cannot avoid (they are forced on it by its own nature), but which it cannot solve—because their solution lies beyond the limits of our experience. The possibility of metaphysics is the central subject of the Critique. Men are bound, Kant holds, to ask questions about the ultimate nature of reality, of God, Freedom, and the Immortality of the Soul. Such questions are prompted by our moral nature, but the reaching out after the infinite and what is beyond the limits of our experience is implicit, Kant holds, in all our knowledge—even the most ordinary.) Metaphysical questions are the most important which can exercise the mind. Metaphysics, nevertheless, for all the labour which men have spent on it, compares most unfavourably, in respect of its success, with the natural sciences. It has not, in Kant's words, attained the sure path of a science. The sciences go from strength to strength : their methods are agreed on : their results are generally accepted. Metaphysics finds no such agreement. It has constantly to retrace its steps. What one metaphysician confidently affirms, another as confidently denies, till men in despair take refuge in general scepticism. This is the contrast with which the Critique starts, and from which its problem arises. Let us examine, Kant says, the method by which the sciences have become such. For the inquiries we now call sciences were not always scientific. They became so at quite definite times and for quite definite reasons. If we can discover the conditions of scientific knowledge, we may then ask how these conditions can be applied to metaphysics. But it is obvious that the

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success of the sciences is the success of reason. For Kant has never any belief in mere empiricism making a science. Mere empirical groping around becomes a science when a priori or rational principles are applied to a subject. The failure of metaphysics and the success of the sciences is a contrast between the failure of reason where it would appear most naturally to be at home, and its success in what seems at first sight a field alien to it. This examination of the secret of the success of the sciences and the failure of metaphysics is an examination—or, to use Kant's word, a criticism or critique—of pure reason. •^This is the outline of Kant's programme, and the prefaces give us also an outline of the answer. It will be found that reason is successful in the sciences because it is there applied to experience, where objects, in Kant's phrase, " conform to the mind," because the sciences deal with things as they appear and within the limits of intuition. These conditions do not apply to metaphysics, which necessarily seeks to go beyond these limits. But though reason can give no knowledge in the field of metaphysics, its questions remain. If they find no answer from dogmatic metaphysics or from science, the practical reas^iji^orajitjproyides something which serves instead of an answer. J Such is the outline of the plot. Before we go on to examine the " table of contents," there are certain things in the outline which need discussion—the idea of Criticism ; Kant's brief but important account in the Second Edition Preface of the manner in which mathematics and physics became sciences ; what he means by " objects conforming to the mind," the relation of the doctrine implied in this phrase to idealism, and the new meaning given to metaphysics. ~Tt has been maintained that philosophers who, like Kant, set themselves up to criticize human knowledge or to define and set forth its limitations, are guilty of a fatal fallacy at the outset. For how can knowledge be criticized but by knowledge, or what can demarcate the bounds of

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reason but reason ? Criticism implies a standard of which that which is criticized falls short. One cannot criticize knowledge without getting outside and beyond it, and that is impossible. Any kind of scepticism or criticism is condemned from the outset, for the scepticism cannot be sceptical of itself and the criticism cannot be critical of itself, and they are each of them knowledge. But the answer to such " high priori" methods of dealing with the idea of Criticism is that Kant, like Locke before him, starts with a distinction within knowledge. Some inquiries are scientific, and some, for all their efforts, are not. That is just a fact, and it is obviously a fact worth looking into. In the second place it is to be noted that the distinctive character of a science for Kant is not its certainty or infallibility, but its steady progress and the agreement among those working at it as to the methods of science. Earlier thinkers—Plato especially—had made a rather similar distinction between knowledge and opinion, but had based the distinction on the certainty and infallibility of knowledge as contrasted with the fallibility of opinion, and the basis of that contrast had been taken to consist in the different nature of the objects with which the two inquiries were concerned. Knowledge was of " things which cannot be otherwise," opinion of " things which can be otherwise." But Kant's instances of inquiries which are treading the sure path of a science include logic, which is concerned with the pure forms of thought, mathematics, which is a priori and yet applies to the sensible world, and physics, which although it is based on a priori principles is yet an empirical science, uses the method of experiment, and gets results which, because founded on observation, have not the clear-cut certainty of mathematics. Kant thinks that all sciences use and are based upon a priori principles, but that their claim to be sciences rests on the ^steady progress in the understanding of nature which the application of these principles brings about. The remarkable characteristic of modern science which

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON chiefly aroused Kant's attention, was that in it the use of a priori principles and observation and experiment went hand in hand. MoJeriTaHrohomy EadTjeeh made possible both by the development of mathematics and by the improvement of the telescope. Science had come into being, not by men turning to study the kind of objects of which true knowledge is possible, but by studying by a revolutionized method the same objects which before they had only " groped around." We may, therefore, when faced with the problem of why metaphysics which oughtjo be a science yet obstinately is not, do well to see how other inquiries became scientific, and then ask whether the same revolution is possible to metaphysics. This then Kant proceeds to do, and his account of the secret of scientific method as revealed in the origin of mathematics and of physics alike is of fundamental importance for the understanding of the Critique. Mathematics had been a rudimentary empirical inquiry among the Egyptians ; the Greeks made it a science. Physics had become a science in the seventeenth century. What had happened to make the change possible ? This is how Kant describes it:— " A new light flashed upon the mind of the first man (be he Thales or some other) who demonstrated the properties of the isosceles triangle. The true method, so he found, was not to inspect what he discerned either in the figure or in the bare concept of it, and from this, as it were, to read off its properties, but to bring out what was necessarily implied in the concepts that he had himself formed a priori, and had put into the figure in the construction by which .he had presented it to himself. If he is to know anything with a priori certainty he must not ascribe to the figure anything save what necessarily follows from what he has himself set into it in accordance with his concept.

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" When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane : when Toricelli made the air carry a weight, which he had calculated beforehand, to be equal to that of a definite volume of water . . . a light broke upon all students of nature. ^They learned that reason has insight into that only which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgement based on fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. . . .^Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which alone concordant appearances can be admitted as equivalent to laws, and in the other hand the experiment which it has devised in accordance with these principles, must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil 'wto l i s ^ n s j o ^ ^ say, answer questions which^ej^sjmnself formulated. Even pTIylacs^ therefore, owes the beneficent revolution in its point of view entirely to the happy thought, that while reason must seek in nature, not fictitiously ascribe to it, whatever as not being knowable through reason's own resources has to be learnt, if learnt at all, only from nature, it must adopt as its guide, in so seeking, that which it has itself put into nature." 1 Something of what Kant is after is plain enough. We can never attain knowledge without asking the right questions, and the Tightness of the question depends as much on us as on the things. Mere apprehension of facts never made a science. Facts have to be made intelligible, and the conditions. oLlhejr JilteUig^^ mind. "Teacher and scholar," "judge and witness," are, of course, but similes : but the judge learns more of his witness than the scholar of his teacher, because the judge's 1

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mind is prepared, and he has got his questions ready. And he learns more in spite of the fact that his questions limit and condition the witness's replies. He may miss something important which the witness has to tell him, because he has not asked the right question, but without his theory, which dictates his question and limits the answer, there would be no understanding of the facts at all. This is the truth which Kant is going to express later in the sentence: "Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Again—and this is perhaps for Kant's teaching the more important point— the question is no good without the answer, but the form of the question dictates the form of the answer ; only if the witness submits to the conditions prescribed by the judge's questions will knowledge result. / And yet it would be unwarranted to argue that because knowledge so results, the form of the answer comes from the answerer—or to conclude anything about the answerer from that form.'/. It may be objected to all this that the simile is being pushed too far. Facts and things cannot answer. What can possibly correspond in science to the answering of a witness ? Are not facts just there to be apprehended and understood or not ? But this is precisely what Kant denies. He does think that/knowledge is always a joint product, of the form prescribed by the mind and the matter supplied by the objects that without this joint processthere can be no knowledge whatever, and that, therefore, there is a sense in which we must think of the mind and its objects as being as independent of and indispensable to one another as are judge and witness,/and yet in such a relation that the objects have to submit to the conditions prescribed by the mindA What that can mean we shall have to consider, but this is what Kant now goes on to say. He proposes to apply to metaphysics the analogy he has conceived when examining the nature of the sciences. " Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard

KANT 50 to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must, therefore, make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge."* But how can objects conform to the mind ? At any rate, says Kant, the experience in which alone objects can be known may conform to the mind. For experience, like the results of cross-examination, is a joint product. This new way of conceiving the possibility of a priori knowledge Kant compares to the revolution brought about in astronomy by Copernicus. The comparison has often been derided. Copernicus found man on this earth the supposed centre of the universe. His " revolution" destroyed for ever that anthropocentric view. But Kant, in supposing that, Instead of the mind conforming to objects, objects conform to the mind, is going in precisely the opposite direction and making man's mind the centre of the universe of knowledge. This criticism involves, as we shall see, a misunderstanding of Kant, but it also involves, as Professor Kemp Smith has shown, a misunderstanding of Copernicus. What Copernicus had done was to suggest that certain changes in the apparent positions of the heavenly bodies were to be explained not by changes in these bodies but by changes in the position of the observer brought about by the rotation of the earth. The source of the true explanation of some of what we see is in an understanding of what is happening to ourselves. Kant is to show that the explanation of certain elements in our knqwledgeJs to be found in ourselves—in what the mind contributes—and Kant thinks that an understanding of this is the only way to confirm the objectivity of our knowledge. As Kant says : " We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might 1

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not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest." 1 The parallel with Copernicus is thus a true one, but" nevertheless " objects conforming to the mind" is a startling expression, easily rnisunderstood. Kant did not help matters by calling his system " transcendental idealism." ^ o r in spite of all his asseverations that transcendental idealism meant empirical realism, the adjective " transcendental," whicTTwäilHtendeoT to make the noun less misleading, only made it more so); for it has suggested that Kant's is an idealism of a more than usually thoroughgoing kind. It will be well, therefore, before we go further, to say something about what Kant conceived to be his relation to idealism. For it is quite certain that when some of the first readers of the Critique described Kant as an idealist, in the then accepted sense of the term, he was both surprised and annoyed at the misunderstanding. It is also true that in spite of all he said the misunderstanding has persisted. But before we take leave of Copernicus, let us remember that the Copernican revolution started as an explanation of apparent changes in the positions of the heavenly bodies. Apparent changes are observed and recorded. They are, indeed, all we can observe and "record". But what kind of things are they ? The answer surely is, no kind of (kings ; the Copernican explanation of them is that they are due to changes in things—changes in our position and changes in the positions of the stars and the planets. Do not let us, therefore, begin by assuming that what Kant calls objects are any kind of things either, although they are what we observe—are, in fact, in the strict sense of the word, objects. In the letter to Herz of 1772, already quoted (p. 34), where Kant is first shown conscious of the problem raised by his learning from Hume that the principle of causation was both necessary to experience and not obtained by analysis, Kant says that he could understand the necessity 1

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of knowledge if knowledge were either archetypal or ectypal: if what we know were produced entirely by the mind or entirely by objects. Kant's early difficulties had taught him that neither of these alternatives was possible. The new sciences, he had convinced himself, relied on observation, and could not do without it. Knowledge could not be regarded as either the mind's coming to apprehend and reason from its own innate principles, or as the mind's unaided self-development./The attempts of Descartes and Leibniz to explain the sciences on those lines had, he considered, hopelessly broken down. The English empiricists had chosen the "j^ctypal " alternative. For them the guarantee of the validity of knowledge was the mind's passive reception of the impressions stamped upon it by external things. But Hume had shown by his account of causation as at once an essential and (on such a theory of knowledge) an inexplicable principle that that " way of ideas " would not explain the facts. Both those alternatives had led in different ways to idealism, to what Kant calls the problematic idealism of Descartes and the dogmatic idealism of Berkeley. . For the archetypal alternative assumes that knowledge is really the mmdTs knowledge of the principles within itself, and it can only get beyond itself to an external world by miraculous interventions. The existence of the external world* is but an unsupported conjecture. The empiricists had begun by supposing the independent reality of external things producing impressions on the mind. But as they supposed that the physical effects of external things got somehow changed into mental " impressions " or " images," which had in some curious way to get out of physical space " into " the mind, they thought of knowing as the mind's regarding its own ideas or images. It was easy then for Berkeley to kick away the ladder by which this position had been reached and deny the existence of the external things altogether.
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mind knew itself better than, or before, it knew external objects., He is going to argue that we never come to know ourselves except over against what is not ourselves, and vice versa. If he calls our knowledge of the external world phenomenal, he calls our knowledge of ourselves the same. He never doubted the real existence of ourselves, and he as little doubted the real existence of other things. He thought indeed that the independence and the relatedness of mind and things was the presupposition of all objective knowledge. His " refutation of idealism," which some have thought inconsistent with his position, was for him fundamental. He thought indeed that it was only from this position that idealism could be refuted. But, if this is all true, why was Kant ever thought to be an idealist, and what is the meaning of " objects conforming to the mind " ? Does he not continually solve the problems with which he is confronted by saying that we make the mistake of supposing that we have to do in knowledge with things in themselves, whereas we have only to do with appearances in the mind ? Is not that Locke over again, only wanting another Berkeley to make it a thoroughgoing, consistent, and impossible idealism ? Kant started, as Locke started, with the common-sense assumption that here on the one side is our mind, and there on the other side are external things, and that knowledge of external things arises in the mind. " There can be no doubt," runs the first sentence of the Introduction, " that all our knowledge begins with experience. For how should our faculty of knowledge be awakened into action did not objects affecting our senses partly of themselves produce representations, partly arouse -the activity of our understanding to compare these representations, and, by combining or separating them, wake up the raw materials of the sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects which is entitled experience ? " x That is the position with which Kant starts, and with that position broadly he ends. He never substantially 1

B 1.

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departed from it. But that position, when held by Locke, had shown itself curiously unstable. How did Kant contrive to give it greater stability ? The answer is in the first place that Kant, unlike Locke, and in spite of occasional phrases which will not bear thinking out, never committed himself to that theory of perception which supposes that the mind is aware only of images or ideas—separate mental entities produced in the mind by things. He does not attempt to describe perception or intuition in terms of anything else. His most usual expression is not that we know only phenomena, not things, but that w£^ow_thjn^_as^they appear and not as they aje^in themselyes. We know things as they look and sound, etc., and how they look and sound, etc., depends partly on us. We can never get away from the general fact of looking, though we can get away, and do in all objective thinking get away, from the particular variations introduced into how things look from particular variations in us. To ask what things are in themselves is, in his view, to ask either what we should apprehend if we could apprehend them by thought alone without intuition, or how things would look if they didn't look. In the second place, Locke prepared the way for Berkeley by making objectivity consist in the agreement between our ideas and objects, as though we were aware only of ideas in our minds, and yet attained truth in a comparison between these ideas and the things which produced thern. But as ex hypothesi we cannot apprehend the things that produced them, this position is an absurd one ; the things are otiose, and Berkeley's demolition of them was inevitable. Descartes had begun the confusion by describing truth as the property of that which we clearly and distinctly conceive. But if truth be regarded thus, as inhering in or belonging to something distinct, then when we are asking whether what we apprehend is true, we are really asking whether it is real or an illusion, and we shall concern ourselves, as is done in the endless disputes

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between idealism and realism, about the nature of that which we apprehend, whether it is an image or a reality— something dependent on us or independent of us. And if, like Berkeley, we begin by holding that all we can apprehend is something dependent on mind, then we are bound to go on to say that all that is real must be dependent on mind. But this is to misconceive the nature of truth. That is true which, when we apprehend it, tells us about something else than that which we apprehend. That is what Locke was after when he talked of the agreement between ideas and things. But if ideas be ex hypothesi that which we apprehend, the agreement between them and things cannot be apprehended. Kant takes up a position to which all such disputes are irrelevant by seeing that truth is concerned not with the relation between what we apprehend and something on the other side of the apprehensible, nor with the quality of that which is apprehended, but with the relation of what we apprehend at one time to what we apprehend at another—or, as he puts itjM;he relation between present and possible experience. This is the secret of his stress on the synthetic rather thaa the analytic nature of judgement His predecessors had made analysis the typical act of knowledge, as though we were presented at first with a confused whole which thought then analysed either into self-evident propositions or into simple ideas passively received and therefore bearing on them the authentic mark of the thing which impressed them. For Kant knowledge is always of what is in experience, and experience is always in time, and as we come to know more and more of the world that is presented to us, we are never presented with it all at once, buJLat any moment we look back to the past and forward to the future. We arejneyer presented with a whole, but come nearer seeing things as a whole by connecting what we see now with what we have seen and what we are to see. There is no knowing which does not take place in time—and none, therefore, which is not connecting what we apprehend now with what we have

KANT 56 apprehended or are to apprehend. Connecting in time is the typical act of knowledge, and, therefore, all knowledge involves^ synthesis. Hume had seen something of this when he made association play such an important part in knowledge. But he denied the distinction between such more or less mechanical association as we allude to when we use such phrases as " a curious association of ideas," and the association or synthesis which we make when we are judging what we believe to be true. Kantmakes this distinction a fundamental one. There is, according to him, an association which is only subjective, and an association which is objective. Both are governed by rules. But the rules governing the first are empirical, those governing the second a priori. There are certain principles which we must observe if our synthesis or association is to be true. Kant proposes to give a list of such principles and then explain their validity. The paradoxical part of what he has to say is that our synthesis will be objective—not subjective—conforming to the facts, not our mere personal suggestion—enabling us to predict what we shall actually see, if it conforms to principles which are not discovered in experience but imposed by us. This doctrine will be considered later. ^Vhat is important for our understanding of Kant's relatioirto idealism is that because in all this process of synthesis—of connecting what we see at one time with what we see at another—we do not in the distinction between subjective and objective go outside or beyond the sphere of what we experience, of how things look and sound, etc.; the status of these looks and sounds does not arise, the ordinary controversies about idealism and realism are irrelevant, and Kant does not make the mistake which made Locke's statement of the common-sense position unstable., Kant, indeed, in the Opus Postumum, definitely says that " In the transcendental philosophy it does not matter whether I regard sense representations from an idealist or a realist standpoint, because we are only concerned with

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the relation of objects to one another, not with thenrelation to the subject." When, therefore, Kant talks of objects conforming to the mind, he is not making any assertion about the nature or behaviour of things, except in so far as is involved in saying that both the mind and things contribute to knowledge. His idealism is not metaphysical doctrine, as most idealism is. In fact, one of the main results of Kant's inquiry into the nature of the sciences—an inquiry which was started to see what conditions metaphysics would have to fulfil if it was " to tread the sure path of a science "—is that metaphysics cannot fulfil these conditions, and cannot, therefore, become a science—not, at any rate, metaphysics in the ordinary sense. What sort of metaphysics Kant thinks ought to take its place we shall see later. /''''-'•

(3) THE INTRODUCTION

The conception of synthesis which we have seen to be fundamental in Kant's conception of the nature of knowledge dominates the Introduction. There the far-reaching problem propounded in the Prefaces is set forth in its logical aspect—how judgements may be both a priori and synthetic- Kant in the very statement of his problem is criticizing both his rationalist and his empirical predecessors. His so-called pre-Critical writings had been largely taken up with the impossibility of getting truth in metaphysics—of proving the existence of God, for example— by analysis of conceptions. He had come to think that all metaphysical judgements of any importance were synthetic, in the sense that the predicate was not got by analysis of the subject, bjut by somehow going out of or beyond the subject and coming to connect it with what it had not hitherto been seen to be connected with^ The belief in the power of analysis had been the result of reflexion on mathematical processes. The certain assurance in that field of new knowledge, apparently got by analysis, made analytical reasoning appear the true type

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of all a priori knowledge. Kant, however, insists that mathematical discovery is not a mere matter of analysis. It always involves a synthetical element: even the result of a simple sum is not got by analysis, but by counting or some kind of construction. He challenges, therefore, the rationalist assumption that a priori judgements are necessarily analytic. The empiricists, on the other hand, had seen in synthesis mere association—mere seeing or thinking together. When Hume discovered that the principle of causality was synthetic, i.e. was not got by mere analysis of the conception of an event, and had also seen that it was a priori, in the sense that it was presupposed in most of our ordinary experience, he had refused to call it a judgement, and had reduced it to the rank of an instinctive and irrational feeling. The empiricists, therefore, took for granted that all judgements were synthetic:and a posteriori, i.e. depending upon gwöepiic>Ji\ of asgociated qualities—strictly speaking, nothing but simpIe~p6rception. Kant has made the discovery that there are judgements which are both a priori and synthetic, and that they are the presupposition of science. For he takes for granted that there cannot be science as contrasted with mere empirical examination without universality and necessity, and that universality and necessity are the qualities only of what is a priori. If we are to ask what are the conditions which have made science possible, „we have only to ask how a priori synthetic judgements are possible in the sphere with which the science in question is concerned. T£ant notes three characteristic types of synthetic a priori judgements—the judgements of pure mathematics, the judgements such as that every event has a cause or that " in all changes of the physical world the quantity of matter remains the same," and the judgements of metaphysics. His inquiry into the possibility, which for Kant means the conditions of the occurrence and the validity of such judgements, can, therefore be described by him as an attempt to answer the questions : How is pure mathe-

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matics possible ? How is pure science of nature possible ? And lastly, How is metaphysics possible ? As, however, he does not think that metaphysics in the ordinary sense is possible, the last question divides itself into two. How is metaphysics possible as a natural inclination ? That is, How do these questions arise, the attempt to answer which is the concern of ordinary metaphysics ? Secondly, when we have shown that metaphysics as an attempt to answer these questions is a mistake, there remains the question, How is metaphysics possible as a science ? Can we remould metaphysics and make it, instead of a delusion, a really scientific inquiry ? Kant makes a connexion between these several questions and the various divisions of the Critique. The ^Esthetic is supposed to be an answer to the question about the possibility of mathematics ; the Analytic to explain the possibility of what he calls pure science of nature ; and the Dialectic to be concerned with metaphysics. There are, however, as we shall see, difficulties in this correspondence. Such is in outline the thesis of the Introduction. It seems at first sight straightforward, but there are in it certain difficulties which deserve discussion, as they are of great importance throughout the Critique. When Kant is explaining the necessity of examining the nature and conditions of a priori synthetic judgements, he takes for granted that there are analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori judgements. These have been already discovered and expounded by others. He is simply calling attention to a new variety of judgement hitherto unnoticed. Our difficulty nowadays is not to admit that there are synthetic judgements, but that there are any analytic judgements, and to admit that there is no difficulty in the synthetic a posteriori as he describes it. There are no really satisfactory instances of analytic judgements. They all seem on examination to be statements about the meaning of words. They are not so much explications of a concept as statements of what we mean

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by a term. And, on the other hand, although Kant says that there is no difficulty about a posteriori synthetic judgements because experience is the tertium quid which makes the synthesis possible, this is a very general statement which is really inconsistent with his own later account of judgement in the Analytic. Hume, by emphasizing only the synthetic nature of judgement, had made out judgement and the association of ideas to be one and the same thing—which obviously will not do. An association of ideas is just not a judgement. When we say "that rock is like the Duke of Wellington," we do not mean that it is the Duke of Wellington; but that it reminds us of him; but if association and judgement were the same, there could be no difference between the two statements. The empirical judgement as Locke and his successors had described it is no judgement at all. QKant is going to show in the Deduction of the Categories that all judgements are informed by a necessary principle ; that all judgements, therefore, require what he calls I deduction—>an explanation of how a universal and *- necessary principle can combine with the data of observation. That means that he is going to show that his statement in the Introduction, that empirical a posteriori judgements find their unity of connexion in experience, ) needs, to say the least of it, amplification.) It implies also that he is mistaken in supposing, as he seems to do in the Introduction, that empirical judgements give no real universality. Kant is really concerned with the fact that analytic judgements as the rationalists described them give no increase in knowledge, and synthetic a posteriori judgements as the empiricists described them give no universality, while he has discovered certain judgements, the synthetic a priori, which give both. It is very characteristic of Kant's method of tackling problems that he takes the problem as it arises, in the existence of certain judgements which obviously will not fit into either of the accepted types, and accepts for the meantime the traditional view about those types. ^What is going to happen is

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that the new type of judgement is going to turn out to be the pattern of all judging. \ This way of Kant's of tackling things piecemeal has certain disadvantageous consequences which are especially apparent in the Introduction and the ^Esthetic. He is trying in the Introduction to define his problem, and he practically does so by assuming that the distinctions between analytic and synthetic, a priori and a posteriori, are obvious and need little elucidation. The one new point he has to make is that he proposes a new combination : to analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori he proposes to add synthetic a priori. He takes for granted the notion of a priori thought implied in the rationalist yiew of analytic knowledge, and the notion of synthesis implied in the empiricists' description of empirical judgements, and puts them together. But this means that he gives a very confusing account of both, and especially of what he means by a priori. The rationalists had made a distinction between reason and intuition, and supposed that rational thinking was something which went on unaided by and independent of intuition. There the mind alone, by exercise of its own peculiar powers, apprehended reality. Kant talks often of things as noumena, objects apprehended by reason, because the position from which he started pre-supposed that it was the nature of reason to apprehend reality. Realities—things in themselves—and objects apprehended by reason thus meant the same. Such exercise of reason being entirely separate from and independent of intuition was described as a priori —as though before any intuitive experience the mind could and did apprehend reality unaided. The temporal suggestion in the phrase a priori is unfortunate; it gave rise to all the difficulties in the conception of innate ideas, which Locke trenchantly criticized at the beginning of the Essay. The doctrine implied not the priority but the independence of rational knowledge. Such knowledge needed nothing and got nothing from intuition. Now Kant gives up the sharp separation of a priori or

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rational and a posteriori or empirical knowledge. The first words of the first paragraph of the Introduction are : " There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience." That is against the doctrine of innate ideas. The first words of the second paragraph criticize the empiricists: " But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience." In all experience there is an a priori element. But he goes on to describe our knowledge as a compound. " For it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge (sensible impressions serving merely as the occasion) supplies from itself. If our faculty of knowledge makes any such addition, it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish it from the raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in separating it."^ The implication is that though these two elements are conjoined, each exists as it were in its own right, and they could be separated ; and that suggestion is confirmed when Kant goes on to say that it is worth inquiring whether there is knowledge independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses ; and says that he will mean by a priori knowledge such as is absolutely independent of all experience ; distinguishes a specially pure a priori knowledge in which absolutely nothing empirical is mixed; and actually, inconsistently with all he is going on to say, he makes the proposition that every change has a^ cause a proposition "which is a priori but not pure, because change is a concept which can only be got from experience." Pure a priori knowledge, on this showing, is knowledge got outside or independent of the world of change : knowledge of what Plato called things which are in themselves always the same. The mind, it is assumed, can somehow get away from the temporal process and apprehend the changeless. Kant, when he talks of pure a priori knowledge in the Introduction, is clearly thinking of mathematics, * B I and 2.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON 63 and particularly of pure geometry. He takes over without criticism the traditional conception of mathematics. Mathematics and metaphysics are both concerned with a ; timeless world. The third type of a priori judgements which are the basis of the natural sciences, of which the principle of causality is the most prominent, seem to be of a slightly inferior brand of a priori. But when we come to the Analytic we find that judgements of this thinLiype become for Kant the typical instances of the a priori, and that other judgements, including the mathematical, are judged in the light of these : that Kant has then to give up the notion of experience being a compound of two elements, each of which can exist separately apart from the combination. A priori then comes to mean not that which is absolutely separate from and independent of all experience, but that which is independent of any particular experience. "V One aspect of experience is that the world is füll of a number of things and that we never exhaust its infinite Variety. This we can never entirely master, and because we cannot, our knowledge has to wait for it to be given. But along with this element of variety, or changing qualities, there is a constant element—what Kant calls the form as opposed to the matter of experience. We can see certain relations within that form to be entirely independent of their matter, so that they will hold whatever the variations of the content filling them. This is what Kant is thinking of when he says that the distinctive mark of the a priori is its strict universality : the a priori is N something that holds at all times and all places. Because / mathematics is a priori in this sense, we assume that its propositions hold in the stars as much as on this earth. It is with the a priori in this sense that Kant is going to be concerned. The Critique is to examine its extent and the conditions and justification of its validity. The other far-reaching ambiguity in the Introduction comes from Kant's taking over at the beginning the empiricists' account of synthesis as he had taken over the

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rationalists' account of the a priori. CThe conception of synthesis is dominant with Kant, as we saw, because he holds that knowledge is always a process in time f\that it is never therefore a process where we begin with everything given to us and have only to take it to pieces, to disentangle or dissect the whole before us. Wh^tjs. giyejDL tQus. JooksJjacJkJx) .the.pasLand- forward-to 4heiuture, and can only bejindfitstood in^thaJighjL of „what is beyond itseJtfJ_|ja,jjrier„isJkn,9Kfc..thexefore,, we have.to connect what we are aware, of,iiow,,with.,what.we have been or are to Be aware of. There is no knowledge without imagination] But the empiricists had gone much further in their reduction of knowledge to association. For they had been influenced by the desire to find ultimate simple units of association or composition, misled by scientific analogies. They thought of that which was synthesized as simple ideas or impressions—mental atoms—what modern writers call sensa—contents with no internal diversity or variety. For their way of thinking all relations were external. There was and could be nothing in the units of synthesis themselves—in the impressions or ideas—which could determine their relations. Their synthesis was pure synthesis with no analysis about it. Analysis could only be of what had already been synthesized. For the units of mental synthesis being atoms were unanalysable. It was this "mental atomism which led to Hume's famous statement in the appendix to the Treatise, where he lays down two propositions which he can " neither render consistent nor renounce "—" that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences." Now this account of experience is clearly as misleading in the one direction as the rationalists' account was in the other. We do not start with everything given us, having only to analyse. But neither do we start with isolated atoms. What we are given—what we are aware of—is not a whole in the sense of being complete, but it is a whole in the sense of having some compass—some extent in space,

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some duration in time, some internal variety and structure; it is something, that is, which can be and is analysed. When we connect our present with our past or future, we do not connect our whole present but some elements in ft, and we connect it not with our whole past but with some elements in it. There is always analysis combined with synthesis. There are always relations within the given as well as relations between the given and what is not given. It is almost certain for other reasons that Kant had not read Hume's Treatise. He certainly shows no signs of having ever appreciated Hume's difficulty. In none of his accounts of either Locke or Hume does he seem to have grasped the atomism in- them. He has no sympathy with their desire to get to the ultimately unanalysable datum. He quite definitely parts company with Hume in his account of space and time. They are, as we shall see when examining the ^Esthetic, given as wholes. He even neglects unduly in the ^Esthetic the element of synthesis involved in the apprehension of time and space. Similarly the given is for him always a manifold : time involves the comprehension of the simultaneous as well as of the successive : duration as~well as succession is an aspect of time. Intuition—anschauung—as compared to a supposed mere receptivity of impressions—is always of a manifold. And we shall see when we come to the Critique of Judgement what importance he attached to the apprehension of empirical form and structure in the given. „, Judgement, then, for Kant, as the Deduction shows, involves analysis as well as synthesis. But Kant never makes this point clearly. In the first Critique, at any rate, he concentrates all his attention on synthesis, and if we come to Kant with Hume's difficulties in our mind, as they were not in Kant's, we might suppose that Kant thought that Hume's difficulties about the synthesis of atomic impressions were got over by ascribing a principle of synthesis to the mind, as though all relations were imposed by the mind upon objects. There is some justification for Kant's procedure. In c

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this Critique he is concerned with a priori synthesis, and he ^ does think that that is imposed by the mind upon objects. He takes empirical synthesis for granted. When he does come to examine it in the Critique of Judgement, these ambiguities disappear. But he would have saved his readers a great deal of misunderstanding, and himself some inconsistencies, if he had begun in the Introduction, not by setting up a new kind of judgement—the synthetic a priori—over against the analytic a priori and the synthetic a posteriori, but by giving a revised account, based on his later analysis of the judgement, of the combination of these diverse elements in all judging. (4) THE ^ESTHETIC

At the end of the Introduction Kant explains that the division of the first main section of the Critique into what he calls the Esthetic and the Analytic is based upon the fact that there are two sources of human knowledge, which may spring from a common root unknown to us, namely, sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, and through the second of which they are thought. Kant thus takes over from the empiricists the view of the passivity of the mind in sensation. Sensation is the given, understanding the spontaneous element of knowledge. ; He holds that there is no knowledge without these two elements—one is useless without the other—but their functions in knowledge are quite different, and it is vital that they should not be confused. This distinction between the passive and the spontaneous element—between what is given and what is constructed, intuition and thinking, sensibility and understanding— runs all through Kant's thought. It has been criticized as pre-Critical, but the Kantian system would go to pieces without it. At the same time, the particular way in which the distinction is conceived by Kant is considerably altered in

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the course of the Critique, and much of the presentation of the distinction in the ^Esthetic is pre-Critical. /*"" What Kant appears to do in the ^Esthetic is, as we have already suggested, to take the account of the understanding as constructive and spontaneous from the rationalists, and the account of sensation as passive from the empiricists, and say that both are necessary to knowledge^—adding this very important and significant doctrine, that space and time are not the products of the understanding but part of the passively received or given, but an a priori element in that given and to be distinguished from the a posteriori element represented by sensations. We shall discuss some of the difficulties of Kant's exposition later. Meantime it is important to remember that Kant is putting space and time on the side of the given. When we start thinking or judging or in any way using the understanding, there are space and time given to begin with. A great deal of misunderstanding of Kant would be impossible if this were remembered. Kant begins the ^Esthetic by stating this distinction at some length : " In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and from which all thought gains its material. But intuition takes place only in so far as the object is given us. This again is only possible, to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects, is entitled sensibility. Objects are given to us by means of sensibility and it alone yields us intuitions ; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts. But all thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

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" The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition, which is in relation to the object through sensation, is entitled empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled appearance. " That in the appearance which corresponds to sensation I term its matter; but that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations, I term the form of appearance."1 The " given " for Kant is all appearance ; it is all the result of the effect of things on the sense organs : it is neither the real things as they are in themselves, nor is it the work of the mind ; it comes from the interaction of the mind and external things. It is all, therefore, what Kant calls empirically real. There it is; we do not make it for ourselves ; when we begin to think we find it there. And it is given both with an infinite variety of sense qualities and with a certain form or structure. This form or structure can be considered independently of the sensations which are ordered in it. That is what we mean by the distinction of form and matter. But the form is always what Kant calls transcendentally ideal; that is, if we do not remember that it is the form of the way things look— a form of intuition—and treat it as though it existed in its own right, we shall find ourselves involved in difficulties at once. We shall be asking how things would look if they didn't look, or be supposing that we could come to a knowledge of their nature without looking at them. Kant sums up his teaching in his " general remarks on the Transcendental ^Esthetic " in the following words : " What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance ; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, 1

A ig, 20 ; B 33, 34.

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or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be run over, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay, space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What, objecls j n a y b e in themselves, and apart from all thirreceptivity~of our" sensibility, remains completely unknown to us ? We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them—a mode which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared in by every being, though, certainly, by every human being. With this alone have we any concern. Space and time are its pure forms and sensation in general its matter. The former alone can we know a priori, that is, prior to all actual perception : and such knowledge is, therefore, called pure intuition. The latter is that in our knowledge which leads to its being called a posteriori knowledge, that is, empirical intuition. The former inhere in our sensibility with absolute necessity, no matter of what kind our sensations may be; the latter can exist in var5dng modes."^ Kant's account of space and time in the Esthetic is largely determined by his sense of the inadequacy of two previous views which at that time disputed the field : the view of Leibniz, only recently made known in any kind of completeness by the publication of the New Essays on Human Understanding ; and the views of Newton and the Newtonians. The opposition between the Leibnizian view of space and time and the scientific view had been clearly set forth by the great German mathematician, Euler.2 " The metaphysician divides the world, in order to render it intelligible, into ultimate simple parts. The mathematician must insist that the divisibility of matter or of space is infinite, and that, therefore, an indivisible simple can never be reached. The metaphysician reduces * A 42 ; B 59-60. * Quoted by Cassirer, Kant'.s Leben und Lehre, p . 111.

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reality to a sum of independent point-like substances which, in their composition, produce the appearance or rather the illusion of extension ; the mathematician on the other hand knows that, thanks to the continuity of space and time, it is possible to go only from a more complex spatial or temporal relation to a less complex relation, but that it is never possible to make extension out of points— the extended out of the unextended. Further, according to the teachings of metaphysics, pure space and pure time are in themselves nothing, but are both thought of only as determinations, as accidents of bodies and their movements which alone are real; on the other hand, the mathematician and the physicist, while they do not concern themselves to determine the kind of reality which pertains to time and space, must insist that some sort of reality is to be attributed to them, and that extension and duration (even when abstracted from the extended and the enduring) possess an independent reality. Without that assumption it is impossible to give a clear and determinate sense to the laws of motion—e.g. the law of persistence in motion cannot be stated unambiguously and precisely unless pure (or, as Newton called it, absolute) space is distinguished from all that it contains, and is recognized as an independent whole in relation to which the rest or motion of a material system can be spoken of." That is the case of the scientist—or at least the Newtonian physicist—against Leibniz. Kant was quite clear that the Leibnizian view of space made physics impossible. He did, of course, take the finality of Newtonian physics for granted, and we might be tempted to maintain that the general theory of relativity has entirely altered the position. That is too large a question to discuss here. But Kant's real quarrel with Leibniz was that the applied mathematical sciences take time and space in some sense as given and assumed before determination of objects in space can begin and (that is not really touched by the theory of relativity)

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On the other hand, Kant considered that if the Newtonians' claims for the independent reality of time and space, as distinguished from bodies in time and space, were admitted, impossible consequences followed for metaphysics. If we accept the view of the absolute reality of time and space, we must assume two eternal and infinite independent not-things " which are there, without anything real being there, only in order to contain what is real." The Newtonian view of reality implied in the assumption of absolute time and space is not really intelligible. Kant was also concerned, as we shall see later, with the antinomies which were involved in the doctrine of the absolute reality of time and space. This, then, is the dilemma. Mathematics and physics assume that you take space and time for granted in the determination of objects and that, therefore, you cannot begin with objects and their determinations, and from them go to spatial and temporal determinations. But if this '• independence of space and time from the varying character-/v, istics of objects in space and time is granted—and to grant it seems implied in the validity of mathematics and physics—and if we, therefore, give space and time an independent reality, impossible metaphysical difficulties arise. This consideration of the impossibility of the two existing views leads Kant to his own conclusion. Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of the external sense, i.e. the subjective condition of sensibility under which alone external intuition is possible. What does Kant mean by;" the form of intuition "? --No really satisfactory answer can be given in the ^Esthetic. For there Kant can only say what he means there by declaring that space and time are empirically real but transcendentally ideal. But he means by that not simply that we are aware of space and time in ourselves (as forms of our sensibility, whatever that may mean), but that they are necessarily implied in objective judgement. But it is not till the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories that

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Kant explains what is implied in objective judgement. When he does that, he gives a quite new account of sensibility and imagination, really inconsistent with the form given in the ^Esthetic to the distinction between intuition and understanding. So long as we are simply dealing with the ^Esthetic, we cannot give a satisfactory account of space and time on Kant's lines. All we can see is the main lines of the position he was trying to hold on to. We can elucidate the ^Esthetic by seeing what he does not mean, and perhaps also by noticing certain definite mistakes which he fell into because of his sharp separation between the ^Esthetic and the Analytic. " The merely formal ideality of the objects of external sense," says Kant in one of his reflexions, " is proved in the Transcendental ^Esthetic : their material ideality—the notion that there is no external object corresponding to them—is thereby rebutted." Kant thinks that space and time are forms of our experience of objects. There is a serious ambiguity to be noticed later in his treatment of time, but this may for the moment be disregarded. He sometimes seems to talk as though the whole of space and time with spatial and temporal determinations were purely mental—as though the mind found in itself the elaborate structure of empty spatial and temporal determinations—prior to and quite independently of any experience of specific sensations— and then fitted non-temporal and non-spatial sensations into this framework. That was certainly not Kant's final view. " To every given spatial determination," he says in tha Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, " there must be a ground in the object which is itself unknown." 1 Similarly he says in the observations to the first Antinomy : " things, as appearances, determine space, that is, of all its possible predicates of magnitude and relation they determine this or that particular one to belong to the real."2 That some such view was what he was after is also shown 1

B. E. iv. p. 507, 1. 27.

2

A 432; B 460.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON by his answer to an objection raised by the mathematician Lambert to his account of time. Lambert had said : " You cannot say that time is unreal; making it a form of the mind does not make it unreal, for, after all,the mind and its changes are real." Kant's answer is that the fact that this objection is made against his account of time and not against his account of space shows that his position has been misunderstood. It has been assumed that when he says that space is a form of sensibility, he means that • it is real within the mind but not otherwise, and, therefore, that its externality, which is its essence, is an illusion. In other words, to make space mental; would be to make it unreal, but to make time mental is not to make time unreal. Kant's answer is that space and time are equally real—the real appearing in the form of intuition, but equally unreal when regarded as existing apart from such intuitions. The mind's own experience of time implies absolute time in the Newtonian sense just as much as does our experience of external change; but in both cases, if we take this assumption as implying the independent existence of an absolute thing, or, as Kant says, a " not-thing " called time, we get into impossible difficulties. Kant does, however, in the Esthetic, say certain things about space and time which are clearly indefensible, and furthermore inconsistent with the part he assigns to our intuition of space and time in the later parts of the Critique. — The first is his attempt to distinguish between space and time by making one the form of outer and the other the form of inner sense. " By means of outer sense, a property of our mind," the second section of the Esthetic begins, " we represent to ourselves objects as outside us and all without exception in space. In space their shape, magnitude, and relation to one another are determined, or determinable. Inner sense, by means of which the mind intuits itself or its inner state, yields indeed no intuition of the soul itself CI

KANT 74 as an object ; but there is, nevertheless, a determinate form (namely, time) in which alone the intuition of inner states is possible, and everything which belongs to inner determinations is, therefore, represented in relations of time. Time cannot be outwardly intuited, any more, than space can be intuited as something in us." 1 This attempt to distinguish time and space by attributing the one to inner and the other to outer sense involves a confusion—the confusion at the root of subjective idealism. For inner and outer are spatial terms. It looks as though Kant had started with the CartesianLockeian view that we are immediately aware of our own states, and then exempted space from this view, continuing the view as applied to time. He saw that if you accept the idealist view of intuition the intuition of externality is impossible; but he seems here to think that the intuition of time is perfectly explicable on an idealist theory. But that if taken strictly would imply that we only intuit time " within " us—or rather (as " within us " means nothing) that our intuitions of time and space are entirely distinct; and that what is ordered in time cannot be ordered in space, and vice versa. That is, of course, absurd, and Kant denies it at once in his account of change. " The concept of alteration, and with it the concept of motion, as alteration of place, is possible only through and in the representation of time. " If this representation were not an a priori (inner) intuition, no concept, no matter what it might be, could render comprehensible the possibility of an alteration, that is, of the combination of contradictorily opposed predicates in one and the same object, for instance, the being and the not-being of one and the same thing in one and the same place." 2 And in the next paragraph he says that " time is the formal condition a priori of all appearances," as though 1

A 22, 23 ; B 37.

» A 32 ; B 48.

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75

space were included in time; and he only manages to preserve a distinction between space and time by saying in the next sentence that our intuition of external phenomena is mediate, our ^intuition of time immediate. That seems like Locke's muddle at its worst, as if we perceive ourselves and our " inner " temporal modifications, and somehow infer from these to external, i.e. spatial, phenomena. But Kant has said that time and space are both forms of intuition and both immediate. Intuition is defined in the first sentence of the jEsthetic as " that by which knowledge relates itself immediately to objects." If Kant meant this, in the Second Edition he disentangled himself almost completely from the confusion involved, and recognized that time and space imply one another : (that our experience of ourselves is only got over against a temporal and spatial experience which is not ourselves.X His final view is that the given is an intuition of time and space—succession and simultaneity—out of which in becoming aware of objects we become aware of ourselves over against objects. The intuition of time and the determination of time come from our intuition of change and our distinction between objective change and change in ourselves. " Inner " and " outer " are words which do not elucidate the distinction of time and space, but the distinction of time and space—or of duration and extensity —is not one which can be stated in terms of anything else. We can, of course, deny the implication of this distinction that space and time are originally separate forms of intuition which we combine in experience; rather they are distinguished in our original intuition of change, and the distinction—as the theory of relativity suggests— is, when given the absoluteness which Newtonian physics gave to it, one source of the antinomies and contradictions which Kant discusses in the Dialectic. Kant's doctrine of the inner sense had, however, certain consequences from which he never disentangled himself. Behind the confusion of inner and outer is a recognition of the distinction between what may

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be called private and public experience, the recognition that self-consciousness and thinking involve not only the awareness of changes of which others may be aware, but some sort of awareness or consciousness which is peculiar and private to each individual. Recent writers have expressed the distinction by saying that we are aware of external objects, and are not aware of but "enjoy " this awareness as well as our desires and feelings. Our experience of the life of the self is somehow something quite different from our experience of the world which is common to all of us, and yet—and here is the great difficulty—we and all other selves are part of the common world. We cannot draw a line round ourselves and say that that is the boundary between inner and outer experience, because intuition crosses that boundary and makes it unreal; but we have to recognize that there is a sense in which we know ourselves as others know or may know us, and also a sense in which we know ourselves as others cannot know us. Professor Alexander's term " enjoyment " is meant to express this difference. However we express it, it is clearly of great importance. But Kant began by expressing this distinction in a quite impossible way—by connecting it with the distinction of inner and outer, and making that the distinction between time and space ; with the result that when that form of the distinction breaks down, the distinction disappears altogether, and it is assumed that, in so far as we can have knowledge of ourselves, we know ourselves exactly as we know external objects ; and this, as we shall see, has a far-reaching effect on Kant's treatment of the antinomy of free will and determinism. The second great difficulty of the ^Esthetic as it stands comes from Kant's identification of the distinction between intuition and understanding with the distinction between passivity and spontaneity. He sees that all thinking takes spatial and temporal order for granted. He, therefore, puts space and time on the side of the given, as though

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON we started with an apprehension of empty space and empty time. Kant is quite rightly maintaining against Hume's confusion of a succession of ideas with an idea of succession that apprehension of space and time is always an apprehension of a whole with parts in it. The manifold in space, says Kant, depends on limitation. Spaces are parts of space : space is not the addition or sum of something"not spatial. The same holds of time. But that cannot justify Kant in describing space as " represented as an infinite given magnitude "—a representation of an infinite is impossible. Kant is always insisting that finitude is one of the characteristics which distinguish intuition and the given from the understanding; and, when Kant gives his mind to the conception of infinity, he always connects it with the spontaneity of the understanding. Infinite space and time cannot be intuited or conceived apart from such activity. Kant, indeed, even in the ^Esthetic, sees this : " That which, as representation, can be antecedent to any and every act of thinking anything, is intuition ; and if it contains nothing but relations, it is the form of intuition. Since this form does not represent anything save in so far as something is posited in the mind, it can be nothing but the1 mode in which the mind is affected through its own activity (namely, through this positing of its representation), and so is affected by itself; in other words, it is nothing but an inner sense in respect of the form of that sense." 1 /That is obscure enough, but it shows that Kant's identification of what is given for thinking with what is passively received is breaking down at once. He will not be able subsequently to represent anything as " merely given," but will have to allow, indeed to insist, that the activity of the mind pervades all knowledge, both sensibility and understanding. , The distinction between 1

B 67, 6S.

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intuition and understanding, if it is to persist, will have to be a distinction between different kinds of mental activity. There is this further difficulty in the ^Esthetic, that, as we saw, Kant makes the ^Esthetic the answer to the problem of how synthetic a priori judgements are possible in mathematics, and his account of space and time is based on the assumptions of geometry, i.e. of geometrical thinking. But if there are special assumptions of geometrical thinking, and if Kant is going to give an entirely new account of the nature of thinking in the Analytic, then this account of space and time in the ^Esthetic is bound to be inadequate. It will in fact turn out that Kant holds not only that both intuition and understanding involve activity, but that all thinking involves determination in space and time, and that, therefore, the position of the ^Esthetic, that space and time are altogether on the side of the given, belonging to intuition and not to understanding, breaks down. A partial explanation of these confusions is that Kant took over most of his account of space and time from the Dissertation of 1770, written before he had been faced with Hume's difficulty about causation and, therefore, about synthetic a priori judgement in general; and that he only gradually realized the full consequences of his new view of judgement. The elements of the ^Esthetic which no later criticism affects are Kant's insistence against Leibniz that space and time, with the possibility of spatial and temporal determination, are assumed before thinking can begin—not determinations we arrive at by thinking about something not given as spatial or temporal and his argument that, since they are thus involved in perceptual experience, we cafirfot "say anything about their nature or the nature of anything corresponding to them outside of that experience and that that experience involves the two elements of form and matter. We must allow that, however convincing Kant's arguments are against Leibniz, that time and space

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

Q

are not concepts and, therefore, not the product of the understanding but elements of intuition ; nevertheless the distinction between intuition and understanding, as Kant presents it in the ^Esthetic, is not only full of difficulties in itself, but is one which has no room for space and time as they are assumed by the mathematician. This failure to describe satisfactorily the given element in knowledge before considering the spontaneous and active part suggests that the two elements cannot be separated as sharply as Kant suggests, and we must reconsider the distinction when we have considered Kant's account of the part played by the understanding in knowledge—the Transcendental Analytic. (5) THE METAPHYSICAL DEDUCTION, OR THE DISCOVERY OF THE CATEGORIES

Kant begins the second part of his transcendental doctrine of elements—which he calls Transcendental Logic and divides into the Analytic and the Dialectic—by an emphatic restatement of the distinction between and the complementary nature of intuition and understanding. The distinction is still based on the passivity of sensibility. " If the receptivity of our mind, its power of receiving impressions, in so far as it is in any wise affected, is to be entitled sensibility, then the mind's power of producing representations from itself, the spontaneity of knowledge, should be called the understanding." 1 This would imply that all imagination is understanding, a position from which Kant later quite definitely departs, and so far the passage is, as Professor Kemp Smith says, pre-Critical. But in its insistence on there being a fundamental distinction between intuition and understanding, and on these both in their distinctness being necessary to knowledge, the passage represents what is a position from which Kant never departed. The passage indeed represents an advance on the position of the ^Esthetic, in so far as it emphazises ' A 51; B75.

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KANT

the fact that neither of these two faculties can produce knowledge without the other. " Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without Tinderstanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers or capacities cannot interchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.} But that is no reason for confounding the contribution of either with that of the other; rather is it a strong reason for carefully separating and distinguishing the one from the other. We therefore distinguish the science of the rules of sensibility in general, that is, .(Esthetic, from the science of the rules of the understanding in general, that is, logic"! But Kant is not concerned with logic as it has so far been understood—a science of " the absolutely necessary rules of thought, without which there can be no employment whatsoever of the understanding, which therefore treats of understanding without any regard to difference in the objects to which the understanding may be directed."^ He is concerned with something he calls transcendental logic. He defines " transcendental" by saying that the term is not to be applied to all a priori knowledge, but only to that knowledge by which we know that and how specific representations—intuitions or concepts —can be employed or are possible purely a priori. It is the knowledge of the possibility or of the employment of the a priori. Transcendental Logic, then, will be concerned with concepts, not with intuitions ; as concepts they must be principles of the activities of pure thought, not empirical > A 51-52 ; B 75-76.

• A 52 ; B 76.

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concepts, and as the concepts with which transcendental logic is concerned they must have " a n a priori application to objects." We may sum this up by saying that transcendental logic is concerned with the a priori conceptual principles of objectivity. This transcendental logic will have a positive and a negative aspect. The positive will show what those principles are, and how in union with the sensibility they help to produce knowledge of objects; the negative will show the contradictions which arise when attempts are made to get knowledge out of these principles if they are taken by themselves without reference to their application in experience. The first he calls Analytic, the second Dialectic. Kant's distinction of the two logics is confusing. He seems to have thought that what he calls general logic examines the operations of pure thought quite irrespectively of any reference to objects at all. General logic is to be distinguished from applied logic—the study of thought in its application to this or that branch of knowledge. Kant regards it as wider in application than transcendental logic. But Kant's account of it assumes that we can examine the principles of pure thought in entire abstraction from any reference to objects at all, that that had been done by Aristotle once for all, and that logic was a completed science. But if logic is to be distinguished from psychology as Kant insists, it examines not the operations of the mind in general, but those operations in so far as they are related to or lead to knowledge of objects ; and that seems to involve an examination of the principles of objectivity or transcendental logic. What is quite certain is that Kant himself refuted his view that logic was a completed science by his own revolutionary discoveries in it. " Modem " as distinguished from Aristotelean logic takes its start from Kant's treatment of concept and judgement in his transcendental logic; But Kant's view of the priority, independence, and completeness of the traditional general logic had, as we shall see, some curious results.

KANT

82

Transcendental logic has to concern itself with the a priori concepts which make knowledge possible. What are they, and how is a list of them to be discovered ? Kant begins by insisting that no list is of any use unless it is complete ; no list will be complete which does not issue out of a single principle. " Transcendental philosophy, in seeking for its concepts, has the advantage and also the duty of proceeding according to a single principle. For these concepts spring, pure and unmixed, out of the understanding which is an absolute unity; and must, therefore, be connected with each other according to one concept or idea." 1 They are to come from the general nature of understanding. What, then, is understanding ? Understanding is not intuition. It is knowing through concepts. Concepts are_principles of judging. This is one of Kant's most important discoveries. " Whereas all intuitions, as sensible, rest on affections, concepts rest on functions. By ' function ' I mean the unity of the act of bringing different representations under one common representation. Concepts are based on the spontaneity of thought, sensible intuitions on the receptivity of impressions. Now the only use the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of them. Since no representation, save when it is an intuition, is in immediate relation to an object, no concept is ever related to an object immediately but to some other representation of it—be that representation an intuition or itself a concept."2 We can see now the importance of Kant's making time and space forms of intuition. He gets rid of that distinction which had obscured the earlier logic—of individuals perceived by sense and universals apprehended by mind. For Kant the concept is not an object we apprehend at all. He is thus again enabled to take up a middle position 1

A 67 ; B 92.

* A 68 ; B 93.

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between the rationalists and the empiricists. The former had thought of a priori concepts as objects apprehended by the mind—entities of which the mind is aware in thought as it is awar,e of things by sight. The difficulties of that position are discussed without being overcome in the Parmenides of Plato. Locke begins the Essay with an attack on i t ; Berkeley was attacking the same doctrine in another form when he attacked Locke's doctrine of abstract ideas. Locke had got into difficulties over the nature of general terms. He had asked himself the question: When we use a general name, what are we thinking of or what does the general name signify as the proper name signifies the individual ?—and his answer was " the abstract idea." Berkeley's criticism is that if you try to think of such an abstract idea as an apprehended or represented entity, you find it to be an impossibility. His constructive suggestion is that the general term has no constant significance, but stands indifferently for any of the particulars included under it. This will in itself not do, because it leaves unexplained how particulars are included under it. It is obvious that they can only be included under it because of their nature, because they are—in the old language—instances of the universal. Berkeley suggests that the link between the instances is likeness. You think, that is, apprehend or remember, this colour, for instance, or any like it. Hume, taking up the same general position, that you can observe ideas or impressions to be alike but cannot observe the identity of a concept, but recognizing that you can use a general term intelligibly without remembering or imagining an indefinite number of particulars, says that what the general term stands for is the particular ideas plus the habit of so surveying them. " Yellow " means this colour plus the fact that I have seen and expect to see others like it. If this were all there is to be said, association of ideas and judgement would be the same, and they would both be statements not about ideas but about the mind's habits of association. Kant's analysis of judgement is based not

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simply on a distinction between intuition and judging, but more fundamentally on a distinction between imagination—including in the term memory—and judging. Judging is synthesis, or association governed by a rule. " Concepts rest on functions, and function is the unity of the act of bringing different representations under one common representation." Empirical concepts rest on observation—on perception of likeness and temporal and spatial order and structure. There could be no concepts if ideas and impressions had the atomistic character which Hume ascribed to them. But a structure or form or likeness is not itself a concept—it becomes a concept only when embodied into a rule by which we order our apprehension and relation of particulars. Concepts, therefore, depend on the spontaneity of thought. The understanding can make no other use of them than to judge by them. This characteristic activity of the mind in ordering and giving unity to its synthesis is implied in all concepts, and their nature cannot be understood apart from it. But if this is so, we can now understand how there may be a priori concepts. /For if this activity of the mind which is judging should have different forms, there would then be different kinds of unity which the mind imposed on its synthesis of representations, and these would be the a priori conceptsA Kant's merging of concepts in judgement, his conception of judging as the operation of a rule, implies that there is an a priori element in all judging. That will be found, therefore, alike in empirical and in a priori judgements. But as general logic has long ago made out an established list of the forms of judging considered without any reference to the objects judged, that list will reveal the differences in the nature of judging as such, or the differences of the kinds of unity discoverable in the mind's activity, and we have found our clue to the list of categories. Kant then gives a list of judgements as classified by the traditional logic, and goes on to give the corresponding categories. His procedure obviously rests

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on the finality of the traditional logic. His view of the finality of the traditional logic rests on its abstractness— on the view that the traditional logic managed to classify forms of judgement with no reference whatever to the material or content of judgement. That supposes that the traditional logic was examining the activities of pure thought, and that we can so examine the activities of pure thought without reference even to objects in general. Only if that is true can the distinction between general logic and transcendental logic—that is the examination of the principles of objectivity—be maintained. But this is to misunderstand the purposes and aims of the traditional logic, based as it was on the conception of a class. In any case there is a curious confusion in Kant as to the real derivation of his list of a priori categories. The structure of the Critique implies the complete sufficiency of the clue given by formal logic. This discovery of the categories is followed by the deduction of the categories. That is, of course, essential. For Kant's account of the nature of the a priori categories, that they are the mind's rules imposed on its synthesis, at once raises the problem I—how can the mind by imposing its rules on its synthesis or association transform that synthesis from subjective imagination toi objective judgement 1) But the transcendental deduction of the categories turns out not to be, in either edition, a deduction of categories. The separate categories are hardly mentioned. It is a deduction of the principle of judging ; the assumption is that that is all that is required. The classification given by general logic will do the rest. But when the deduction is over, we find that the categories, in order to have any application to objects, have to go through a process entitled schematization, as the result of which they emerge as a priori principles of the understanding; and though there is still some just traceable correspondence between the traditional logic and the final list, it becomes increasingly evident that the real clue to the classification is to be found elsewhere, in the different

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possible forms of ordering in space and time on which the possibility of objective determination or judging, depends. There are, then, two views in Kant about the source of the classification of categories. The first, expressed in the structure of the Critique, is that the characteristic activity of the understanding has as activity its own forms, that these have been discovered by general logic, and that the categories will correspond to them. As the possibility of a priori categories depends entirely on the reality and differentiation of the mind's activity, this classification will be complete and final. This clearly breaks down in practice. The second view which is worked out in the Analytic of Principles is that all judgement is giving unity to synthesis, and that there is one and only one principle of all synthetic judgements. " The highest principle of all synthetic judgements is, therefore, this : every object stands under the necessary conditions of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience."1 The differentiation of concepts is the differentiation of that in the content, i.e. in intuition, which is used for the purposes of the rule. There can be a priori principles because there is a priori content, and for no other reason. Judging is determining in time and space, but time and space are given a priori in intuition. The possibilities of temporal and spatial determination as such can be seen exhaustively from an examination of what they involve. This second view gives a much more intelligible account of what Kant is doing in the Analytic, and what he conceives the principles of objectivity to be ; but it is not easy to reconcile with his claim to have produced a complete list of a priori synthetic judgements. For it becomes clear that Kant's principles of the pure understanding are the principles of the physical sciences ; and if they are a complete list of a priori synthetic principles, then the physical sciences are the only form of knowledge. 1

A 158 ; B 197.

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87

That indeed is a view which Kant sometimes seems to take. "An inquiry contains so much of genuine science as it contains of mathematics," he says in the Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science.1 But even if we accepted the consequence of this view, that moral judgements and aesthetic judgements are not knowledge, we should still have to reckon with history. Kant himself, in the two later Critiques, is concerned with a priori principles which are not included in and not derivable from this would-be complete list of the first Critique. That Kant's discovery of a priori principles does not strictly follow the guiding thread of logic will be seen if we consider the details of his lists of judgements, categories, and principles. In the list of judgements he inserts two, the singular and the limitative judgements, which were not admitted by formal logic. When we come to the principles we find that, corresponding to the three judgements of quantity and the three corresponding categories, there is only one principle, and that principle corresponds to the judgement which Kant has inserted. The same is true of the principle of quality. Finally, the three categories of relation only if they are given a meaning quite other than they had been given in the traditional logic correspond to the three types of relational judgement. (6) THE TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION

Kant, in the second edition of the Critique, rewrote almost entirely the transcendental deduction of the categories. The preface to the first edition suggests that even after the first edition was finished he was not entirely satisfied with the deduction. It had cost him a great deal of trouble, and he seems to have been conscious that it was not easy reading. In writing the second edition he did not think that he had changed his views. On the contrary, he says : " In the propositions themselves and their proofs, and also in the form and completeness of the plan, I have 1

Op. cii., Preface:

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88

found nothing to alter", x but he refers to " the many misunderstandings into which even acute thinkers have fallen in passing judgement upon my book," and says that he hopes he has made " improvements which should help in removing the obscurity of the deduction of the concepts of understanding." We may, therefore, take it that Kant meant the second edition version of the Deduction to be the authoritative statement of his views, and I shall deal with it in my exposition. There is this further advantage in dealing with the second edition. Later criticism, building on the circumstances under which the first Critique was composed, has resolved the first edition Deduction into strata which are supposed to reflect different stages of Kant's struggle with what he always regarded as the central problem of the Critique. As I have said, I think that this process of resolution has been overdone ; but as the peculiar circumstances of composition which are held to justify it did not recur when the second edition was written, we can avoid such questions by confining ourselves to that edition. Kant begins by saying that the first essential to the understanding of the Deduction is to understand the problem of which it offers a solution. " The reader must, therefore, be convinced of the unavoidable necessity of such a transcendental deduction before he has taken a single step in the field of pure reason." 2 He puts the problem by way of a contrast between the comparative ease of the problem faced in the ^Esthetic and the difficulty of the Deduction. The solution of the ^Esthetic, he thinks, had been comparatively simple. Once we realize that space and time are a priori forms of intuition, i.e. once by reflecting on the nature of intuition we see that it involves time and space, we can be sure that when we in geometry discover the laws of spatial relations, these will apply to objects in so far as they appear in space. Space is involved in our geometrical thinking and in our intuition of objects. We get over the difficulty as to how 1

Bxxxvii.

* A 88; B 121.

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our geometrical thinking can apply to objects, when we realize that it does not apply to things in themselves but only to things as they appear. For space being necessarily involved in geometrical thinking and in intuition, it is like an in-and-out entry on both sides of the balance sheet, or like the scale of a map which is involved both in reading the map and in checking our readings on the ground. If the categories are to be valid, there must be the same sort of relation between our judgements which imply the categories—our judgements which imply causation, for example—and our intuitions. If we think in terms of the categories, we must intuit in terms of the categories. Only in that case will it be possible toregard the categories as, so to speak, an in-and-out entry—something which, because it is implied both in the thinking which anticipates experience and in the intuition which checks that anticipation, does not affect and is not affected by the differences of the independent real. We may illustrate the lines of the solution Kant is seeking by reminding ourselves that we can make calculations about size in terms of feet and inches. So long as we are going to measure in feet and inches, we choose the scale; but we can make objective judgements by means of our scale so long as we read them off in intuition qn the same scale. Our use of inches rather than centimetres does not involve any judgements about the nature of things. The inches or the centimetres, so long as they are used both in the calculation and in the measurement, are an in-and-out entry. But if, e.g., we make deductions about the history of the world from the number of inches found in- measurements of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, we are, among other strange assumptions, assuming that the Great Pyramid was built by people using the scale of inches. This is the sort of solution Kant's theory demands. It is his answer to the difficulty which he put in his letter to Herz, when he said that our intellect is neither archetypal nor ectypal. But when he comes to the deduction of the categories,

KANT go it appears at first sight as though this solution were ruled out. For though we intuit in space and time, we do not intuit in terms of the categories. Kant puts this difficulty in a way which shows how Hume's problem about causation had led to his own problem. There seems to be a difference between the conditions of sensibility and the conditions of understanding. " The categories of the understanding, on the other hand, do not represent the conditions under which objects are given in intuition. Objects may, therefore, appear to us without their being under the necessity of being related to the functions of understanding; and understanding need not, therefore, contain their a priori conditions. Thus a difficulty such as we did not meet with in the field of sensibility is here presented, namely, how subjective conditions of thought can have objective validity, that is, can furnish conditions of the possibility of all knowledge of objects. For appearances can certainly be given in intuition independently of functions of the understanding. Let us take, for instance, the concept of cause, which signifies a special kind of synthesis, whereby upon something, A, there is posited something quite different, B, according to a rule. It is not manifest a priori why appearances should contain anything of this kind (experiences cannot be cited in its proof, for what has to be established is the objective validity of a concept which is a priori) : and it is therefore doubtful whether such a concept be not perhaps altogether empty, and have no object anywhere among appearances." 1 That is Hume's problem. We are aware of succession but not aware of causation, and we add to our experience of succession the conception of causation. With what right ? asks Hume, and answers, " obviously with none." We can perhaps help ourselves to understand the argument of the Deduction if we anticipate and remind 1

A 89, 90 ; B 122.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON ourselves how Kant answers this specific problem when he discusses causation in the Second Analogy. His answer to Hume is that if you accept Hume's statement of the problem—and that means Kant's own statement of the problem here—there is no answer. But Hume's statement of the problem is ambiguous. It pretends that we start with the bare consciousness of succession, and then asks how we can add to that the concept of necessary connexion. But Hume has really assumed that we have the consciousness of objective succession. That implies, Kant argues, that we have already distinguished between subjective and objective succession, between succession in our apprehending and apprehension of a succession, and the principle of objectivity implicit in this experience of succession is the principle of causation. This implies that Kant will have to alter his statement of the problem ; but it is important to see that Kant does not have entirely to alter that statement, and that he must at least retain the distinction between intuition and understanding. He indeed recurs to that distinction in the course of the argument of the Deduction. The implication throughout is that space and time have been deduced in the ^Esthetic by our reflecting on our perceptual experience and concluding that that experience could not be what it is without those recognized forms we call space and time. We are, however, not yet in a position to do that in regard to concepts. We just do not find them pervasive of experience as we find space and time. That we do not is indeed obvious from our distinction between subjective and' objective. Some synthesis is governed by the concepts of the understanding, but some, surely, is not. Kant, for example, is going to say in the Critique of Judgement that in the experience of the beautiful the imagination is not governed by a concept. What Kant suggests in the section called "Transition to a Transcendental Deduction of the Categories," a section common to the Deduction of both editions, is that we should ask whether

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" A priori concepts do not also serve as antecedent conditions under which alone anything can be, if not intuited, yet thought as object in general. In that case all empirical knowledge of objects would necessarily conform to such concepts, because only as thus presupposing them is anything possible as object of experience." " All experience does indeed contain, in addition to the intuition of the senses through which something is given, a concept of an object as being thereby given, that is to say, as appearing. Concepts of objects in general thus underlie all empirical knowledge as its a priori conditions. The objective validity of the categories as a priori concepts rests, therefore, on the fact that, so far as the form of thought is concerned, through them alone does experience become possible."1 Experience, that is, has necessarily objectivity in it, for unless we can distinguish between subjective and objective, no experience in any intelligible sense of the word is possible at all. The implications of objectivity, then, are as much involved in experience as space and time. This then, is the conception of experience which is to determine the Deduction. " Experience " does not simply mean the given : it means the given with the distinction of object and subject already in it. This means that where we apply our thinking, say in terms of causation, to what we intuit, the intuited we apply it to is not simply the passively received spatial and temporal representations described in the ^Esthetic ; it is an intuited to which we have already done something in order to achieve the distinction between subjective and objective, and to which we must have already done something if our intuition is to be an intuition of objects. We do not test our scientific theories by our imagination or our dreams, but by observation of objective fact, but, though this test is sometimes described as an appeal to " brute fact," we cannot distinguish between brute fact 1

A 93 ; B 125-126.

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and illusion without applying to our observation the principles which distinguish between subjective and objective, and therefore we have had to use the categories before we can get " facts" by which to check our theories. But if the categories are-already implied in our intuition of objects, since they are functions of the mind's activity in judging, does this not involve that the simple distinction made in the Esthetic between the spontaneity of the understanding and the passivity of intuition has broken down ? Does that not involve that in all our experience we are judging, and experience is the product of the mind's activity ? The simple distinction of the ^Esthetic has indeed broken down, but some distinction between understanding and intuition remains vital for Kant. If it were given up altogether, then our understanding would be what he calls archetypal. There are interpretations of Kant which practically take this view, reducing the given to a mere indeterminate chaos of impressions which is, as it were, moulded at will by the understanding. The fact that we are obviously not aware of this in our conscious experience is got over by the supposition that the process of reducing the chaos of impressions to the comparative orderliness of what we intuit is performed by an unconscious process. ^But Kant is careful to say that what the understanding has done is to introduce into the manifold as given in space and time the distinction of subjective and objective"—that and no moreN He never goes back on the fundamental views of space and time as involved in the given which he sets forth in the ^Esthetic. He never calls in understanding to explain why we have a picture or field of vision before us. The whole account of the beautiful in the Critique of Judgement would be unmeaning if he did. Further, he is careful in several passages of the Deduction to insist that the understanding is not entirely constructive of its object, but implies a given. " An understanding in which through self-consciousness all the manifold would

KANT 94 eo ipso be given, would be intuitive ; our understanding can only think, and for intuition must look to the senses."1 " The manifold to be intuited must be given prior to the synthesis of the understanding and independently of it. . . . Were I to think an understanding which is itself intuitive (as, for example, a divine understanding which should not represent to itself given objects, but through whose representation the objects should themselves be given or produced), the categories would have no meaning whatsoever in respect of such a mode of knowledge. They are merely rules for an understanding whose whole power consists in thought, that is, in the act whereby it brings the synthesis of a manifold, given to it from elsewhere in intuition, to the unity of apperception."2 That is the peculiar work of the understanding—to bring the manifold of intuition to the unity of apperception ; and that, as we shall see, is for Kant the same as transforming mere intuition into experience of an object. What has been added there to the given material presented in intuition has been that which makes the distinction between subject and object possible. The contrast Kant makes in the passages quoted above between our understanding and what he calls an intuitive understanding, is used by him to bring out the separation and disparateness between the understanding and intuition, It is this disparateness in range, and the fact that understanding does not make the intuition to which its categories apply, that creates the problem. For it means that we have to think what we have not yet experienced. It is this confident anticipation of intuition by thought which is the puzzle. If we could see all the universe at once and apprehend it in all its detail in a unified consciousness, the difficulty would not arise. But this separation between the understanding and intuition has two aspects, and if we are to understand Kant's problem and his solution these must be distinguished. In the first place, though our separate 1

B 135-

« B 145.

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representations, the content of separate acts of attending, are not atomic sensa, though they have in them always a certain structure and diversity, yet they are each of them fragmentary and none of them is self-explanatory. Any judging always involves connecting what we are aware of at this moment with what we have been aware of or are about to be aware of. The meaning and significance of any representation points beyond itself. So ordinary and constant is this reference beyond the immediate given that we can only with some difficulty distinguish between what we see and what we imagine. We fill out the actual content of our awareness at any given moment by means of the imagination, and it is through the work of the imagination that our actual intuitions are for us always intuitions of a world beyond them. It is through the understanding working on the imagination that that world beyond them is an objective world, and not a world of fancy. Hume had already noticed the part played by our imagination in making our changing, discontinuous impressions into the picture of an enduring world of objects. But he had understood the work of the imagination in such a way as to make no distinction between the work of the imagination in judging and what is ordinarily called association of ideas. The fundamental part of Kant's argument in the second edition of the Deduction is his insistence on the distinction between judging and mere association, and his doctrine of the relation between the transcendental imagination and the understanding which is involved in that distinction. But, secondly, Kant retains the distinction between the spontaneity of the understanding and the given and passive nature of intuition. The mind in thinking controls, arranges and combines; but it does not control and combine what is presented to it—it controls its own acts of attending and imagining. It does not move about presentations in space. Thinking is a process in time : it is not a process in space. It is because that is so, that,

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as we shall see, the schematism of the categories is concerned with the principles of determination in time, though it implies the intuition of space. This distinction is expounded in Kant's doctrine of the inner sense. I shall take the second distinction first, in so far as it is possible to treat the two separately, partly because it has been more generally misunderstood. Kant said almost nothing about it in the first edition. From a passage which he inserted in the second edition at the end of the Principles of the Pure Understanding, it looks as though he had not realized when writing the first edition how entirely his account of the mind's activity in thinking, as there given, seemed to destroy his distinction between the activity of the understanding and the given nature of intuition. " What determines inner sense," says Kant, " is the understanding and its original power of combining the manifold of intuition, that is, of bringing it under an apperception upon which the possibility of understanding itself rests. Now the understanding in us men is not itself a faculty of intuitions, and cannot, even if intuitions be given in sensibility, take them up into itself in such a manner as to combine them as the manifold of its own intuition. Its synthesis, therefore, if the synthesis be viewed by itself alone, is nothing but the unity of the act, by which, as an act, it is conscious to itself, even without the aid of sensibility, but through which it is yet able to determine the sensibility. The understanding, that is to say, in respect of the manifold which may be given to it in accordance with the form of sensible intuition, is able to determine sensibility inwardly. Thus the understanding, under the title of a transcendental synthesis of imagination, performs the act upon the passive subject, whose faculty it is, and we are therefore justified in saying that inner sense is affected thereby. Apperception and its synthetic unity is indeed very far from being identical with inner sense. The former, as the source of all combination, applies to the manifold of intuitions in general, and in the

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guise of the categories, prior to all sensible intuitions, to objects in general. Inner sense, on the other hand, contains the mere form of intuition, but without combination of the manifold in it, and therefore so far contains no determinate intuition, which is possible through the consciousness of the determination of the manifold by the transcendental act of imagination (synthetic influence of the understanding upon inner sense), which I have entitled figurative synthesis. " This we can always perceive in ourselves. We cannot think a line without drawing it in thought, or a circle without describing it. We cannot represent the three dimensions of space save by setting three lines at right angles to one another from the same point. Even time itself we cannot represent, save in so far as we attend, in the drawing of a straight line (which has to serve as the outer figurative representation of time), merely to the act of the synthesis of the manifold whereby we successively determine inner sense, and in so doing attend to the succession of the determination in inner sense. Motion, as an act of the subject (not as a determination of an object) and, therefore, the synthesis of the manifold in space, first produces the concept of succession, if we abstract from this manifold and attend solely to the act through which we determine the inner sense according to its form. The understanding does not, therefore, find in inner sense such a combination of the manifold, but produces it, in that it affects that sense."1 And Kant adds in a note : " I do not see why so much difficulty should be found in admitting that our inner sense is affected by ourselves. Such affection finds exemplification in each and every act of attention. In every act of attention the understanding determines inner sense in accordance with the combination which it thinks, to that inner intuition which corresponds 1

D

B 153-5.

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to the manifold in the synthesis of the understanding. How much the mind is usually thereby affected every one will be able to perceive in himself." * We have to notice how in this process of determining the inner sense—as in determining our acts of attention, for example—consciousness of time and of space are both involved. We control our attending—that is what Kant calls controlling the inner sense—but we are attending to things in space meanwhile. So in Kant's account above of how we come to the concept of succession, we initiate a motion (motion as an act of the subject), but attend, not to the spatial synthesis but " solely to the act through which we determine the inner sense." It is perhaps even more significant that, according to Kant, we can know time— i.e. not merely be aware of but know as determined—only by drawing a straight line. We may illustrate what Kant means by the understanding determining the inner sense, if we consider the simple instance of counting the number of books in a book-shelf. It is, as we shall see, an unduly simplified instance, concerning as it does an act of knowing a whole where the whole is given all at once in intuition, for Kant is mainly concerned with judgements where the range of our understanding goes beyond our intuition. But the instance will show what he means by connecting or combining, and by the understanding determining the inner sense. We cannot know how many books there are without counting; to count them we need successive acts of attention, these successive acts have to be synthesized, and the synthesis has to be governed by a concept and by the intuition of the whole. Without the intuition of the whole book-shelf we should never know where to stop. Our counting would be like " counting up to a hundred." Without the category of quantity which is expressed in number, our successive acts of attention would have no unity and would give no knowledge of the ^157.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON number of the books. I can only know that I have come to know the number of the books, because I know that I have done my counting rightly : that I have given to my successive acts of counting the kind of unity required by the general notion of unity forming a sum, controlled by the empirical apperception of the seen whole set over against my acts of counting. Let the unity of my synthesis, expressed in the sum " twelve books," go, and my separate acts of counting would become discrete separate acts. In Kant's words, " I should have a self as many coloured and various as I have representations of which I am conscious." Separate acts of noticing separate books would neither give a sin gle operation of adding nor a number known. The rule of counting governing the association produces a unity in the temporal process of counting and a spatial unity of that which is counted. For one last thing about this simple process of counting books remains to be noticed. It implies not only the recognized unity in the process of counting governed by the category of quantity and the intuited unity of the book-shelf: it implies also the distinction between me who count and that which is there to be counted : and that distinction has to be maintained through the whole process by the assumption that certain changes in what we are aware of as we vary our attention are due to the variations in our attending, and certain other changes are due to variations in the independent things we are counting and the units with which they are counted. That involves the categories of substance and causation and reciprocity. If we scrutinize carefully what is happening even in a simple process of this kind, we can see it is all governed by a standard of unity or consistency, in which the two elements distinguished—the counting self and the counted books—have each their proper place. Both what Kant calls the inner sense and the external sense are united in one unity of consciousness. " The synthetic unity of consciousness," Kant concludes, " is, therefore, an objective condition of all knowledge. It

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is not merely a condition that I myself require in knowing an object, but is a condition under which any intuition must stand in order to become an object for me. For otherwise, in the absence of this synthesis, the manifold would not be united in one consciousness."1 This unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the successive acts of consciousness is, in Kant's phrase, transcendental; it is a condition of the possibility of experience, because without principles of unity governing my acts of synthesis there would be no distinction of subject and object, and no self-consciousness and no objectivity. The special restricted instance of determination we have been taking so far is a process where we get unity in a time process over against a spatial unity, and so achieve a determined spatial unity. But this instance is an artificial simplification. It is an instance of what Kant called empirical apperception. But in knowing we are going through a process of time whose empirical unity is very slight; we are knowing a world which stretches beyond the range of our perception in space and time. I shall only know that world if I can give to all my experience the same kind of unity which I give to my empirical consciousness of the books and my acts of counting them in the restricted instance. But I cannot give unity to my consciousness as a whole by adding together the little bits of unity I may get in empirical consciousness. My empirical consciousness must be governed by a principle. Unless all my experiencing is thought of as a process in one time, and as a process in which I come to know objective unity in time and space, that unity cannot be achieved. The general features of the simpler process must remain, my spontaneity, i.e. the controllable succession of my acts of awareness or imagination, what Kant calls the inner sense, and the principle, controlling that succession and an intuited unity over against it. Without this principle of the understanding 1

B 138.

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controlling the imagination there would be no knowledge ; nor again would there be knowledge unless that activity could go on over against an intuited or intuitable unity. The a priori form of the given—space and time—is as essential as the a priori principle of connecting. " But since there lies in us a certain form of a priori sensible intuition, which depends on the receptivity of the faculty of representation (sensibility), the understanding, as spontaneity, is able to determine inner sense through the manifold of given representations, in accordance with the synthetic unity of apperception, and so to think synthetic unity of the apperception of the manifold of a priori sensible intuition—that being the condition under which all objects of our human intuition must necessarily stand." * " When, for instance, by apperception of the manifold of a house I make the empirical intuition of it into a perception, the necessary unity of space and of outer sensible intuition in general lies at the basis of my apprehension, and I draw as it were the outline of the house in conformity with this synthetic unity of the manifold in space. But if I abstract from the form of space, this same synthetic unity has its seat in the understanding, and is the category of the synthesis of the homogeneous in an intuition in general, that is, the category of quantity. To this category, therefore, the synthesis of apprehension, that is to say, the perception, must completely conform."2 In other words, in order to perceive properly a house, I have " as it were to draw it ", to copy it in my imagination and acts of attention. Their order has to be governed by the apperception of the whole. But the whole is intuited by us as a whole in intuition, i.e. through the intuition of space and the conditions of our sensibility. When Kant says that we draw, as it were, the house, he does not mean that as we attend to each successive part of 1

B 150..

2

B 162.

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the house the house gradually looms before us. " As it were drawing " is " a s it were copying "—making the successive acts of awareness conform to the unity of apperception. But the given whole comes to be perceived as a given determined whole through these acts of noticing so far as they are connected by an intellectual principle— the category of quantity. So in the same way my perception of change depends on the assumption that the two states I successively notice are in the given related in time, not brought into relations of time by my successively noticing them; just as my successive acts of noticing the parts of the house presuppose that the parts of the house are in the given related in space. If I am to know anything as objective, it must have a discoverable unity. Only if there is a discoverable unity can there be anything to govern my acts of association; only if there is a principle governing that association or synthesis can there be any difference between mere association and judging; only if there is such a distinction can there be any difference between subjective and objective; and only if there is such a distinction is experience possible. Therefore, it is a principle of objective experience that objects should conform to the principles which make objective judgement possible ; for without that condition they could not be known, and without knowing objects I could not be aware of myself. For judgement, according to Kant (§ 19), differs from subjective association by its being association governed by the principle of the objective unity of apperception. " I do not here assert that these representations necessarily belong to one another in the empirical intuition " (i.e. that I cannot help seeing them together) "but that they belong to one another in virtue of the necessary unity of apperception in the synthesis of intuitions, that is, according to the principles of objective determination of all representations, in so far as knowledge can be acquired by means of these representations—principles which are all

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derived from the fundamental principle of the transcendental unity of apperception."1 This process of judging involves, the moment we go beyond the restricted instance of empirical apperception, the use of the imagination—not what Kant calls the reproductive imagination, but what he calls the transcendental imagination. Because time and space are homogeneous, we can imagine time and space as indefinitely extended; and these give principles of unity to which all our reproductive imagination must conform if it is to give us knowledge of a connected world. Without empirical imagination—memory of the past and anticipation of the future, i.e. memory of past intuitions and anticipation of future intuitions—no real knowledge is possible. But imagination alone is not enough. For all knowledge implies a connexion in what we intuit, which is other than the empirical connexion of our intuition. It always implies that there is more than what is actually present to us. But the past intuitions we remember and the future intuitions we anticipate have to be thought of as connected in the objective unity of an all-pervading and transcendental apperception. We cannot get an actual apperception of that whole, but we can think of space and time as wholes, of which our actual apperceptions are but parts. Time and space, therefore, become for Kant the key to the Transcendental Deduction. " In the representations of space and time we have a priori forms of outer and inner sensible intuition ; and to these the synthesis of the apprehension of the manifold of appearance must always conform, because in no other way can the synthesis take place at all. But space and time are represented a priori not merely as forms of sensible intuition, but as themselves intuitions which contain a manifold of their own and therefore are represented with the determination of the unity of this manifold. 1

B 142.

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Thus unity of the synthesis of the manifold, without or within us, and consequently also a combination to which everything which is to be represented in space or in time must conform, is given a priori as the condition of the synthesis of all apprehension—not indeed in, but with these intuitions. This synthetic unity can be no other than the unity of the combination of the manifold of a given intuition in general in an original consciousness, in accordance with the categories, in so far as the combination is applied to our sensible intuition. All synthesis, therefore, even that which renders perception possible, is subject to the categories ; and since experience is knowledge by means of connected perceptions, the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience, and are therefore valid a priori for all objects of experience."1 It follows from this that the categories are applicable only to what we experience. For as the standard of the objective apprehension and determination of an intuited whole was the achieved unity of apperception, so the standard of knowing and of true judging in general is that of an ideal unity of apperception in general. The distinction between subjective and objective is a distinction within experience. A representation is not objective because of its intrinsic nature, but because of the necessity of its connexion. That is objective which we must think —not because we recognize its intrinsic necessity, but because it is essential to the unity of that which we experience. Coming to know, then, is not a process of getting behind the way things look, but of coming to know fully and systematically how they would look under all possible circumstances. As Kant says in the Dialectic: " Thus we can say that the real things of past time are given in the transcendental object of experience; but they are objects for me, and real in past time only in so far as I represent to myself (either by the light of history or by 1

B 160-1.

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the guiding clues of causes and effects), that a regressive series of possible perceptions in accordance with empirical laws, in a word, that the course of the world conducts us to a past time series as condition of this present time—a series which, however, can be represented as actual not in itself but only in the connexion of a possible experience. Accordingly, all events which have taken place in the immense periods that have preceded my own existence mean really nothing but the possibility of extending the chain of experience from the present perception back to the conditions which determine that perception in respect of time. If, therefore, I represent to myself all existing objects of the senses in all time and all places, I do not set these in space and time prior to experience. Their representation is nothing but the thought of a possible experience in its absolute completeness."1 In the empirical apperception our counting is governed by a whole which we see all at once, though we may notice its several parts successively. In knowledge in general, in connecting our present with our past and future experience, we are governed by the conception of a whole; but we come to know that whole from the centre outwards, not from the circumference inwards, the centre being our own consciousness, the a priori framework of space and time being the means by which we achieve what consistency we do. Knowledge always involves both connecting and the matter of intuition. That matter cannot be anticipated. The a priority only concerns the quite general principles of determination. " Pure understanding is not, however, in a position, through mere categories, to prescribe to appearances any a priori laws other than those which are involved in a nature in general, that is, in the conformity to law of all appearances in space and time. Special laws, as concerning those appearances which are empirically determined, 1

D I

A 4 9 5 ; B 523-4.

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cannot in their specific nature be derived from the categories, although they are one and all subject to them. To obtain any knowledge whatsoever of these special laws, we must resort to experience, but it is the a priori laws that alone can instruct us in regard to experience in general, and as to what it is that can be known as an object of experience."1 This means that the Deduction has shown that certain general a priori principles of connexion are implied in any knowledge of objects ; that as the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is implied in any experience, the possibility of the application of these principles is already implied also. But the application of the principle •—the judgement, for example, that B is caused by A— involves empirical intuition. This point may perhaps be made clearer by returning to Hume's difficulty. Supposing it is said in answer to Hume that the a priori principles have been already assumed in order that we should ever have the experience of succession, it might still be replied: "We do achieve an experience of mere succession. That, after the categories have done their work in the distinction between subjective and objective, is what we have got. How can the categories be again applied to turning that apprehension of mere though objective succession into an apprehension of necessary relation ? " The answer is that our apprehension of objective succession is always fragmentary and discontinuous; but that as we have fixed A and B as successive events over against our succession in apprehending, we have assumed that the relation between A and B is based on objective determinations, and has its ground in the object and not in our changes, so we must assume that the further determinations discoverable between A and B, and the further determinations of A and B themselves and their relations to other discoverable objective events, will be determinable as objective. The application in detail of the a priori principles is only doing 1

B 165.

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more thoroughly what is already done to some extent in the most rudimentary experience in which the subjective and the objective is involved: it is making our intuition of objects, not of a different kind, but more detailed and determined. It is in principle exactly what we are doing when by successive acts of attention we count, and, therefore, intuit in a more accurate and determined way, the number of books in a book-shelf which we see all the time. We are now in a position to understand the relation between thinking and intuition which emerges from the Deduction. The old distinction is to this extent given up, that we do not consciously start with a mere given. Thinking and intuition go hand-in-hand all the time. Before any kind of reflexion can begin, there has been mental activity determined by the principles of objectivity. But even the most rudimentary experience is always the result of thought operating on the given, and the difference between thinking and the given persists at higher stages. What we intuit is always in ordinary experience determined to some extent already by thought, because it has always some interpretation and meaning in it; but the distinction does not disappear in spite of the interaction of thinking and intuition. At any stage the two are distinguishable. We can think or judge or we can look. The looking goes on within the framework, so to speak, of previous thinking; and the thinking depends upon intuiting. Both, as Kant said, are necessary to knowledge, but in spite of their mutual influence on one another they remain distinct; and Kant in the psychological section of his Anthropology, published near the end of the century, remained as convinced of the distinction, and of the mistake of Leibniz in making the difference one of degree and not of kind, as he was when he began the Critique. But the distinction can no longer be simply stated, as it is in the ^Esthetic and even in the Analytic, as the distinction between spontaneity and passivity. For the imagination, as Kant says in the Deduction, seems to contradict

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that division. The spontaneity and activity of mind is necessary to perceiving as well as to thinking. The characteristic mark of the understanding is that it governs the activity of the imagination by rules or concepts. ^Esthetic perception, as Kant explains in the third Critique, involves the activity of the imagination ; it may even involve concepts ; but it is not governed by concepts, but by the imagination. In this account of the teaching of the Deduction, and of Kant's maintenance of the distinction between thinking and intuition, I have departed considerably from the account given by Professor Kemp Smith, and it may perhaps be well to explain where the difference between the two views lies. _=5There are two main views possible of the Deduction, based on different interpretations of Kant's conception of the work done by what he calls " the blind faculty of imagination " and of his account of intuition. Both have in common the doctrine that in perceiving anything. as an object, the assumptions on which the categories are based have already been operative in the work of the imagination. But the first view, which I have been expounding, holds that this is not inconsistent with the retention of the distinction between the given and the connected, between intuition and thinking; the second holds that it is. Without the understanding, on the first view, our intuition would give us a picture, i.e. an intuitable field of vision, but not an object; on the second view the understanding is necessary even to produce a picture—without it there is only indiscriminate chaos. In support of the former view, it may be noted that Kant, in a psychological fragment, illustrates the difference between the sensibility and the understanding by saying that " there can be clearness in intuition even when there is absolutely no concept, e.g. when one has no names for the manifold in a building and yet distinguishes all its details satisfactorily."1 1

B. E. xv, p. 84, fr. 220.

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According to the first view the intuition of the given, strictly given, is always the intuition of a manifold in space and time, with, therefore, individual spatial and temporal relations intuited in that manifold. That is very far from being a chaos. What it lacks is the distinction between subjective and objective. No distinction is made between those variations in the given which are due to changes initiated in the subject and those which are due to the object. This last, distinction alone, Kant maintains, is produced by the mind's constructive activity. This doctrine of Kant's is so novel that it is seldom understood. For we normally tend to suppose that a presentation, sensum or idea, whatever we call that which is presented to sense, is either mental or physical, subjective or objective; and as we choose between these alternatives we call ourselves idealists or realists, as though the metaphysical status of the presentation were given, whatever else might be. Kant's view is that the distinction between subject and object cannot be arrived at without the activity of the mind. If the mind had only one single representation given to it, it could not make out whether that representation was mental or physical, subjective or objective ; it could not indeed split that single representation into an " ing " and an " ed," an apprehending mind and an apprehended content. We realize the self in its activity. The activity of the self as contrasted with the activity of what is apprehended is in its turn the object of apprehension, inasmuch as we are aware that the order and unity of the acts of our apprehending—from each of which the apprehended content is inseparable—is other than the order and unity which belongs to the apprehended. The same apprehended contents form two series, the one being the history of the apprehending mind, and the other the apprehended object. When Hume reduces the mind to the series of its impressions and ideas, and also reduces objects to a series of impressions and ideas, he does not seem to realize that from his point of view there can be only one series of

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impressions, which he makes do duty for the mind and for things in turn. We can only escape from this dilemma by recognizing that from the one series of " impressions and ideas " which we actually experience, we construct by the use of our understanding a series which is governed by the unity of our mind and a series governed by the unity of the objective world, and that is done, and can only be done, by thinking. This implies that we can distinguish between subjective and objective only in so far as we can recognize our order and unity of apprehending as being other than the order and unity of what is apprehended. If we ask in detail how we make this distinction, we mostly do it unconsciously. But though the process is mostly unconscious, we realize it when we make mistakes, and we can, so to speak, catch ourselves at it if we try. As Kant explains in the second edition, the making of this distinction implies consciousness of the permanent in space over against our consciousness of the time process. If the given were a mere chaos, the process of thinking which produces the distinction of subjective and objective would be impossible. This interpretation of Kant indeed stands or falls on the assumption that the relation between thinking and observation, which is commonplace in scientific thinking, is only an elaborate and explicit form of what goes on at a more rudimentary stage in establishing the distinction between subjective and objective. According to the second view, the given is the isolated impression or sense datum; all apprehension of the manifold is successive, and therefore all apprehension of the manifold as we consciously experience it is already ordered synthesis. The given is then never experienced as such. We cannot be aware of a manifold as a manifold except in virtue of the mind's synthesis of those isolated elements. Therefore, this synthesis must be operative before consciousness. It indeed makes consciousness possible. All mental activity of any kind then is synthesis working on a priori principles and is, therefore, judgement. Judgement is the unit of thought and of all mental activity.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON Yet in judging the individual mind is constrained by a transcendent necessity—the general demand to produce a unified experience. We shall perhaps be in a better position to judge between these two different interpretations when we have examined in more detail Kant's account of the inner sense. For there is no doubt that much of the difficulty of Kant's deduction, even in the second edition, comes from the ambiguity of that account. For, as we saw in discussing the ^Esthetic, the distinction between inner and outer sense is founded on a confusion, and yet Kant is trying to express by it a real distinction. In § 24 of the second edition of the Deduction, in a passage most of which has already been quoted Kant discusses his position that our knowledge of ourselves is as phenomenal as our knowledge of objects. This is the doctrine that the inner sense " represents to consciousness even our own selves only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves. For we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected."1 " What determines inner sense is the understanding and its original power of combining the manifold of intuition, that is, of bringing it under an apperception, upon which the possibility of understanding itself rests. Now the understanding in us men is not itself a faculty of intuitions, and cannot, even if intuitions be given in sensibility, take them up into itself in such manner as to combine them as the manifold of its own intuition. Its synthesis, therefore, if the synthesis be viewed by itself alone, is nothing but the unity of the act, of which as an act it is conscious to itself, even without the aid of sensibility, but through which it is yet able to determine the sensibility inwardly. The understanding, that is to say, in respect of the manifold which may be given to it in accordance with the form of sensible intuition is able to determine sensibility inwardly."2 l

Bi52.

2

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Let us note the implications of this passage for Kant's account of knowledge. The inner sense is here all along contrasted with the outer sense ; its specific form is time, its characteristic activity the imagination. It is controlled by the understanding. There is no thinking and knowledge without this controlling, but the imagination which is controlled is not what is known. A line or a figure is known by movement. It is our consciousness of our determination of the inner sense in time which makes us know the figure which does not itself contain succession. " Even time itself we cannot represent, save in so far as we attend, in the drawing of a straight line (which has to serve as the outer figurative representation of time), merely to the act of the synthesis of the manifold whereby we successively determine inner sense, and in so doing attend to the succession of this determination in inner sense. Motion as an act of the subject (not as the determination of an object) and, therefore, the synthesis of the manifold in space, first produces the concept of succession —if we abstract from this manifold and attend solely to the act through which we determine the inner sense according to its form."1 Kant adds in a note : " Motion of an object in space does not belong to a pure science, and consequently not to geometry. For the fact that something is movable cannot be known a priori, but only through experience. Motion, however, considered as the describing of a space, is a pure act of the successive synthesis of the manifold in outer intuition in general by means of the productive imagination, and belongs not only to geometry but also to transcendental philosophy."2 This doctrine of Kant's is obviously fundamental. By means of it he thinks he maintains the activity of mind— 1

B 154.

2 B 156.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON the prescription of the a priori laws to experience—without prejudice to the discoverability and givenness of the objects of experience. This is what the distinction of inner and outer sense is now used to emphasize. Yet if all imagination is inner sense, the inner sense is not confined to time, but must involve consciousness of space. Drawing lines and describing circles are temporal, but also spatial. What Kant is really enunciating here is the all-important doctrine that we can only know by acting. But the term inner sense is most misleading. " Inner " is a spatial word ; " sense " implies that we are aware of our own activities in the same way as we are aware of outside objects. Yet Kant in this passage insists on what is clearly his mature view, that knowledge always involves both time and space, both what he calls inner and outer experience. Further—and this is another puzzle—in inner sense we get knowledge of ourselves. Our inner sense is as much our transcendental subject appearing as the external sense is the appearance of things in themselves. Kant, therefore, puts the phenomenal subject, the appearance of the noumenal self, over against the phenomenal world, the appearance of noumena. But there are difficulties in this. Clearly we are not aware of our acting or apprehending in the same way as we are aware of external objects. The internal sense and the external sense are not both senses in the same sense. Yet if we make our awareness of our awareness different in kind from that awareness, and call it enjoyment—saying that in every act of apprehension there is an " ing " which is enjoyed over against an " ed " of which we are aware—that does not solve our difficulties. For if we are concerned only with apprehending, the difference and variety will all be on the " ed " side, and the " ing " will be a transparent abstraction with no meaning. Kant's insistence on the activity of the mind will help us a little. We experience our own activity, whether in knowing or in what we ordinarily call acting, in a real sense, though in a sense other than that in which we experience external objects. It is no doubt important

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to remember—what is often forgotten—that knowing is action, involving desires, purposes, and duties, as much as non-cognitive forms of action. Let us say, then, if we will, that in modern language the inner sense is our enjoyment of our own activity. That gets us some way, but not far enough. For this particular activity is connected inextricably with what we are aware of in that activity, and what we are aware of is the objects of the external sense. What does emerge in the Transcendental Deduction is that there are two orders of the objects of the external sense : the order in which we become aware of, remember, or imagine them, and the order in which we think them to be objectively connected. The first order, that of subjective succession, is in our power ; we can alter or change it as we think fit. When we are knowing, we are determining that subjective order in accordance with the principles of the pure understanding, and so reaching or coming to the knowledge of an objective order. But though knowledge implies action, thinking and making are not the same thing. We make something when we think, but not the object of our thinking. The mind prescribes laws to objects, no doubt, but only the quite general laws; for the detail of the empirical law we have to go to the facts. Kant considered knowledge a joint product of an a priori element contributed by the mind, and an a posteriori contributed by objects. It is, therefore, not possible for him to say either that knowledge makes its object or that the object makes the knowledge of it. Thinking is for him a process by which we do arrive at knowledge, but a process also in which we may go wrong. The basis of his phenomenalism is intuition. We can have no knowledge apart from intuition with its matter and form; and the complementary truth to that is that we can have no knowledge of anything except what we can intuit. Because we go from what we perceive to what we perceive, the subjective conditions of intuition are an in-and-out entry,

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which does not affect the objectivity obtained by an interpretation of the differences of what is conveyed through the same form. When Kant comes in the Deduction to consider thinking, his problem is more difficult. For in thinking we are concerned with spontaneity and activity of the mind. If the mind is spontaneous in thinking, thinking is a process which is, so to speak, loose from its object. It may, therefore, go right or wrong. The puzzle is that the existence of a priori principles implies that in regard to these error is not possible. You may be wrong in saying that this event has this particular cause, but you cannot go wrong in saying that it must have some cause. That is what the universality and the necessity of the a priori involves. The easiest way out of the difficulty is, of course, to deny the a priori, and to say that thinking is a process of trial and error, hit or miss. Kant did take that view with regard to what he called the regulative principles of judgement. He did think that the conception of mechanical causation, for example, was what Pragmatists would call a postulate. The scientist will push it as far as it will go, but must be prepared to find that it will not go all the way. But he always thought that all this experimentation and verification assumed a priori principles which, because they were a priori, were not capable of verification. It is these that need a deduction. That deduction must be in principle the same as the deduction of the ^Esthetic ; it must show that the a priori principles of thinking are an in-and-out entry. But since the special difficulty of the deduction of the categories comes from the spontaneous activity of thought, we must get clear about the nature of this activity. What does it affect ? The understanding, Kant says, controls the inner, not the outer, sense. The inner sense includes the imagination. The suggestion is that having two senses, inner and outer, we control or determine one in order to get determined knowledge, i.e. a determined unified perception of the other. But if this means that the inner sense is peculiarly

KANT n6 within us, that will not do. There is something peculiarly " internal" about it, namely, the consciousness of our own activity. That is private. Only we ourselves can be conscious of the purposes and intuitions which direct that activity. But the activity is not necessarily or ordinarily private. We can watch a person attending to this rather than that. Think of the description of Sherlock Holmes following Watson's thoughts. The distinction of inner and outer as Kant gives it will not do. For this controlled determining of the inner sense, which is thinking, includes the control of movement; and it looks as if the movement might be either movement in the imagination or actual movement. We know the house by, as it were, drawing it, or by actually drawing it. The distinguishing mark of the movement which is involved in thinking is that it is movement over which we have control, and whose unity as a process in time we appreciate as we give the process its unity. That is why Kant says in the note quoted above, that " motion considered as the describing of a space," as contrasted with the intuited motion of an object in space, " belongs not only to geometry but to transcendental philosophy." Let us then ask ourselves over what we have control. What can we vary over against something which we do not vary? We have control over our acts of attending, and over our imagination and our bodily movements, and over our manipulation of symbols. We can distinguish between what is subjective and what is objective in our experience just because we have control over our bodily movements. By varying our bodily movements we can vary the content of our intuitions, and can then distinguish what in that content is due to that variation and what is not so due, but must be ascribed to the object. Without the possibility of that distinction, which involves the appreciated unity of our action over against an intuited manifold, there would be no objectivity. But the apprehension of the given is always a time process over against a spatial intuition; and therefore the laws of thinking, if not, strictly speaking, the

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laws of things, are the laws of the apprehension of things as objective. And so we get our in-and-out entry. For there to be experience, there must be the distinction of subject and object; for there to be the distinction of subject and object, there must be the controlled process of determining our activities in time over against an awareness of determination in space. Hence the general principles of determination in time, a process involving also the determinate apprehension of space, are necessarily implied in all experience. This account of the Deduction does more justice than the other to the main points Kant is concerned to maintain in the second edition Deduction—the contrast between thinking and an intuitive understanding, between thinking and perceiving, between thinking and association, between the inner and the outer sense. But it cannot be put forward as an account of what he did say. For if we accept it we must say that the concept of freedom, or at least of self-determination, and with it the independence of the activity of the self from the phenomenal determination of nature, is as essential to any account of knowing as it is argued by Kant in the second Critique to be to any account of acting. Indeed, if as the Deduction undoubtedly maintains thinking is a conscious activity, that might seem necessarily to follow. But Kant certainly does not draw that conclusion, and this interpretation can only be defended if we may hold that neither in the first nor in the second Critique did he entirely disentangle himself from the erroneous implications of the terms inner and outer sense. This implies that no mere interpretation of what he says will give a defensible doctrine. Whatever interpretation we adopt, we have to say of it, This is the line of argument in Kant which, if consistently worked out, as it was not consistently worked out by Kant, will give the most fruitful results. Other interpretations of Kant seem to me to arise from the ambiguity of his conception of the inner sense. For if

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we start with the distinction between inner and outer sense, as denned in the ^Esthetic, we are in a position very little removed from that of Locke. The doctrine of external sense has made a breach in that position, but has not destroyed it. Kant is still at this stage talking as though we were principally aware of our own representations, i.e. of something specifically mental. The position assumes that we are aware of ourselves as we are not aware of external objects. Representations, or what in modern language are called sensa, are thought of as purely mental existences; they are entities, having an existence in a separate sphere, the world of mind. The mind in its endeavour to achieve a unified and consistent experience assigns to some of them objectivity. We can indeed say that unless they exhibit a certain regularity and display what Kant calls objective affinity, such consistency as experience demands would not be possible. But the whole position is really not much removed from Berkeley. For all the contents of apprehension—whether of memory, perception, or imagination— are put on the same level. They are all mental entities, and the distinction between subjective and objective might be put as the distinction between thinking our own thoughts and thinking the thoughts of a universal consciousness. That would leave the main doctrine of Berkeley untouched—that we can know ideas only, and that ideas are mental entities. This position leads almost inevitably to the repudiation of things in themselves by Kant's successors and to a metaphysic based on an epistemological idealism. It is roughly Schopenhauer's interpretation of Kant. This view is obviously much more clear-cut than Kant's doctrine even in the first edition. It ignores his distinction between inner and outer sense, his peculiar emphasis on time in the chapter on Schematism, his repeated emphasis on the distinction between thinking and intuition, and the special place he gives to imagination even in the first edition. It is clear even there that if this doctrine can be got out of Kant, it is not what he was trying to say. Rather it is

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the victory of the Lockeian presuppositions with which he started over what he is trying to say. It is indeed matter of historical fact that Kant repudiated this interpretation with indignation, and made the changes in the second edition largely to correct this particular misunderstanding. With this subjectivist view of Kant's teaching may be contrasted what Professor Kemp Smith calls Kant's phenomenalism. The doctrine of the inner sense, according to the second edition, is connected with the refutation of idealism. The essence of idealism which Kant is concerned to refute is its assumption that knowledge of the self is prior to knowledge of objects. But the Deduction of the second edition has shown that knowledge of self and knowledge of objects are correlative : that we come to be aware of the unity and order in our knowing over against the unity and order of what is known. These two centres of unity arise in consequence of the work of the transcendental faculty of imagination on an undifferentiated vague chaos : the one is the phenomenal self, the other phenomenal nature. And because the reality of each of these lies in its connectedness, the merely given, being in itself not connected, shrinks almost to nothing. The phenomenal self is not anything sensed, but "enjoyed" action. Phenomenal nature is its correlate, the unity made. Thinking as action has triumphed over the given. The mark of the phenomenal self and of phenomenal nature alike is connectedness and relation. The difficulty of this view is to keep the two phenomenals apart. That, to do justice to this interpretation of Kant as an interpretation, is clearly a difficulty of Kant's. Each world has indeed its own transcendental ground—the noumenal self on the one hand, things in themselves on the other. And so far as the subject is concerned, Kant insists that though we know the self as phenomenal, we know that though not what the transcendental self is : and the reality of that transcendental self, left open as a possibility but not revealed by knowledge, is experienced in action and its freedom realized in moral obligation. But Kant assumes

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that the self as known, the phenomenal self, is, as phenomenal, determined—and as determined it is part of phenomenal nature. For clearly our actions affect nature and are affected by it. When we think then of this phenomenal self we must think of it as part of one phenomenal world, not of two phenomenal worlds. This is, in fact, Kant's settled attitude to the problem of free-will and determinism, that the self is noumenally free but phenomenally determined; and it is phenomenally determined, not as a world by itself but as part of nature, by external stimulus acting on a given bodily disposition. Yet if that is really the upshot of the first Critique, and we really are committed by it to one phenomenal world, the reality of the noumenal self becomes as shadowy as that of the thing in itself, and we are in principle committed to behaviourism, or at least to epiphenomenalism. What has happened here is clear enough. Kant's confused distinction of inner and outer experience has led to the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object, which he is at all costs determined to preserve— which is, indeed, the basis of all his phenomenalism, and therefore the basis of all this interconnectedness and determinedness which is threatening to engulf the self. The fundamental difficulty of this view is that it makes nonsense of Kant's distinction between understanding and intuition. Its plausibility depends on the assumption that Kant was trying to answer the special problem arising from Hume's sensational atomism. But Kant's account of space and time in the ^Esthetic is already entirely inconsistent with Hume's atomism. Once we give up the notion that Kant accepted Hume's psychology, the main argument for this interpretation seems to me to disappear. In the meantime we may revert to the sentence in which we summed up the results of the Deduction of the second edition—that the general principles of determination in time, a process necessarily involving determined apprehension of space, are necessarily involved in all experience.

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For that will be found to be the key to the next section of the Critique, the Analytic of Principles. (7) THE ANALYTIC OF PRINCIPLES

The Deduction of the Categories has turned out to be, as we have seen, not a deduction of the different categories but of the general principle of judgement, or of what Kant calls the synthetic unity of apperception. The general result of Kant's account of the understanding has indeed been to show that categories or a priori concepts have their reality only in judgement. The metaphysical deduction, searching as it did for a single principle from which all the categories might be deduced, found it in the general nature of judgement and in the fact that general logic had already discovered the different forms of judgement. But the new account of the nature of judgement which Kant has given in the Transcendental Deduction has cast some discredit on the sufficiency of the distinctions of traditional logic ; and though Kant does not now say anything about the insufficiency of general logic, he acts as though he had become aware of it, and attacks anew the problem of the differentiation of the pure form of judgement in a section which he calls the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding. He expounds in rather more detail his general doctrine that a concept is never an image, a something apprehended either by the senses or by the intellect, but a rule in judging. At the basis of all empirical concepts there are, no doubt, empirical perceptions or representations. If we had not seen individual dogs we should not have the concept of a dog. But empirical representations only make concepts when a rule in judging is made out of them—when what we have seen is made into a rule by which we determine whether this or that is a dog. The same, in Kant's view, holds of a priori concepts. They are based on a priori intuitions, but they become concepts when an a priori rule of judging is made out of them.

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The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding is described by Kant as concerned with the problem of how the categories are applied to experience, but it is also, and indeed principally, an account of how the concepts, as a priori principles of judging, get reality or objective determination. What can there be in common between an a priori concept and intuition ? With this question Kant approaches the problem of the schematism. Causation, for example, as Hume had pointed out, cannot be observed in experience. Kant's answer is that, as the Deduction has shown, all judging is determination in time of the inner sense, and all experience also involves determination in time. The general principles of determining in time will both be involved in judging and be applicable to perceived experience; and if there are different modes of temporal determination, these, and not the list given by general logic, will give the varieties of the act of judging as such, and, therefore, the list of what Kant calls the principles of pure understanding. Quantity has meaning because we can count; and counting is producing " unity in the synthesis of the manifold of a homogeneous perception in general, a unity due to my generating time itself in the apprehension of the perception." Quality has meaning because we recognize differences which, while they have a certain regularity and order, are not quantitative differences but differences of degree, or what Kant calls intensive quantity—the degree to which time is filled. The categories of relation are, when schematized, the various ways in which we think an objective order in time; substance that which endures through time; cause and effect objective sequence in time; and reciprocity mutual and determined co-existence in time. The categories of modality are not quite the same as the others, but Kant uses them to explain (mainly in criticism of Leibniz) the meanings which on Critical principles we must give to possibility, actuality, and necessity.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON With this preliminary explanation of the manner in which the categories find significance in the various forms of judgement, Kant goes on to give a list of what he calls the principles of the pure understanding. He explains them to be the actual rules which govern the application of the categories. If we are to draw all the consequences of the doctrine that a concept is really a rule in judging, they are the categories displayed in their true nature as the fundamental principles or rules which make objective judgement possible. They are all consequences of what Kant calls the highest principle of all synthetic judgements : every object stands under the necessary conditions of synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience. They are, indeed, the various principles which govern the unity of that synthesis. Kant sums up what he has to say of Schematism in these words : " It is evident, therefore, that what the schematism of understanding effects by means of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination is simply the unity of all the manifold of intuition in inner sense, and so indirectly the unity of apperception which as a function corresponds to the receptivity of inner sense."1 These principles are also Kant's answer to the question, How is physics possible ? In them Kant is giving a deduction of the fundamental a priori assumptions upon which physics, as he conceived it, rests. For the upshot of his argument is that physical science is merely the elaboration and explication of principles which are implied in the most elementary experience in which subject and object are distinguished. Thinking is a mental activity, and therefore always a temporal process. But in thinking, as contrasted with mere imagining, or with counting when we, for example, count i A 145 ; B 185.

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up to a hundred instead of counting how many of anything there are, we transfer the time to the object; we are concerned with objective number, objective duration, succession, and co-existence, not with the number of our acts or with the duration, succession, and co-existence of our representations. Eut this process implies not only consciousness of time, but also consciousness of space. In the first edition Kant seems to have taken this last point so much for granted that he says nothing about it, with the result that he is often supposed in this section to teach an entirely different doctrine of the relation of time and space from that which he has stated in the ^Esthetic. When he says that all our experience is successive, he is taken to have meant that it is only successive, and that we can have no intuition of a manifold except successively. If we start with this assumption, we have to suppose Kant to be trying to show how, out of an experience which is only temporal, we produce the distinction of subjective and objective, and generate, so to speak, the conception of space. Then we should rightly regard Kant in this section as engaged in an impossible task. This misconception Kant corrected in the second edition —partly in a passage he described as the Refutation of Idealism, to which we shall recur, and partly in a passage at the very end of the section, where he describes the complementary part played in this process of objective thinking by the consciousness of space. It may be well to begin, therefore, with two passages which give Kant's account of the respective parts played by consciousness of time and consciousness of space. " All increase in empirical knowledge and every advance in perception, no matter what the objects may be, whether appearances or pure intuitions, is nothing but an extension of the determination of inner sense, that is, an advance in time. This advance in time determines everything, and is not in itself determined by anything further. That is to say, its parts are given only in time and only

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through the synthesis of time : they are not given antecedently to the synthesis. For this reason every transition in perception to something which follows in time is a determination of time through the generation of this perception, and since time is always and in all its parts a magnitude, is likewise the generation of a perception through all degrees of which no one is the smallest, from zero up to its determinate degree. This reveals the possibility of knowing a priori a law of alterations, in respect of their form. We are merely anticipating our own apprehension, the formal conditions of which, since it dwells in us prior to all appearance that is given, must certainly be capable of being known a priori." 1 That is the one side of the matter. Our experience is a continuous process in time, and that process with its infinite power of divisibility is the same in imagination and in apprehension. But, on the other hand, it is always also a consciousness of the simultaneous or of space. " In order to understand the possibility of things in conformity with the categories and so to demonstrate the objective reality of the latter, we need, not merely intuitions, but intuitions that are in all cases outer intuitions. When, for instance, we take the pure concepts of relation, we find, firstly, that in order to obtain something permanent in intuition corresponding to the concept of substance, and so to demonstrate the objective reality of this concept, we require an intuition in space (of matter). For space alone is determined as permanent, while time, and, therefore, everything that is in inner sense, is in constant flux. Secondly, in order to exhibit alteration as the intuition corresponding to the concept of causality, we must take as our example motion, that is, alteration in space. Only in this way can we obtain the intuition of alterations, the possibility of which can never be comprehended through any pure understanding. . . . The in1

A 210 ; B 255.

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tuition required is the intuition of a movement of a point in space. The presence of the point in different locations (as a sequence of opposite determinations) is alone what yields to us an intuition of alteration. . . . Similarly, it can easily be shown that the possibility of things as quantities, and, therefore, the objective reality of quantity, can be exhibited only in outer intuition." 1 We start, then, with consciousness of time and of space, and with our power of imagination and synthesis, the spontaneous activity of the mind. We know, as a matter of fact, that we have somehow got out of that the distinction between subjective and objective, between merely imagining and judging. The explicit and elaborated judgements of physical science only do more systematically what we must have already done to some degree in order to get any distinction between subjective and objective at all. That is Kant's case for the use of a priori principles in science. They are implied, not in any experience, but in any experience of objects, i.e. wherever we have made the distinction between subjective and objective. This doctrine can be seen most clearly in his account of causation. For it was Hume's criticism of causation which originally led Kant in this direction. What, then, is Kant's answer to Hume ? Its main outlines have been already noted in the last section. Hume asks how we can add to our experience of succession the notion of necessary determination. Kant's answer is that we can only get the experience of objective succession if we have presupposed the principle of necessary determination. For we could not distinguish between mere succession in our apprehension and apprehension of succession without the principle of causation. " Experience itself—in other words, empirical knowledge of appearances—is thus possible only in so far as we subject 1

B 291-293.

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the succession of appearances, and, therefore, all alteration, to the law of causality : and, as likewise follows, the appearances, as objects of experience, are themselves possible only in conformity with this law." 1 Kant explains his meaning by contrasting our successive apprehension of a house with our successive apprehension of a boat going downstream. In each experience our representations are successive : we are aware, first of one side of the house, then of another ; first of the boat in one position in the stream, then of it in another. But we assume without more ado, in the first case that we are successively apprehending what simultaneously exists, and in the second case that we are apprehending what is actually successive. In the second case we " put the time into the object." We do this in most cases so naturally and instinctively that it seems strange to say that we are employing the principle of causality in the process. But this is what Kant maintains. " We have to show in the case under consideration that we never, even in experience, ascribe succession (that is, the happening of some event which previously did not exist) to the object, and so distinguish it from subjective sequence in our apprehension, except when there is an underlying rule which compels us to observe this order of perceptions rather than any other : nay, that this compulsion is really what first makes possible the representation of a succession in the object." 2 This might be taken to imply that only when we know that A is the cause of B, can we know that B follows A. That would be absurd. It would not meet Hume's point that we are certainly aware of B following A before we know what causes B. Kant only says that " a representation can acquire its determinate position in the relation of time only in so far as something is presupposed in the 1

B 234.

2

A 196-7 ; B 241-2.

KANT

128

preceding state upon which it follows invariably, that is, in accordance with a rule." x Because we conclude something objectively succeeds, we must assume that it is determined. Kant does not analyse this process of determining sequence in any detail. But if we remember the passage quoted above about the movement of a point in space, and if we consider what happens when we are in any doubt as to whether an apprehended succession is objective or not, we can see the force of what he says. We ordinarily assume that a succession is objective because we assume that we have not brought it about. If in apprehending the different parts of the house we were not aware of the movements of our bodies, we should think the house was turning round. We can say, " this succession is not due to me ", because we are already working on rules of what is due to our action. But if we ever supposed that just anything could cause anything else, we could never make the distinction between subjective and objective sequence; that distinction is a distinction between the apparent changes caused by ourselves and those which, not being caused by ourselves, we assume to be caused by some tiling else. The process always implies, as Kant insists in the second edition, intuition of the manifold in space : for it always implies the intuition of something moving over against something which is not moving. This is the answer to the criticism sometimes made that Kant's doctrine implies that the whole of the present is determined by the whole of the past. Because the process of disentangling successive apprehension from apprehension of succession begins with the intuition of something moving against what does not move, causation is always concerned with the cause of the particular change, not of the whole present state of the universe. Inquiry begins always with an actually perceived change, and that is always only a partial change. If we left the matter there, we should be reduced to what is sometimes called a " streaky view of causation," as 1

A 198; B 244.

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though the world were made up of a lot of quite independent chains of causation. Kant meets this difficulty by insisting that the general category of relation includes, besides causation, substance (or the principle that in all changes there is something which does not diminish or increase) and reciprocity (or the principle that co-existence is equally determined with succession). The three taken together are involved in the objective determination of change, and when elaborated and systematized make up the first principles of physics. In the Metaphysical First Principles of the Natural Sciences, published in 1786, Kant attempted this elaboration in what he described as a dynamical, as opposed to the prevalent mechanical, system of physics. This identification of the principles of objectivity with the principles of physics has certain difficulties. Kant himself made a distinction between the first two principles —the Axioms of Intuition and the Anticipations of Perception—the principles of quantity and quality on the one hand and the Analogies of Experience and the Postulates of Empirical Thought, or the principles of relation and morality on the other. He called the first two mathematical and the categories of relation dynamical. In another passage he called the first two constitutive and the others regulative. For the first two, he affirms, are concerned only with the formal aspects of quantity and quality, and judgements implied in them can be elaborated, as they are in mathematics, independently of their application to experience. But the categories of relation are concerned with the existence of objects and presuppose the perception of different specific changes, which cannot be anticipated. Kant was in agreement with Hume that we never understand how one thing causes another. We can by experiment come to the conclusion that B must have been caused by A, and, having established that, we must assume that all B's will be caused by A's. The specific laws of causation cannot be deduced from the general principle, but must be E

130

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discovered by experience. In the Critique of Judgement Kant explains that while we assume that it is possible to reduce the manifold diversity of causal laws to a small number of general principles, there is no necessity that this should be possible. Our assumption that it is possible is only a regulative assumption, what Pragmatism would call a postulate. He then goes on to say that in thus attempting to make a system of these empirical laws the general a priori principle of causation takes the two forms of mechanical and teleological causation—each of which must be applied as far as it will go. This assumes that physics and natural science are not the same, though in the first Critique Kant seems to assume that they are, and it suggests the question whether the elaboration which physics gives to the principles of objectivity involved in any experience is the only possible elaboration. Kant had been occupied for a long time with the principle of causation, and had not given anything like the same attention to substance and reciprocity ; and he does not say whether as causation has different empirical rules which are irresolvably different because empirical, so substance and reciprocity have similar empirical applications. He seems rather to assume that their use in physics is'their only possible use, and because of this he denies their application to the self. For he is rightly clear that the principles of substance and reciprocity as actualized in physics imply space. But while he may be right in maintaining, as he does in the Metaphysical First Principles of the Natural Sciences, that psychology is not a science in the sense in which he is there using the word " science," he does admit that introspection is possible, i.e. that we can make objective judgements about ourselves. If these judgements are objective, they must imply the categories, and categories in some way schematized. In the same work Kant says that an inquiry is scientific in so far as it is mathematical, and that he sees no prospect of chemistry becoming a science in that sense. But here again we have something which, though perhaps not a science

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON in one sense of the term, is certainly objective and, as objective, must imply the categories, though it will not imply the principles of pure understanding as they are made-by Kant to be the first principles of physics. Kant recognized the distinction between the historical sciences and physics, but his own preoccupation with physics made him neglect the discussion of the principles implied in history. This, as, we shall see later, got him into unnecessary difficulties when he came to discuss the relations between causality and freedom, difficulties which he only partially got over in the Critique of Judgement. Bergson's criticism of Kant, or at any rate of the first two Critiques is very apt. " If you read the Critique of Pure Reason carefully, you will see that Kant has criticized, not reason in general, but a reason fashioned to the habits and the necessities of Cartesian mechanism and Newtonian physics. If there is only one science of nature, and Kant never seems to doubt this, if all phenomena and all objects are strung out along one single plan to produce an experience, single, continuous, and entirely on the surface (and this is the never varying hypothesis of the Critique of Pure Reason), then there is only one kind of causality in the world. All phenomenal causality implies rigorous determination, and liberty must be sought outside experience. But if there is not one science, but several sciences of nature, if there is not one scientific determinism, but several scientific determinisms of unequal rigour, then we must distinguish between different planes of experience ; experience is not simply on the surface, but also extends in depth ; finally it is possible, by insensible transitions, without any sudden shock, without quitting the realm of facts, to go from physical necessity to moral liberty." 1 The Postulates of Empirical Thought are not really, as 1

" Le Parallelisme Psycho-Physique et la M6taphysique Positive," Bulletin de la Sociite Franfaise de Bhilosophie, May, 1901, p. 63.

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KANT

we have said, on a level with the other principles. Kant uses the logical distinction of modality in judgements to expound the relation between possibility, actuality, and necessity involved in the critical principles. Knowledge has been shown to involve a union of two different elements —formal conditions prescribed by the mind's activity and material conditions supplied by sensation. The formal conditions are the criterion of possibility: " that which agrees with the formal conditions of experience, that is, with the formal conditions of intuition and of thought, is possible." But thought in itself—and this we shall see later is for Kant a point of great importance^—can never prove existence. " Reality is bound up with sensation, the matter of experience." It is that which is experienced or which might be experienced. This might seem to involve the doctrine that the reality of things is just their being experienced, that the mind makes nature, but to take this subjectivist view is to miss the lesson of the Deduction, that experience always involves the distinction between subjective and objective, and that something to be experienced is as necessary to that distinction as the experiencing mind. Kant, in the second edition, tried to avoid this misinterpretation of his doctrine by inserting at the end of the Postulates a section called the Refutation of Idealism. He criticizes idealism on the ground that it assumes that knowledge of the mind is prior to knowledge of objects. Once we begin, as Descartes did, with a mind conscious of its own existence, and then ask how, having attained that consciousness without a knowledge of external objects, we can get outside of it, we can find no answer. We are shut up either to what Kant calls the problematic idealism of Descartes or to the dogmatic idealism of Berkeley. We must either just admit that the existence of external matter cannot be proved, or say with the dogmatic idealist that mind and its states are the only reality. But this, as we have seen, is to ignore the fact that we only come to know the mind's activity over against what is not its activity, that the elements of

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spontaneity and of the given are both involved in experience, and that the consciousness of space is as fundamental and primary as the consciousness of time. Kant has now answered his second main question— How is pure science of nature possible ?—and is ready to deal with his last twofold question about the possibility of metaphysics. But before he leaves the Analytic for the Dialectic he sums up the results he has so far reached in a section entitled " The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena." " We have seen that everything which the understanding derives from itself is, though not borrowed from experience, at the disposal of the understanding solely for use in experience. The principles of pure understanding, whether constitutive a priori, like the mathematical principles, or merely regulative, like the dynamical, contain nothing but what may be called the pure schema of possible experience. For experience obtains its unity only from the synthetic unity which the understanding originally and of itself confers upon the synthesis of imagination in its relation to apperception : and the appearances, as data for a possible knowledge, must already stand a priori in relation to and in agreement with that synthetic unity. But although these rules of understanding are not only true a priori, but are indeed the source of all truth (that is, of the agreement of our knowledge with objects), inasmuch as they contain in themselves the ground of the possibility of experience viewed as the sum of all knowledge wherein objects can be given to us, we are not satisfied with the exposition merely of that which is true, but likewise demand that account be taken of that which we desire to know." 1 " The pure concepts of the understanding can never admit 1

A 236, 237 ; B 295, 296.

134 KANT of transcendental but always only of empirical employment, and the principles of pure understanding can apply only to objects of the senses under the universal conditions of a possible experience, never to things in general without regard to the mode in which we are able to intuit them." 1 Accordingly the Transcendental Analytic leads to this important conclusion, that the most the understanding can achieve a priori is to anticipate the form of a possible experience in general, and since that which is not appearance cannot be an object of experience, the understanding can never transcend those limits of sensibility within which alone objects can be given to us. " Its principles are merely rules for the exposition of appearances, and the proud name of an Ontology that presumptuously claims to supply, in systematic doctrinal form, synthetic a priori knowledge of things in general (for instance, the principle of causality) must,' therefore, give place to the modest title of a mere Analytic of pure understanding." 2 This might be taken, and has indeed been taken, to imply that the distinction between phenomena and things in themselves has thus been rendered unmeaning, and that there can be no sense in any reference beyond experience at all. " When we say that the senses represent objects as they appear and the understanding objects as they are, the latter statement is to be taken, not in the transcendental, but in the merely empirical meaning of the terms, namely as meaning that the objects must be represented as objects of experience, that is as appearances in thoroughgoing interconnexion with one another, and not as they may be apart from their relation to possible experience 1

A 246 ; B 303.

2

A 247 ; B 303.

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135

(and consequently to any senses), as objects of the pure understanding." 1 Kant does, in fact, hold that if by noumenon we mean what the word suggests, an object apprehended by thought alone as distinguished from the senses, there are no noumena. The Critical philosophy has destroyed the old distinction between the world apprehended by sense and the world apprehended by thought. But there is still meaning, Kant insists, in the distinction between phenomena and things in themselves, or in saying that we only know things as they appear, if there is meaning in saying that to know things only as they appear limits our knowledge. But there is meaning in that if and in so far as we can and do raise questions which are intelligible questions, but which, nevertheless, experience cannot answer. And this Kant maintains to be the case. He is going to explain in the Dialectic the first sentence of the Preface to the First Edition—" Human reason has this peculiar fate, that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer."2 The account of knowledge which Kant has given in the Analytic has shown something of what he means by this. For all our knowledge implies, as we have seen, a transcendental unity, the thought or conception of which is the principle of all our judging—which, however, is never completely apprehended ; and the notion of a whole which we never reach is operative in'all our scientific knowledge. The conception of the limited nature of our knowledge is got, therefore, not by a contrast between knowledge of what we experience and some other kind of knowledge, but from an analysis of that knowledge of experience itself. To explain and investigate this aspect of reason, in which it shows itself as a demand which knowledge cannot fulfil, is the purpose of the Dialectic. 1

A 258 ; B 313, 314.

2

A vii.

136

KANT (8) THE DIALECTIC

In the Dialectic, as we saw in the Introduction, Kant is to answer the question, How is metaphysics possible ? as the earlier parts of the Critique have answered the questions, How is pure mathematics possible ? and, How is pure natural science possible ? But while Kant assumes the possibility of mathematics and of pure natural science, however much he thinks that possibility calls for a deduction, he cannot make the same assumption about metaphysics. He can, and does, assume what he calls " metaphysics as natural disposition " ; but he holds and is going to argue that the metaphysical doctrines to which that disposition leads are all illusion. He is going to argue that metaphysics, in the sense in which it has ordinarily been understood, is not possible : that we can have no knowledge of what is beyond experience, of the objects with which metaphysics has been concerned. When that is realized, but not before, we can then see how there can be a scientific metaphysics, if we are content that criticism shall take the place of metaphysics. The Dialectic has, in accordance with this programme, a negative and a positive aspect, as it is concerned to rebut the pretensions of what Kant calls dogmatic metaphysics, and as it is concerned to show the part played in our knowledge by reason. There is in the Dialectic a certain shifting of the balance of emphasis between these two aspects, and with that shifting a certain differentiation in the meaning Kant attaches to reason. Kant has, in the earlier part of the Critique, used the word reason for the faculty of a priori knowledge in general. The whole work, the analysis and deduction of the a priori faculty in mathematics and natural science as well as in metaphysics, is the Critique of Pure Reason, as though one and the same faculty were concerned throughout, and as though the purpose of the Critique were to justify its use in mathematics and science, and to refute its application to metaphysics. That is

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indeed the moral explicitly drawn in the deduction of the categories. The categories are justified on the condition that they apply to experience, and thereby are debarred from application beyond it. We know from Kant's correspondence that he was at an early stage in his Critical thought occupied with what he calls the antinomies. For the contradictions which he found between the assumptions of Newtonian physics and the philosophy of Leibniz, Critical idealism seemed to offer a simple solution. These contradictions'arise from our not understanding the limits of human knowledge, and supposing that the categories which serve us well enough in the unravelling of our experience can be extended beypnd it. If both parties would hold to the motto from Persius which Kant quotes in the Preface to the First Edition—"Tecum habita, et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex "—all these difficulties would be avoided. This is what we might expect the Dialectic to contain, and it does contain it, but a great deal more beside. And the more that it contains is connected with a new and special sense which Kant there gives to reason. He distinguishes it as a special faculty different from understanding. " All our knowhadgestarts with the sensesproceeds frorrTthence to understandjpgr-aiuLends with reason, JjeyoiMl^sthidrth^^ in us for_elaborating i^joaätt^rjdJn^tion ai^bnrigmg rTrmfWjjT^Jrigtiecit. nm'ty pf thought" 1 '^Understanding may be regarded^ as_ajfaculty which secures the~ungy of appearances^ by meamTT>i~Tu1es7 and re^on^aj^th^ faulty "which secureTTffiTm^ standin^.under„pJjacjples.,'2. ^a^ojnJs_j : kajdescribegl^s thejacultv-whichjs concerpeiLwith " the unconditioned " o r " the absolute." Kant's conception of it is perhaps most truly brought out if we say that it is concerned with " the infinite." Kant's distinction between the understanding andreason carries with it the consequence that the principles of reason, have notTthe objectivity of the categories of the under-/ .

rÄi98";""B*355.:" " EI

" » A 302; B 359.

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KANT

standing : they are, as he puts it, regulative and not constitutive ; they are not principles of the possibility of experience in the same sense as are the principles of the understanding. If we consider any judgement which claims to be true, and therefore assumes the distinction between subjective and objective, it can be shown to make that distinction in accordance with the principles of the pure understanding. But at the same time any such ordinary empirical judgement is always in Kant's word conditioned. It takes a certain situation for granted ; it operates within an assumed framework ; it starts with what is taken as a given whole or a definite unit. No doubt that given whole or assumed framework, which is now the basis of our measurement or determination, has been itself got by previous determination and judgement. But at any given moment we are taking for granted the unity we have so far achieved. Yet at the same time these principles of unity, which as differentiated are the schematized categories, are based on a unity which transcends the empirical unity of our consciousness; and we are always, in the search after truth and intelligibility, having to go beyond any particular framework or unity or condition which we use for determination. We cannot measure by infinite space, but any system of co-ordinates by which we do measure assumes infinite space ; we cannot determine events by time, but by preceding events, yet preceding events must be thought of, all of them as a series in infinite time. Thus, while we use the empirical unity we have achieved to determine this or that individual happening, we are always extending the range and scope of the unity of our consciousness in the light of the transcendental unity implied in the notion of truth or objectivity. Kant has no doubt urged in the Deduction that objectivity implies the transcendental unity of apperception, and therefore, by implication, that the ideal of such an unity is " a condition of the possibility of experience " ; but it is the unity as an ideal, and not as realized, which is the condition of the possibility of experience.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

139

In the new meaning Kant gives to reason in the Dialectic he concentrates on this ideal aspect of all thinking. Of the two sides in all judgement—tfhat it is a definite determination in a specific situation according to a rule, and that such determination is distinguished, as judgement, from association or fancy by implying a transcendent ideal of unity—the former is now distinguished as particularly the work of understanding, and the second is assigned to reason. Reason, Kant says, is concerned with ideas in the Platonic sense of that word, and that always means an ideal, something which ought to be. Kant in the Analytic made judgement the special work of the understanding. He now assigns inference to reason. As he found in the forms of judgement given in formal logic his guiding thread to the discovery of a complete list of the categories of the understanding, so he makes formal logic's classification of syllogisms his guiding thread to a complete list of the ideas of reason. As that classification of syllogisms is even less exhaustive of the forms of inference than is the traditional classification of judgements of the forms of judgement, the logical guiding thread is even more misleading in the Dialectic than it was in the Analytic. But there is this of relevance in Kant's correlation of reason and inference./ For as inference takes judgements for granted and brings them together, so reason takes the work of the understanding for granted, and tries to give it greater unity and system.) If reason stands for the ideal of unity in our knowledge, that ideal, Kant says, may take three forms, corresponding to which are the three main-parts of the Dialectic. We have seen that all thinking implies the unity of our consciousness, a transcendental unity never realized in the empirical consciousness. (This ideal unity of the self is an idea of reason, and if we hypostatize our ideal and make it the basis and not the goal of knowledge, we get what Kant calls the Paralogisms or false reasonings of rational psychology J Similarly, on the side of the objective, our judgements imply a system in which objects have their

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KANT

determined place. The thought of such a comprehensive and all-inclusive system governs our judging. If we hypostatize this ideal, we get what Kant calls t.he.sAntj.jaegaies-pf Pure Reason, which are all concerned with the difficulty of a complete system of determination in space and time. J Uniting both these ideals is the ideal of a complete unity of experience, including in itself both subject and object, the completed whole of existence. [This is the ideal of pure reason par excellence, the idea of God/ Or, to put the whole matter perhaps more simply, in thinking we are trying to adjust our limited experience, as Spinoza would say, sub specie cetemitatis, to set things in the order in which we should set them were we in a completely unified consciousness aware at once of all reality. So the ideals, firstly, of this completely unified consciousness over against, secondly, all reality seen by it, and, thirdly, the union of both unified consciousness and unified world in that complete experience, produce the three ideas of reason. Such is the general programme of the Dialectic. But it is not in reality so systematic as Kant would have it be. In the second edition he added a note which shows the source of a good deal of the arguments he discusses. " Metaphysics has as the proper object of its inquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality—so related that the second concept when combined with the first, should lead to the third as a necessary conclusion. Any other matters with which this science may deal serve merely as a means of arriving at these ideas and of establishing their reality. It does not need the ideas for the purposes of natural science, but in order to pass beyond nature. Insight into this would render theology and morals, and, through the union of these two, likewise religion, and therewith the highest ends of our existence, entirely and exclusively dependent on the faculty of

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speculative reason. In a systematic representation of the ideas, the order cited, the synthetic, would be the most suitable ; but in the investigation which must necessarily precede it, the analytic or reverse order is better adapted to the purpose of completing our great project, as enabling us to start from what is immediately given us in experience —advancing from the doctrine of the soul to the doctrine of the world, and thence to the knowledge of God."1 " Rendering theology, morals, and religion entirely dependent on the faculty of speculative reason "—that was in Kant's eyes the real crime of dogmatic metaphysics. He is concerned to. vindicate the independence both of science and morality ; he is convinced that the independence of morality is as much menaced by metaphysical arguments whose object is to support the assumptions of morals and religion as by those which are directed against them. But this means that, in the Dialectic, Kant is examining not only the speculative reason in conflict with itself, but a conflict between the assumptions of morality and of science; and shows that this latter conflict has as much to do as the former with the list of the ideas of reason he considers as his logical guiding thread. The relation between what Kant calls the speculative and the practical reason is not really satisfactorily discussed in the Dialectic, and there is a certain amount of confusion in consequence. Not very much requires to be said about the first main division of the Dialectic, Kant's criticism of rational psychology. He had himself insisted that all thinking involves the identity of the thinking subject. Rational psychology starts with this identity and argues that the self as subject of thinking is a simple substance, unchanged by and independent of bodily processes, and therefore not subject, like the body, to dissolution. But, Kant argues, substance has no meaning except in reference to intuition, and we cannot ascribe to the self any other unity than we 1

B 395.

KANT

142

recognize it to have in our experience. An empirical psychology is perfectly possible because the self can be known as it is experienced. But if we distinguish, as we must, the transcendental unity of apperception as something having a unity beyond the imperfect empirical unity, that subject cannot be known. It is not an object of thought. We cannot talk of the self as a substance without making it an object, that is, without knowing it in experience. " Rational psychology owes its origin simply to misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which underlies the categories, is here mistaken for an intuition of the subject as object, and the category of substance is then applied to it. But this unity is only unity in thought, by which alone no object is given, and to which, therefore, the category of substance, which always supposes a given intuition, cannot be applied. Consequently this subject cannot be known." 1 This negative conclusion, as always in the Dialectic, cuts two ways. It rebuts impartially the dogmatic assertions of the spiritualist and of the materialist; and it leaves room for the assumptions of the practical reason about the nature of the soul. " Nothing is lost, as regards the right, nay, the necessity, of postulating a future life in accordance with the principles of the practical employment of reason, which is closely bound up with its speculative employment. For the merely speculative proof has never been able to exercise any influence upon the ordinary reason of man. It so stands upon the point of a hair that even the schools preserve it from falling only so long as they keep it unceasingly spinning round like a top ; even in their own eyes it yields no abiding foundation upon which anything can be built. The proofs which are serviceable to the 1

B 422.

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143

world at large also preserve their entire value undiminished, and indeed, upon the surrender of these dogmatic pretensions, gain in clearness and in natural force. For reason is there located in its own peculiar sphere, namely, the order of ends, which is also at the same time an order of nature ; and since it is in itself not only a theoretical but also a practical faculty, and as such is not bound down to practical conditions, it is justified in extending the order of ends, and therewith our own existence, beyond the limits of experience and of life."1 Yet at the same_ time this moral proof is not theoretical knowledge. " We must renounce the hope of comprehending, from the merely theoretical knowledge of ourselves, the necessary continuance of our existence."2 This passage admirably illustrates Kant's attitude to dogmatic metaphysics when used as a support of moral or religious principles. He argues that its proofs are invalid, but that their disappearance is no loss, for they have never convinced anyone. The real arguments for immortality, or for any hopes of that which we cannot meet in experience, are moral. This is Kant's denial of knowledge in order to make room for faith. The Antinomies of Pure Reason are introduced in a passage which seems characteristic of Kant's earlier outlook on the problems of the Dialectic—as though there were not, strictly speaking, any ideas of pure reason. The antinomies arise from reason's demand for the unconditioned being applied to the operations of the understanding. " Reason does not really generate any concept. The most it can do is to free a concept of understanding from the unavoidable limitations of possible experience, and so to endeavour to extend it beyond the limits of the empirical, though still indeed in terms of its relation to the empirical."3 This 1

B 424.

» B 426.

3

A 408; B 435.

KANT 144 demand of reason can apply, says Kant, only where the synthesis of the understanding constitutes a series of conditions subordinated to one another as conditions to a given conditioned. " Absolute totality is demanded by reason only in so far as the ascending series of conditions relates to a given conditioned."1 When to such synthesis the demand for the unconditioned is applied, an antinomy results. For the unconditioned may be got in two ways : by extending the series to infinity at the expense of not having the definite starting-point, or by supposing an absolute and not a conditioned starting-point at the expense of taking it out of the series. Kant finds four " cosmological ideas " resulting from the mn

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.,«.flM«l.».AJ^^i.-:-^-^.

- . •— • - n r l , . , f m(K

n v m

,

a t m

mm

|J

p

pimiiili

Ill mi IIII Willi • • • ! 11

are : " (i) Absolute completeness of the composition of the given whole of all appearances. (2) Absolute completeness in the division of a given whole in the field of appearance. (3) Absolute completeness in the origination of an appearance. (4) Absolute completeness as regards dependence of Existence of the changeable in the field of appearance."2 They give rise to the following pairs of contradictory propositions, where the thesis and antithesis are, Kant argues, equally demonstrable. (1) (a) Thesis : the world has a beginning in time, and is also limited as regards space. (b) Antithesis : the world has no beginning and no limits in space ; it is infinite as regards both time and space. (2) (a) Thesis : every composite substance in the world is made up of simple parts, and nothing exists save the simple or what is composed of the simple. 1

A 409 ; B 436.

« A 415 ; B 443.

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145

(b) Antithesis? no composite thing in the world is made up of simple parts, and there nowhere exists in the world anything simple. (3) (a) Thesis : Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only causality from which the appearances of the world can one and all be derived. To explain these appearances it is necessary to assume that there is also another causality, that of freedom. (b) Antithesis : there is no freedom ; everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature. (4) (a) Thesis :. there belongs to the world, either as its part or as its cause, a being that is absolutely necessary. (b) Antithesis : an absolutely necessary being nowhere exists in the world, nor does it exist outside the world as its cause. The proof of the theses is^ j2ased,flq.ib^UMKtssibility of the antitheseSjj.s_thejpro£f of the antitheses is based on the mpossiblETy of the theses. It is often said that the arguments for the theses depend upon the notion that the conception of infinity involves a contradiction. But this Kant explicitly denies. Not all infinite series involve a contradiction, but only those which are, as Kant says, regressive. Really the contradiction arises from the attempt to apply the notion of infinity to the work of the understanding. If we agree with Kant that knowledge implies both universality and individuality, both a rule and a definite starting-point, then the theses are insisting on the need for a definite starting-point, and the antitheses on complete universality. This comes out in an interesting note which Kant, in the second edition, appended to the argument for the second part of the thesis of the First Antinomy, that the world is limited in space. " An indeterminate quantum can be intuited as a whole when it is such that though enclosed within limits we do

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not require to construct its totality through measurement, that is, through the successive synthesis of its parts. For the limits, in cutting off anything further, themselves determine its completeness."1 Such an intuition of wholeness is implied in all definite spatial determination, and therefore in all knowledge of existence in space, and a complete determination of existence must have the same definite unity as its foundation. That is the case for the thesis. The case for the antithesis is clear enough. For all temporal and spatial determinations imply the possibility of going beyond what is given. As Kant puts the matter : " Since this unity of reason involves a synthesis according to rules, it must conform to the understanding : and yet as demanding absolute unity of synthesis it must at the same time harmonize with reason. But the conditions of this unity are such that when it is adequate to reason it is too great for the understanding, and when suited to the understanding too small for reason." 2 Before he considers the solution of these antinomies Kant has a section entitled " The Interest of Reason in these Conflicts," which brings out how Kant felt himself concerned with both sides of the conflict. " We find on the side of dogmatism, that is, of the thesis : " First, a certain practical interest in which every rightthinking man, if he has understanding of what truly concerns him, heartily shares. That the world has a beginning, that every thinking self is of simple and therefore indestructible nature, that it is free in its voluntary actions and raised above the compulsion of nature, and finally that all order in the things constituting the world is due to a primordial being, from which every1

B 456.

* A 422 ; B 450.

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thing derives its unity and purposive causations—these are so many foundation-stones of morals and religion. The antithesis robs us of all these supports, or at least appears to do so." 1 The thesis has also a speculative interest, in that it seems to present a world more completely intelligible. On the other hand, " in compensation, empiricism," the side of the antitheses, " yields advantages to the speculative interest of reason, which are very attractive and far surpass those which dogmatic teaching bearing on the ideas of reason can offer. According to the principle of empiricism, the understanding is always on its own proper ground, namely, the field of genuinely possible experiences, investigating their laws, and by means of these laws affording indefinite extension to the sure and comprehensible knowledge which it supplies. Here every object, both in itself and in its relations, can and ought to be represented in intuition, or at least in concepts for which the corresponding images can be clearly and distinctly provided in given similar intuitions. There is no necessity to leave the chain of the natural order and to resort to ideas, the objects of which are not known, because, as mere thought entities, they can never be given. Indeed the understanding is not permitted to leave its proper business, and under the pretence of having brought it to completion to pass over into the sphere of reason and of transcendent concepts—a sphere in which it is no longer necessary for it to observe and investigate in accordance with the laws of nature, but only to think and to invent, in the assurance that it cannot be refuted by the facts of nature, not being bound by the evidence which they yield, but presuming to pass them by or even so subordinate them to a higher authority, namely, that of pure reason. " The empiricist will never allow, therefore, that any 1

A 466 ; B 494.

KANT

14«

epoch of nature is to be taken as the absolutely first, or that any limit of his insight into the extent of nature is to be regarded as the widest possible. Nor does he permit any transition from the objects of nature—which he can analyse through observation and mathematics, and synthetically determine in intuition (the extended)—to those which neither sense nor imagination can ever represent in concreto (the simple). Nor will he admit the legitimacy of assuming in nature herself any power that operates independently of the laws of nature (freedom), and so of encroaching upon the business of the understanding, which is that of investigating, according to necessary rules, the origin of appearances. And, lastly, he will not grant that a cause ought even to be sought outside nature in an original being. We know nothing but nature, since it alone can present objects to us and instruct us in regard to their laws." 1 Such is the conflict which the antinomies present. Its solution, Kant affirms, is the doctrine of Transcendental or Critical idealism. Were objects things in themselves, then one or other of the contradictory propositions would have to be true. Critical idealism rescues us from this dilemma by affirming in the first place, in regard to the first two antinomies, that inasmuch as space and time are forms of our intuition, pertaining to things as they appear and not to things as they are, the categories of space and time do not apply to an object thought of as going beyond experience ; and in the second place, in regard to the third and fourth antinomies, that both thesis and antithesis may be true if the one refers to things in themselves and the other to things as they appear. The application of this doctrine to the first two antinomies is not hard to understand. " Since no maximum of the series of conditions in a sensible world, regarded as a thing in itself, is given through 1

A 468- 7 0 ; B 496-8.

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149 the cosmological principle of totality, but can only be •set as a task that calls for regress in the series of conditions, the principle of pure reason has to be amended in these terms ; and it thus preserves its validity, not indeed as the axiom that we think the totality as actually in the object, but as a problem for the understanding, and therefore for the subject, leaving it to undertake and to carry on, in accordance with the completeness prescribed by the idea, the regress in the series of conditions of any given conditioned."1 We must think then of space and time as infinitely extensible and infinitely divisible, but not as infinitely extended or divided things. For they are both phenomenal, constituted by the relation between mind and reality which Kant calls appearance and our extending or dividing them is part of this their phenomenal nature. But when we come to consider the third and fourth Antinomies, the satisfactoriness of the solution provided by Critical idealism depends on the meaning we give to the distinction between appearances and things in themselves. Kant states his doctrine thus, in a passage of which I have already quoted part in a previous chapter : " The faculty of sensible intuition is strictly only a receptivity, or capacity of being affected in a certain manner with representations, the relation of which to one another is a pure intuition of space and of time (mere forms of our sensibility), and which in so far as they are connected in this manner in space and time, and are determinable according to laws of the unity of experience, are entitled objects. The non-sensible cause of these representations is completely unknown to us, and cannot, therefore, be intuited by us as object. For such an object would have to be represented as neither in space nor in time (those being merely conditions of sensible representation), and apart from such conditions we cannot think any intuition. »A 5 0 8 ; B 5 3 6 .

KANT i5o We may, however, entitle the purely intelligible cause of appearances in general the transcendental object, butmerely in order to have something corresponding to sensibility viewed as a receptivity. To this transcendental object we can ascribe the whole extent and causation of our possible perceptions, and can say that it is given in itselfprior to all experience. But the_ appearances, while c^forrmng to it. amJiQi-^äK&aJjLtliemselyes. 5ut_only~in this experience, being mere representatron^wMdi__as perceptions can mark ouLareal object only in so far as the perception connects with all others according to_lhe rules of the unity of experience. Thus we can say that the real trmi^s~5rpast~time are given in the transcendental object of experience : but they are objects for me, and real only in so far as I represent to myself (either by the light of history or by the guiding clues of causes and effects) that a regressive series of possible perceptions in accordance with empirical laws, in a word, that the course of the world conducts us to a past-time series as condition of the present time—a series, however, which can be represented as actual, not in itself but only in the connexion of possible experience. Accordingly, all events which have taken place in the immense periods that have preceded my own existence r really mean nothing but the possibility of extending the chain of experience from the present perception back to, the conditions which determine this perception in respect/ to time." 1 /—J Critical idealism, thereiore. implies that we can only know things in terms of perceiving them ; that perception Is a"~jc)int result fTEatwe can never get behind that joint result to apprehend the independent nature of the factors which produce it ; but that we can distinguish variations in the joint result as due to one or other of the two factors, ourselves or things ; and that we do this by the principle of causation or necessary determination in time. Our distinction of variations as subjective or objective is based 1

A 494-495; B 522-523.

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throughout on the principle that their explanation is to be found in what preceded them. It follows from this that the principle of causation can have no exception in experience; that once we admitted an appearance which was not determined one way or the other in time, our distinction of subjective and objective would be gone, and that, therefore, this at least in the antithesis is true : " Everything in this world takes place in accordance with the laws of nature." But it follows also that causation conceived of as necessary determination in time is not a complete account of what happens. For it is not concerned with the appearance as the result of that which is not appearance, but only with the relation of one appearance to another. There are, therefore, two senses in which we can talk of causation, and, therefore, this at least in the thesis is true : " Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only causality from which the appearances of the world can one and all be derived. To explain these appearances it is necessary to assume that there is also another causality." " Is it a truly disjunctive proposition," says Kant," to say that every effect in the world must arise either from nature or from freedom: or must we not rather say that in one and the same event, in different relations, both can be found? That all events in the sensible world stand in thoroughgoing connexion in accordance with unchangeable laws of nature is an established principle of the Transcendental Analytic, and allows of no exception. The question, therefore, can only be whether freedom is completely excluded by this inviolable rule, or whether an effect, notwithstanding its being thus determined in accordance with nature, may not at the same time be grounded in freedom. The common but fallacious presupposition of this absolute reality of appearances here manifests its injurious influence to the confounding of reason. For if appearances are things in themselves, freedom cannot be upheld. Nature will then be the complete and sufficient

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determining cause of every event. The condition of the event will be such as can be found only in the series of appearances : both it and its effect will be necessary in accordance with the law of nature. If, on the other hand, appearances are not taken for more than they actually are ; if they are viewed not as things in themselves but merely as representations, connected according to empirical laws, they must themselves have grounds which are not appearances. The effects of such an intelligible cause appear and accordingly can be determined through other appearances, but its causality is not so determined. While the effects are to be found in the series of empirical conditions, the intelligible cause, together with its causality, is outside the series. Thus the effect may be regarded as free in respect of its intelligible cause, and at the same time in respect of appearances as resulting from them according to the necessity of nature. . . . * Whatever in an object of the senses is not itself appearance, I entitle intelligible\ If, therefore, that which in the sensible world must be regarded as appearance has in itself a faculty which is not an object of sensible intuition, but through which it can be the cause of appearances, the causality of this being can be regarded from two points of view. Regarded as the causality of a thing in itself, it is intelligible in its action ; regarded as the causality of an appearance in the world of sense, it is sensible in its effects. We should, therefore, have to form both an empirical and an intellectual concept of the faculty of such a subject, and to regard both as referring to one and the same effect. This twofold manner of conceiving the faculty possessed by an object of the senses does not contradict any of the concepts which we have to form of appearances and of a possible experience. For since they are not things in themselves, they must rest upon a transcendental object which determines them as mere representations : and consequently there is nothing to prevent us from ascribing to this transcendental object, besides the quality in terms of which it appears, a causality which is not appearance,

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although its effect is to be met with in appearance. Every efficient cause must have a character, that is, a law of its causality, without which it would hot be a cause. On the above supposition we should, therefore, in a subject belonging to the sensible world have, first, an empirical character, whereby its actions, as appearances, stand in thoroughgoing connexion with other appearances, in accordance with unvarying laws of nature. And since these actions can be derived from the other appearances, they constitute together with them a single series in the order of nature. Secondly, we should have to allow the subject an intelligible character, by which it is indeed the cause of those same actions in their quality as appearances, but which does not itself stand under any conditions of sensibility, and is not itself appearance. We can entitle the former the character of the thing in the field of appearance, and the latter its character as thing in itself. . . . " In its empirical character, therefore, this subject, as appearance, would have to conform to all the laws of causal determination. . . . In its intelligible character (though we can only have a general concept of that character) this same subject must be considered to be free from all influence of sensibility and from all determination through appearances.''1 Such is Kant's solution of the antinomy between causality and freedom. He imagines that by his separation of the two spheres of the intelligible and the sensible he can preserve the claims -of both science and morality unimpaired. He is prepared to say that if we regard man scientifically, as he says, from the point of view of anthropology, we must hold that had we sufficient knowledge we could predict all his actions, and that yet when we regard him morally, we may say that he ought not to have done certain things, and that " ought " must imply " need not." The difficulty is that if the notion of moral responsibility 1

A 536-40 ; B 564-8.

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is to be real, the intelligible sphere must affect the sensible. Kant is entirely prepared that it should, and yet to maintain that the thoroughgoing determination of natural law is not thereby affected. There are those who find this solution satisfactory. But if it assumes that man's actions viewed phenomenally are in principle entirely predictable, it is hard to see how there can be any real meaning in moral freedom. Kant is bound to say that all action is subject to the law of causation because all actions can be part of a phenomenal world, and everything phenomenal must be determinable. However free my action may appear to be, someone else observing it must be able to say : " That change I observe is not a change in me the observer, but in that which (in this case him whom) I am observing," and that distinction must always be governed by a rule. There must be a reason why the observer says this is due to A's action, not to his own observing; and he can only say that because it exhibits a character, some kind of universality. We can, therefore, at once rule out absolutely undetermined action. But we have not thereby ruled out a universality which admits of variety, nor implied a character which can in all its details be predicted or necessitated. Indeed, if we consider more carefully the principles on which subjective apprehending and the object apprehended are distinguished, we realize that consciousness of my own purposes and activity as not part of the objective, phenomenally determined, world enters into the distinction. We shall see when we come to the Critique of Judgement, that Kant there distinguishes between the general nature of determination which is implied in the causal principle and the different kinds of determination which are compatible with it and are discovered and distinguished empirically, and that he takes for granted that we can recognize purposive or teleological as well as mechanical causation. He is thereby able to reach a solution of this antinomy which is more satisfactory than that given in the first Critique.

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The third and concluding portion of the Dialectic—The Ideal of Pure Reason—is divided into two parts. The first is a criticism of proofs of the existence of God ; the second is an appendix entitled " The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason." In the former part Kant argues that reason produces a conception of its ideal, an individual possessing all fullness of reality and perfection, but can find no means of establishing the existence of such an ideal: in the second he shows how the reason is actually operative in setting up regulative ideals for the understanding in the task science sets before itself. That the relation between these two conceptions of the task of reason is not more clearly conceived by Kant is due to the persistence in his thought of the view that reason can and does work in entire independence of sensible experience. When he is working out this line of thought he is ready to follow Baumgarten in his conception of the nature of God as an Ens realissimum—a conception in which fullness of reality and moral perfection are assumed to be the same. There can, he holds, be no intellectual proof of the existence of God so conceived. But if we find, as Kant thinks we do find, that morality can give us assurance of the existence of God ; for the nature of the God so assured we can rely on the conception furnished by speculative reason. " Thus, while for the merely speculative employment of reason the supreme being remains a mere ideal, it is yet an ideal without a flaw, a concept which completes and crowns the whole of human knowledge. Its objective reality cannot indeed be proved, but also cannot be disproved, by merely speculative reason. If, then, there should be a moral theology that can make good this deficiency, transcendental theology, which before was problematical only, will prove itself indispensable in determining the concept of this supreme being and in constantly testing reason, which is so often deceived by sensibility, and which is frequently out of harmony with

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its own ideas. Necessity, infinity, unity, existence outside the world (and not as world-soul), eternity as free from the conditions of time, omnipresence as free from conditions of space, omnipotence, etc., are purely transcendental predicates, and for this rea?on the purified concepts of them, which every theology finds so indispensable, are only to be obtained from transcendental theology."1 But when we turn to the appendix we find that reason is described as giving to science " the principles of homogeneity, specification, and continuity of forms." The ideal which thinking on those lines would produce would be what might be called a conception of the universe completely intelligible for science, not a being which anyone would be inclined to worship. Kant seems to waver between two ideas of reason. The one would seem to imply that there are two species of reason, the speculative and the practical; the function of the first being to elaborate the concept of the unconditioned, of the second to issue imperatives. The other view seems to involve that reason strictly conceived, i.e. reason as contrasted with the understanding, is always practical. According to the second view, the same practical reason which issues categorical imperatives in conduct prescribes to and commands the understanding. We have seen that Kant has already found the reality of concepts to consist, not in that which is apprehended, but in an apprehending and uniting activity, in the principles or rules. The categories are " functions of unity ", the principles of the pure understanding have their origin not in any apprehended content alone, nor alone in pure mental activity working on nothing, but in the systematically unifying activity of the mind applied to the apprehended a priori forms of space and time. Kant is going, in the second Critique, to describe reason as self-legislation, as the source of laws ; and that is his fundamental conception of its nature. But there must be a situation to which 1

A 641-2 ; B 669-70.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON these laws are to apply before the laws themselves can come into being. If this conception of reason is to be maintained; reason is always practical. We are apt to forget that knowledge is an activity, and that, therefore, it is practical and for its attainment needs ideals as much as any other kind of activity. The question, then, with which this last section of the Dialectic is concerned, is : What is the objectivity implied in ideals ? How far does the fact that the mind is governed, and rightly governed, by ideals imply that these ideals are based on reality, that reality is such that the ideals are capable of fulfilment ? The difference between the section on the proofs of the existence of God and the Appendix'will then be that the first is concerned with the ideals of conduct in general and the second with the more restricted ideals of knowledge, and we shall have to abandon the implication of the first part that there is an ideal of reason as such. The main point in Kant's criticism of the proofs of the existence of God is that all such so-called proofs are eventually dependent on one of them, the ontological proof, and if we consider what is involved in this we can see the mistaken character of the criticism which has been passed on this part of the Critique by many of Kant's successors, from Hegel downwards. These refutations of the proofs of the existence of God, it is urged, are based on Kant's subjectivism ; only a false divorce between knowledge and reality could argue that reason gives us no clue to the nature of reality. We are, in knowing, coming to know something of the nature of reality, and the oneness of reality is, after all, implied in the possibility of knowledge, even of knowledge of the way things appear. But that Kant's criticisms of the proofs of the existence of God are not based on subjectivism is clear from the striking difference in the way in which he treats the first two proofs, the ontological and the cosmological, and the way in which he treats the argument from design, which he calls his physico-theological proof. He does not say that the

KANT 158 design and order we discover in the world are only appearance and subjective. That argument never enters his head. " This world presents to us so immeasurable a stage of variety, order, purposiveness, and beauty, as displayed alike in its infinite extent and in the unlimited divisibility of its parts, that even with such knowledge, as our weak understanding can acquire of it, we are brought face to face with so many marvels immeasurably great, that all speech loses its force, all numbers their power to measure, our thoughts themselves all definition, and that our judgement of the world resolves itself with an amazement which is speechless, and only the more eloquent upon that account." 1 Kant's objection to the argument from design is not that the facts upon which it relies are not facts, but that it goes beyond them ; that it argues that this design and beauty could only be caused by an external agent, and that, it ascribes to that agent, not power corresponding to the design and order actually visible in the world, but much more. " Since we cannot, as regards causality, dispense with an ultimate and supreme being, what is there to prevent us ascribing to it a degree of perfection that sets it above everything else that is possible ? " 2 But that involves the identification of ultimate reality and perfection which is the nerve of the ontological proof. We may argue " to the existence of a cause proportional to the order and purposiveness everywhere observable throughout the world," but that is not to demonstrate that " the things in the world would not of themselves be capable of such order and harmony, in accordance with universal laws, if they were not in their substance the product of supreme wisdom."3 Similarly the cosmological proof starts with existence as we know it, conditioned and dependent on other existence, and transforms an argument that the whole of reality cannot be so conditioned into an argument that this 1

A 622 ; B 650.

2

A 623 ; B 651.

a

A 627 ; B 655.

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conditioned world which we know must be dependent upon an unconditioned necessary being j it then argues that a being which is necessary and unconditioned must exist in its own right, and therefore there must be a being whose nature is such that it involves its own existence. This is obviously the ontological proof again. The ontological proof, then, is for Kant the real stone of stumbling, and if we consider what is really at issue in these arguments we can see that this must be so. Baumgarten's Ens realissimum, which Kant takes over as the basis of the ontological argument, involves a confounding of the notions of reality and perfection, in a way which robs both conceptions of their real meaning. The real issue in all proofs of the existence of God is whether there is in reality, apart from us, anything answering to our moral ideals and aspirations. If by God we mean nothing more than all reality, of course we can prove the existence of God. What we want to know is not whether reality is real or that what exists exists, but whether the fundamental nature of the world with which we are confronted is seen in its nature as discovered by science or in the ideals which guide our conduct—in the starry heavens above or in the moral law within. But if what ought to be is as such different from what is, then it is impossible to argue from a conceived perfection to its existence. This is Kant's answer to the ontological proof. If we can ask whether a conceived ideal exists or is realized, the very question involves that what we conceive is conceived apart from its existence, and, therefore,, that we cannot argue that existence is part of its nature as conceived. If we try to evade this objection by arguing that while, of course, wishes are no guarantee as to facts, it is implied in the nature of a pure ideal that it is capable of realization, and that, therefore, the world is not indifferent or alien to it, Kant is ready to accept an argument of that sort. But that is what he calls moral, not speculative, theology. If we begin with considering the nature of morality, we can assure ourselves that there are necessary ideals imposed upon

i6o

KANT

us by reason, which are not merely the outcome of our inclinations or tastes. It is indeed the supreme function, of reason to impose such ideals upon us, and to act in the light of such ideals is to assume that they are realizable. But that, Kant argues, is not first to know that God exists and then to act because of that knowledge, but to begin with the ideals and to postulate their reality. Kant sums up his position in the matter by what has been called the doctrine of "-as if," in a passage which looks back to the whole of the Dialectic : " In conformity with these ideas as principles we shall— first, in psychology, under the guidance of inner experience, connect all the appearances, all the actions and receptivity of our mind, as if the mind were a simple substance which persists with personal identity (in this life at least), while its states, to which those of the body belong only as outer conditions, are in continual change. Secondly, in cosmology, we must follow up the conditions of both inner and outer natural appearances, in an inquiry which is never to be regarded as allowing of completion, just as if the series of appearances were in itself endless, without any first or supreme member. We need not, in so doing, deny that outside all appearances there are purely intelligible grounds of the appearances : but as we have no knowledge of them whatsoever, we must never attempt to make use of them in our explanations of nature. Thirdly, and finally, in the domain of theology, we must view everything that can belong to the context of possible experience as if this experience formed an absolute but, at the same time, completely dependent and sensibly conditioned unity, and yet also, at the same time, as if the sum of all appearance (the sensible world itself) had a single, highest, and allsufficient ground beyond itself, namely, a self-subsistent, original creative reason. For it is in the light of this idea of a creative reason that we so guide the empirical employment of our reason as to secure its greatest possible

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extension—that is, by viewing all objects as if they drew their origin from such an archetype." 1 This is the way in which Kant has " found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith."2 But it is becoming clear that such faith is not " that faculty by which we believe what we otherwise know to be untrue," but is becoming identified with reason itself, viewed as a practical creative activity. But Kant's final view of the nature of reason, as of metaphysics, can only be made clear after we have examined his account of its formation in conduct and in art, that is, after we have considered the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement. 1

A 672 ; B 701.

* B xxx.

IV KANT'S ETHICS (i) ETHICAL THEORY

W E saw in the last chapter that the original plan of the Critique of Pure Reason included an inquiry into the principles of ethics. This part of the programme of Criticism, for which room was not found in the first Critique, was executed in two works, the one, the Critique of Practical Reason, published in 1788, and a smaller preliminary work, entitled Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, published in 1785. These works being part of the Critical programme, are concerned only with the a priori element in ethics. Additional light is thrown on Kant's views on ethics both in the Metaphysic of Morals, a work divided into two parts—Metaphysical First Principles of Jurisprudence, and Metaphysical First Principles of Ethics—and published in 1797, and the Anthropology, published in 1798, as well as in his Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, published in 1793. Before anything is said about the doctrine as expounded in the two first-mentioned works, it may be useful to make some preliminary observations on Kant's attitude to moral questions. In Chapter II I traced the influences which went to form Kant's philosophy, and mentioned the fact of Rousseau's influence on Kant's appreciation of moral problems. It is worth while to say something in greater detail about that influence. Kant's appreciation of and reverence for Rousseau is one of the most remarkable things about him. No two eighteenth-century characters at first sight seem more unlike than the careful, meticulous, respectable 162

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philosopher of Königsberg and the brilliant, wayward Frenchman. Kant was perhaps alone of his contemporaries in the importance he attached to Rousseau as a philosopher. He appreciated with others his charm, and the beauty of his style. " I have to go on reading Rousseau," he said, " until the beauty of his style no longer gets in my way, and I can apply my mind to him." " The first impression which a reader, who reads from other motives than idleness and a desire to pass the time, gets from the writings of J. J. Rousseau, is that he possessed a combination of uncommon sharp-sightedness, a noble ardour of genius, and a soul full of feeling in as high a degree as perhaps any other writer of any age or people."1 The second impression Kant notes, is the paradoxical and strangle nature of his views. But the final impression which Rousseau made on Kant was his greatness as a philosopher. He couples his name with that of Newton. " Newton saw for the first time order and regularity combined with simplicity, where before him disorder and scattered diversity were discoverable, and since then the comets move in geometrical paths; Rousseau discovered for the ••first .time, under the diversity of the forms assumed by humanity, the deeply hidden nature of man and the hidden law according to which anticipation is verified by observation."2 This coupling of Rousseau with Newton is of great significance. For much speculation in moral questions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was inspired by a desire to put our insight into man and society on a scientific basis after the manner of Newton. But such speculation merely proposed to apply the principles and methods of the physical sciences to conduct. Utilitarianism was the most outstanding of such theories. Kant, from first to last, thinks of the moral world as having its own laws and principles, very different from those of the world of natural science. Not that Kant thought that man 1 8

Kant's Werke. Hartenstein, vol. viii. p. 628. Op. cü., p. 630.

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was not a part of the natural world, or that there was no such science as anthropology. But he made, as we shah see, a distinction between the world of phenomenal fact and the world of duty or what ought to be, and his moral theory is an account of how man belongs to both those worlds. If the key to the understanding of the phenomenal world has been found by Newton, the key to the other, Kant thought, had been found by Rousseau. For Rousseau was the first to establish the essential connexion between duty and freedom. That is the special doctrine which Kant found in Rousseau and made his own. Before Rousseau, it was taken for granted that law and freedom were opposed. Rousseau, starting with the principle of moral freedom, deduces law; and there is a close connexion between Rousseau's distinction of the general and the particular will and Kant's distinction of the autonomous and heteronomous self. There is another remark also that Kant makes about Rousseau which is enlightening. He says that he had been apt to take great pride in his character of learned man, and almost to regard himself because of his intellectual attainments as a superior person. " Rousseau put me right; this blinded prejudice disappeared. I learned to honour men, and I should regard myself as much more useless than a common labourer if I did not believe that my work could accomplish something of worth to all in restoring the rights of humanity." 1 Kant says he learnt from Rousseau the dignity of the ordinary man. Kant's moral philosophy is dominated by a belief in what may Jae described as the simple goodness of the ordinary man. He is prepared to stand or fall by the view that what matters in conduct is attainable by every one, that right conduct is not the privilege of the superior person or of education and learning. A typical instance of how this attitude affects his moral philosophy is found in a note to the Preface of the second Critique. '' A reviewer who wanted to find some fault with this work has put the truth better, perhaps, than 1

Op. cit., p . 624.

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he thought, when he says that no new principle of morahty is set forth in it, but only a new formula. But who would think of introducing a new principle of all morality, and making himself as it were the first discoverer of it, just as if all the world before him were ignorant what duty was or had been in thoroughgoing error ? " It is sometimes supposed to be the business of the moral philosopher to discover a criterion of right conduct, a principle which, if put into the hands of those who can use it, will enable them to tell, as they could not have done without it, what is right and what is wrong. Kant's own doctrines are often criticized as though they were intended to exhibit such a principle, and failed. But nothing was further from Kant's mind than to set forth any such principle or to supersede the dictates of the moral judgement. The business of moral, philosophy is to make clear to merTöie" principles upon which they do act, not to tell them jdiat they ought to do. This they can find out by_u§iQg..-tlifiir reason for themselves, and only so.j That does not mean that moral philosophy is useless, any rnore than aesthetics is useless because it does not and cannot say what things are beautiful, but only makes clear to men what they are doing when they judge things to be beautiful. But it means that for Kant moral philosophy and aesthetics take moral judgements and aesthetic judgements for granted. Not that we must assume ordinary moral or aesthetic judgements to be necessarily right. Thfey are often wrong ; but the way to put them right is to do better wl;iat is done in moral judging or in aesthetic judging, not to do something else, such as reflecting philosophically upon the nature of such judging, however important that something else may be. For there are persons of profound moral insight and true moral judgeinent who are very poor hands at philosophical reflexion. They may have a highly developed practical reason without much speculative power. Kant had the great advantage of honouring a father and mother whom he knew to be simpler, less clever, and less well educated than him-

KANT i66 self, but whom he would never have dreamt of supposing to be, therefore, less good. And if he is to hold on to the superior goodness of the unlettered saint, he must maintain the reality and the independence of the practical reason. That means that he is going to have nothing to do with theories of moral action which regard it as an intellectual understanding of what ought to be done set in motion by some kind of irrational urge. Practical reason for Kant is not reason plus practice, but the rational working of the will itself. Kant begins the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals by insisting on the importance of the distinction between the empirical and the rational part of ethics. He is to be concerned in this work, and in the Critique of Practical Reason, with the a priori or rational part. But we shall not understand what he has to say about this, any more than we can understand what he says about the a priori elements of physics, unless we remember that the rational element has to be supplemented by the empirical. It will be remembered that Kant gave his course of lectures on anthropology in order to ensure that before his pupils considered the a priori elements in science or conduct, they had been well confronted with the empirical facts. But, as in the first Critique, so in the Fundamental Principles and the second Critique, Kant is so much occupied with establishing the reality and examining the validity of the a priori element, that his readers sometimes imagine that he thought that there was nothing else but the a priori element to be considered. He was concerned with the a priori element and its place in science and conduct; that was his particular business. But he never considered that the empirical element in science and conduct was not important. " It might deserve to be considered," he says in the preface to the Fundamental Principles, " whether pure philosophy in all its parts does not require a man specially devoted to it, and whether it would not be better for the whole business of science if those who, to please the tastes of the public, are wont to

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blend the rational and empirical elements together, mixed in all sorts of proportions unknown to themselves, and who call themselves independent thinkers, giving the name of -minute philosophers to those who apply themselves to the rational part only—if those, I say, were warned not to carry on two employments together which differ widely in the treatment they demand, for each of which perhaps a talent is required, and the combination of which in one person only produces bunglers. But I only ask here whether the nature of science does not require that we should always carefully separate the empirical from the rational part, and prefix to physics proper (or empirical physics) a metaphysic of nature, and to practical anthropology a metaphysic of morals, which mast be carefully cleared of everything empirical, so that we may know how much can be accomplished by pure reason in both cases, and from what sources it draws this, its a priori teaching, and that whether the latter inquiry is conducted by all moralists (whose name is legion), or only by some who feel a calling thereto. " As my concern here is with moral philosophy, I limit the questions suggested to this : Whether it is not of the utmost necessity to construct a pure moral philosophy, perfectly cleared of everything which is only empirical and which belongs to anthropology? For that such a philosophy must be possible is evident from the common idea of duty and of the moral laws. Every one must admit that if a law is to have moral force, i.e. to be the basis of an obligation, it must carry with it absolute necessity ; that, for example, the precept, " Thou shalt not lie," is not valid for man alone, as if other rational beings had no need to observe i t ; and so with all the other moral laws properly so called ; that therefore the basis of obligation must not be sought in the nature of man, or in the circumstances in the world in which he is placed, but a^priori simply in the conception of pure reason ; and although any other precept which is founded bri principles of mere experience may be in certain respects universal, yet in so far as it rests

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even in the least degree on an empirical basis, perhaps only as to a motive, such a precept, while it may be a practical rule, can never be called a moral law. • " Thus not only are moral laws with their principles essentially distinguished from every other kind of practical knowledge in which there is anything empirical, but all moral philosophy rests wholly on its pure part. When applied to man, it does not borrow the least thing from the knowledge of man himself (anthropology), but gives laws a priori to him as a Tational being. No doubt these laws require judgement sharpened by experience-; in order on the one hand to distinguish in what cases they are applicable, and on the other to procure for them access to the will of man and effectual influence on his conduct ; since man is acted on by so many inclinations that, though capable of the idea of a pure practical reason, he is not so easily able to make it effective in concreto in his life."^ " Every one must admit, indeed ! " perhaps the reader may exclaim. " Does not Kant begin by assuming one of the most debated questions in moral theory ? " But we shall find that Kant begins by showing that the ordinary moral judgement assumes the existence of an a priori element in morality. Just as in the first Critique Kant takes for granted the distinction between a judgement which claims to be true and a mere association of ideas, and shows that such a distinction would be impossible without the a priori, so he is going here to assume the fundamental distinction between obligation and inclination, between saying " I ought to do so-and-so " and saying " I want to do so-and-so," and is going to argue that such a distinction would be impossible without the a priori. Similarly the discovery of the a priori in the third Critique starts with the assumption of the distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable. These distinctions every one must admit. Ingenious theorists may try to explain them away, but they must 1 F. P., p. 389.

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begin by admitting that obligation and inclination do not mean the same thing. The first section of the Fundamental Principles then starts with an analysis of what Kant calls " the common rational knowledge of morality." It sets out what we assume in our ordinary moral judgements and moral distinctions, in-order by reflexion to gain what Kant calls a philosophical knowledge of morality. The heading to this section, " Transition from the Common Rational Knowledge of Morality to the Philosophical", is important. For the contents of this section are often regarded as Kant's main contribution to ethics. But the heading shows that he is setting down what he thinks every one must admit when he reflects on the nature of moral judgements. He would himself have regarded this section as a mere preliminary to the really important thing he has to say when, at the end of the second section, he comes to the- • conclusion that " the autonomy of the will is the supieme p^ncipk of Jmor^ityT^ ''TTOQung'cä]^^ be conceived in the world, or even out of it," the first section of the Fundamental Principles begins, " which can be called good without qualification, except a good will."^ The fundamental proposition from which Kant starts is that goodness has to do with willing; that if^olhgr.ihings are called good, it is in relation to the will that they are good. Good is directly an attribute of will and indirectly of that which is willed. There is no object or state or condition which, apart from will, can properly be called good. This has sometimes been taken to involve a subjective viewofjgoodness, as though an action became gö6drecirase we wUed it. Barnothing is furthef from Kant's thought than to defend such a doctrine. He is concerned to maintain that as the principle of objectivity in knowledge is in the way we think, so the principle of objectivity in conduct or in goodness is in the way we will. But to say that, therefore, all willed actions are good, is as absurd as 1 F. P., p. 393. FI

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it would be to maintain that if truth is properly a quality of judgement, then all judgements must be true. '• The nature of the good will reveals itself in contrast with incUnation or desires. Not that desires or inclinations are necessarily bad; but they only get a moral character in telation to will, and therefore the distinctive character oi thfi..^ood will shine,^j)ut most clearly when ,i|i§^ggnj|i gjojsJfctjivith fEfi3fisiJ'§§,ÄÄc " W e wiU take the notion of duty, which includes that of a good will, although implying certain subjective restrictions and hindrances. These, however, far from concealing it or rendering it unrecognizable, rather bring it out by contrast, and make it shine forth so much the brighter."^ The good will thus will be seen in an action done from duty^ But if there are nc/objects oTstates which are in themselves of absolute :worth. then " an action done from duty derives its "moral worth, not J^'mn Jhe^jpurpjo^e which- is.._tcLjje ajttained by it, but from Ae maxim by which it is deteri|MQed, anid tEerefbre does not depend on the realization of the object of the^action, but taerely on the principle oj HpUiion Sy which the action has taken place, without regard to^^jQl^feöLöf dSsifci It is clear from what precedes that the purposes which we may have in view in our actions, or their effects regarded as ends and springs of the will, cannot give to actions any unconditional or moral worth. In what, then, can their worth He, if it is not to consist in the will and in reference to its expected effect ? It cannot be anywhere but in the principle of the will without regard to the ends which can be attained by the action. For the will stands between its a priori principle, which is formal, and its a posteriori springs which is niateriä|, as between two roads, and as it must be determined by something, it follows that it must be determined by the formal principle of vohtioiLwhen an actionisdone^from,duty, in wjiich case every material principle has been withdrawn from it."^ " SfflE^' then, " is the necessity ol acting from respect for & law."^^ " The pre-eminent good which we call moral 1 F . P., p. 397.

» F . P., p. 399-400.

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Jaw consists in nothing but the conception of law in itself, which certainly is only possible in a, rational being, in so far as this conception and not the expected effect deternvines the \ ^ . " ^ ' "'\But what sort of law can that be, the conception of whidi «iüSt deterinine the will, even without paying any regard to the effect expected from it, in order that this will may be called good absolutely and without qualification ? As I have deprived this will of every impulse which could arise in it from obedience to any law, there remains nothing but the universal conformity of its actions to law in general, which alone is to serve the wül as a principle, i.e. I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universallaw."^ So* fafare~we taken by~IKe~anaiysis of " the common reason of man." The next section is entitled " Transition from Popular Moral Philosophy to the Metaphysic of Morals." | | is concerned to examine more closely the i^^KMöh between inclination and duty, and to see what consequences can be drawn from it. For the special character of human will is that it finds itself with all kinds of inclinations and interests and desires, that these certainly have their part in determining our will, and that in duty we find a claim that we should act quite without reference to such existing desires and interests. This conflict between the pure principle of volition and the desires produces the motive of obligation which is characteristic o-f.duj]^_^ajid the ngti^_of_jin.,iirjipaaiJxe.i^ gwi|lj A holy will entirely inspired by reason would be a stranger to obligation, as would be a merely animal will. Obligation and the imperative arise from the presence in us of both determining principles of action. " A perfectly good will would be equally subject to objective laws (viz. laws of good), but could nofbe conceived as obliged thereby to act lawfully, because of itself from its subjective constitution it can only be determined by the conception of good. Therefore, no imperatives hold for the Divine will, > F. p., p. 401.

= F. P., p. 402.

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or in general for a holy will; ^o^gÄLis_hßre-^at-ef-pla£e, because the volition is .already of itself necessarily in unison with the law. Therefore imperaliyesLare only formulse to express the relatiori~orobjective laws of all volition toT:lie subjective impefiectlon of the will of This or that r^Honal being, e.g'. the human will. "^ As ill the first Critique Kant is concerned to distinguish judgement which may be true or false from association which is neither, so here he is concerned with will which may be good or bad as distinguished from mere inclination which is neither. Willing is distinguished^ from desiring_bY being governed bjTirpnnciple or reason. TCh£_desireOT inclination is accepte3~ör rejected from some^jmse other than TtselE It is this which distinguishes the-will as rational from desire. But this rational action of the will may at one and the same time determine desire or inclination, and yet be itself subordinated to an inclination. When this happens we are acting under what Kant calls a hypothetical imperative. If you want to achieve a certain result, you must pursue a certain course, or take certain measures ; the determining factor then is " the wanting to achieve a certain result," and if the rriain fact that you want it is taken as a sufficient reason for the action, it has no moral value. Reason is here made subordinate to desire.i Now Kant is clear, and surely rightly, that the reason foif an action being right can never be that you happen to wanii to do it or that it wül produce a result which you happen to want. A man is not acting on principle if his principles is that of a mair I once heard say : " What I say is7*Tp hell with every one else! I'm going to enjoy life in my own way." For if you make a principle of not acting^.on principle, you will succeed in not acting on principle, and' your actions wiU be determined by what you happen to desire. Therefore, although in any decision of the will reason is involved, it may be employed in the very different ways of a servant or a master. We may give the name reasonable to prudential or sensible actions, whose ultimate > F. P., p. 414.

KANT'S ETHICS

173 reason is itself an unscrutinized or irrational desire—any action the final determining explanation of which is expressed-in such terms as : " That is what I happen to want," or " that is the way I am made." Actions may be rationally designed to achieve results which themselves are set to the will bj' casual desires. Or the result itself may be approved as rational; and when we say that, we must mean that there is such a thing as a choice which is rational, not as leading to anything else, but just as having the character of being rational But rational has often been taken to mean only that which gives a reason for something else; from which it would follow that practical reason would be concerned with means to ends, and there would be no sense in talking of a rational end. If that were so, Hume would be right in saying that "reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Kant's view maintains that rationality is an absolute character of some willing. What is perhaps most characteristic of Kant's account of action is that he refuses to make the category of means and^ends a full account of moral action. That is the point of The distinction he makes between the categorical imperative, which he thinks implied in all moral actions, and what he calls hypotheticsd imperatives. Very many writers on moral questions have assumed that rational choice as contrasted with merely impulsive action always means, " I do this to achieve that," and have made the difference between moral and immoral or nonmoral action to consist in the intrinsic superiority of the " that." " I refrain from eating now in order that I may enjoy my dinner better " is only prudential action. " I do something now in order to gain a reward in Heaven," is on such a theory moral action. Rewards in Heaven are moral ends; enjoyed dinners on earth are not. "The business of moral philosophy on this view is to find an end sufficiently superior to be described- as the end of all our actions. There will on this view be no sense in saying that we ought to desire such an end, for

174 KANT " ought " will only mean we ought to be rational rather than irrational; and being rational will always mean taking the right means to the end. Such theories, therefore, have to show that there is a supreme end which we are always seeking. This view assumes what Kant calls an " assertorial imperative," which says not, " / / you want soand-so, then do this," but, " Since you want to be happy, then do this." Moral conduct, then, is defended on some such lines as those suggested in : " Solid joys and lasting treasure None but Zion's children know." Kan^eje^ts^ll^views of a supreme end, or summum bonum, if that be regarded as what determines action. He indeed points out that happiness is far too vague a conception to be of any use as an end in this sense. As we shall see, he thinks that there is a rational end for human action, but he insists that such an end is the consequence of the moral law, and must not, therefore, be regarded as the determining principle of action. " The notion of happiness is so indefinite that although every man wishes to attain it, yet he never can say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills. The reason of this is that all the elements which belongJ;o ^ i.e. they must be borrowed from experience, and nevertheless the idea of happiness requires an absolute whole, a maximum ofwelfare in my present and all future circumstances." 1 The determining principle of goodness is in the will, and therefore 5i the will's rationality. The truly rational will commands categorically; for its rationality, not its reasonableness as a means to something else, but its intrinsic rationality is what determines it as good. 1

F. p., p.

418.

KANT'S ETHICS

175 We have, therefore, Kant says, to inquire into the possibility of a categorical imperative, and " we_>yillJirst inquire whether the mere conception of a categorical imperative "iriay 'nor perhaps supp^^^ us also wiffi^'t^^ formula of it, containing the proposition which alone can be a categorical imperative; for even if we know the tenor of such an absolute command, yet how it is possible will require further special and laborious study, which we postpone to the last section." ^ But as we have seen already, the formula of the categorical imperative can only be derived from " the principles of its volition," i.e. its rationality. The inost obvious mark of the rationality of the principle of^^EjEi^is its universality rärid Kant at this stage of his thought identifies the two. " There remains nothing but the general statement that the maxim should conform to a universal law, and it is this conformity alone that the imperative properly represents as necessary. There is, therefore, but__one Categorical imperative, namely tlas^i__Act oniy,.on^Jhai thäxim wnsrebyjhou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law."^ T^s_isjhe first formulation of the categorical imperative. But as this formula has been reached by seeing that the principle of the will itself is the only thing which has absolute worth, or, in Kant's words, that " rational nature is an end in itself," we may express what isTeaHyThe säine^föimülärtri"äsfecond way: " So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end as well, and never as means only." ^ " This principle, that humanity and generally every rational nature is ari end in itself (which is the supreme limiting "condition of every man's freedom of action) is not borrowed from experience, firstly, because it is universal, applying as it does to all rational beings whatever, and experience is not capable of determining anything about them ; secondly, because it does not present Jiurrtanity as an end to men (subjectively), that is as an object which ' F. p., p. 420.

« F. p., p. 421.

' F. p., p. 429.

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men do of themselves actually adopt as an end, but as an objective end, which must as a law constitute the supreme limiting condition of all our subjective ends, let them be what they will; it must therefore spring from pure reason. In fact, the objective principle.of all practical legislation lies (according to the first principle) in the rule and its form of universality which makes it capable of being a law (say, for example, a law of nature) ; but the subjective principle is in the end; now by the second principle the subject of all ends is each rational being, inasmuch as it is an end in itself. Hence follows the third practical principle of the will, which is the ultimate condition of its harmony with the universal practical reason, viz. : the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislative will. On this principle all maxims are rejected which are inconsistent with the will being itself universal legislator. Thus the will is not subject simply to the law, but so subject that it must be regarded as itself giving the law, and on this ground only, subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author)." 1 Though,„the..second formulation of the categorical imperative is based on the conception of an end, while the first is based on the conception of law, this does not mean that Kant reverts to the use of the category of means and end. For humanity as an end is not something we start by wanting, to the attainment of which all our actions are but means. It is, as Kant afterwards says, an end which is itself a duty. The two first formulations of the categorical imperative are supplementary rather than inconsistent. The nature of the rational will is not adequately expressed in the obedience to law as such-, nor in the pursuit of an end. It has in itself both elements, and the third-formulation—the conception of ji will which imposes ends on it^elfTs~|E~ä|tempt to combine them both. The mutual implication of these three formulations of the categorical imperative is not as simple as Kant apparently supposes it to be. Kant is using the word 1

F . P., pp. 430-1.

KANT'S ETHICS

177 " universal" in two senses. He J[.nds in willing a distinction betw~een~wlrät~~he ca.lls a purpose of reason and a purpose prescribed by inclination. The purpose of reason is a universal purpose. That is the first meaning of the word. But he also considers it a characteristic of rational willing that we regard ourselves as responsible to others, as others are responsible to us. Such willing is universal because it is willed as universally applicable. That is the second meaning. On either meaning moral action for Kant is acting on a principle which the agent sets himself. _If he is really doing that, his action is moral; if the principle be set riöFBytEe man's rational will, but by his desires or interests, then the wiiris perverted and what Kant calls heteronomous. ", Looking back now on all previous attempts to discover the principles of morality, we need not wonder why they all failed. It was seen that man was bound to laws by duty, but it was not observed that the laws to which he is Subject are only those of his own giving, though at the same time they are universal, and that he is only bound to act in conformity with his own will; a will, however, which is designed by nature to give universal laws. For.\vhen one has conceived man only as subject to a law (no matter what), then this law required some interest, either by way of attention or constraint, since it does not originate as a law from his own will, but this will was according to a law obliged by something else to act in a certain way. Now by this necessary consequence all the labour spent in-finding a supreme principle of duty was irrevocably lost. For men never elicited duty, but only a necessity for acting from a certain interest. Whether this interest was private or otherwise, in any case the imperative must be conditional, and could not by any means be capable of being a moral command. I will therefore_call this the principle of the Autonomy of the will, in contrast with every other which I accordingly reckon as Heteronomy."^ "KaritTias one further point to make before he goes on to » F. p . , pp. 432-3.

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consider in the last section how this principle of autonomy is possible. From the three formulations put together, Kant derives jret a fourth and final one : " A rational being must always regard himself as giving laws either as member or as sovereign in a kingdom of ends which is rendered possible by the freedom of the,will-"1 " The conception of every rational being as one which must consider itself as giving in all the maxims of its will universal laws, so as to judge itself and its actions from this point of view—this conception leads to another which depends upon it and is very fruitful, namely, that of a kingdom of ends. By a kingdom I understand the union of different rational beings in a system by common laws. Now since it is by laws that ends are determined as regards their universal validity, hence if we abstract from the personal differences of rational beings and likewise from all the content of their private ends, we shall be able to conceive all ends combined in a systematic whole (including both rational beings as ends in themselves and also the special ends which each may propose to himself), that is to say, we can conceive a kingdom of ends, which on the preceding principles is possible.2 . . . A world of rational beings is possible as a kingdom of ends, and this by virtue of the legislation proper to all persons as members. Therefore every rational being must so act as if he were by his maxim in every case a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends." 3 Thus Kant completes his account of what must necessarily be the content of a categorical imperative, or what must be the principle of morality, if morality is possible. Before we consider how in the rest of the Fundamental Principles Kant proceeds to the deduction of this principle, let us consider the principle itself, and some criticisms which have been made of it. Notice the characteristically Kantian paradox which dominates this account of morality. It begins with what seems to be the most rigorous legalistic moral theory, i F . P., p. 434-

2

F. P.. P- 433-

3

F- P-. P- 43«.

KANT'S ETHICS

179 Morality demands absolute subordination of all inclinations and interests to a law that takes no account of them. The individual with his tastes and capacities and inclinations is nothing; the law as such is all. And then we find that the reason why we are bound by this law, the only possible reason why we can be bound by it, is that we ourselves lay it down. " The laws to which he is subject are only those of his own giving." There is a sense in which Kant's doctrine can be translated to mean that the good is what we will, if the opposition between willing and wanting is pushed to its full extent, and if it be allowed that most so-called willing is a mixture of pure willing and wanting. And yet Kant retains and indeed insists on the motive of obligation. For he insists on the contrast within us between this legislating, principle-determining will and our wants and desires; which contrast involves a further much more difficult distinction between Wille and Willkühr, i.e. between our pure will and our choice. For Kant always insists that the rational will is for us an ideal, or rather is combined in us with inclinations and desires which are inconsistent with it. We must never suppose that we have a holy will, although, as he says later, the holy will is an ideal to which we must more and more approximate. I have called this paradox, beginning with the subordination of the self to the law, and ending with the. subordination of the law to the self, characteristically Kantian because, after all, it is only the application to action of the principle of objectivity which Kant has already expounded in regard to knowledge. No one ever had a greater sense of what may be called the objectivity of scientific fact, than Kant. That is abundantly clear in his pre-Critical writings. Yet his teaching is that the principle of objectivity is within us ; and there is a sense in which Kant's doctrine of truth may be described as implying that that is true which is thought, if the opposition between thinking and association is pushed to its full extent and it is allowed that most so-called thinking is a mixture of pure thinking and association, and if we admit a

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contrast between the self of pure self-consciousness and the empirical self. In both knowledge and conduct we are aware of a law to which we must subordinate our activity if we would achieve our purpose ; in both we can see on reflexion that this law which restrains our ordinary activity is the law of our own reason, and we find that by following this law of our own reason we come to know and to act in accordance with the necessities of a reality beyond ourselves. There is, however, this great difference between the activity of reason in the theoretical sphere and its activity in the practical sphere. As Kant himself notices, reason in the speculative sphere presupposes the a priori intuitions of time and space. Its principles, as we saw in the last chapter, are the result of the application of reason to the conditions of time and space. Without such an a priori element in the given, reason could produce no constructive principles. In the sphere of the practical reason there is nothing corresponding to time and space. Are we to suppose, then, that the rules of practical reason are produced by the sole action of reason alone without any reference to the given at all ? If we are to take Kant at his word, we are apparently to make this assumption. The practical reason is concerned with what ought to be. It need therefore borrow nothing from what is. Speculative reason could not be archetypal, but practical reason can. It is constructing its own archetypes of actions in the actual world. Kant seems to think that reason, using the principle of contradiction or of universality only, can produce principles of conduct. He does, indeed, give examples where we can show that wrong action would involve a contradiction, if universalized, as in his favourite example of telling a lie. If every one told lies or broke promises, there would be no belief or trust and, therefore, no point in telling lies or breaking promises. But, as Hegel pointed out, the argument is based on the assumption that there should be truth-telling and mutual trust. " The mere detailed Kantian statement, the suitability of an act to be presented

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as a universal rule, implies indeed the more concrete notion of a condition, but really contains no other principle than absence of contradiction or formal identity. The rule that there should be no private property contains of itself no contradiction, nor does the proposition that this or that particular nation or family should not exist or that no one should live at all. Only if it is really fixed and assumed that private property and human life should exist and be respected, is it a contradiction to commit theft br murder. There can be no contradiction except of something that exists, or of a content which is assumed to be a fixed principle. Only such a content can an act agree with or contradict. But duty which must be willed only as such, and not for the sake of a content, is a formal identity excluding all content and specific character." 1 There is justice in this criticism, but it is not a complete account of the matter. For Kant sometimes goes beyond the principle of contradiction. Of the four examples which Kant gives to show how his principle works, three are intended to show that to will what is wrong involves a contradiction in the will. But one example is different. " A third finds in himself a talent which with the help of some culture might make him a useful man in many respects. But he finds himself in comfortable circumstances, and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than to take pains in enlarging and improving his happy natural capabilities. He asks, however, whether his maxim of neglect of his natural gifts, besides agreeing with his inclination to indulgence, agrees also with what is called duty. He sees then that a system of nature could indeed subsist with such a universal law, although men (like the South Sea Islanders) should let their talents rust, and resolve to devote their lives merely to idleness, amusement, and propagation of their species—in a word, to enjoyment ; but he cannot possibly will that this should be a universal law of nature, or be implanted in us as such by a natural instinct. For, as a rational being, he necessarily wills that 1

Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 135, note.

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the faculties be developed, since they serve him and have been given him for all sorts of possible purposes."1 The implications of this are far reaching. It implies that the rational in willing is not what is elicited by applying a rational test, like that of general consistency or universality, to the will, but by asking what the will wills when willing rationally, it being assumed that it is willing rationally when it wills under the principle of universal obligation or as a member of a kingdom of ends. To put this more correctly, we may when we are willing be determined in the last resort by what we want, making that the principle of our action. Then our will is what Kant calls heteronomous and morally wrong. Or we may be determined by the fact that we regard ourselves as answerable to others ; that we are members of a moral community with moral obligations to one another. There are certain actions which are quite obviously inconsistent with such an attitude. Such are actions where we make ourselves an exception to moral rules which we in general uphold. Kant's examples of telling lies or making promises which we have no intention of keeping fall under this class. But there are other actions, the argument for whose Tightness is just that they are what we will when we recognize our moral obligations. The ultimate determining principle of our will must be either a want or inclination, prescribed to us by our particular nature and environment, or reason itself. This implies that there is a purpose of reason, or that the moral reason is creative or, as Kant says, constructive. But it does not imply that the creative moral reason works in a vacuum or produces a priori rules independently of any circumstances, only that it is the determining principle when applied to a concrete situation. If we were to be allowed to develop the implications of this passage and to ignore the other passages where Kant clearly falls into the mistakes of which Hegel accuses him, we might ascribe to Kant a moral theory which was not unduly formal. We could save Kant from the accusation i F . P., p. 423.

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of having consistently maintained a view which is obviously nonsensical by arguing that he inconsistently maintained a reasonable view. If we had only the Fundamental Principles and the Critique of Practical Reason to go by, we should have to choose between these two alternatives. Fortunately such speculation is unnecessary, inasmuch as Kant has defined much more clearly his account of the a priori in conduct in his Metaphysic of Morals, published in 1797. That work represents probably a certain development of Kant's thought. It was written after the Critique of Judgement, which, as we shall see, was intended to deal with some of the difficulties raised by the Fundamental Principles and the Critique of Practidal Reason. But it shows how Kant worked out the possibilities, revealed but not developed, in his earlier works. In the Metaphysic of Morals, the difference which I have noticed between the principles which are based on the principle of contradiction and those which are based on what the rational will wills is elaborated as the basis of the distinction between the doctrine of right {Rechtslehre), and the, doctrine of virtue (Tugendslehre). " Right is concerned with law, which can be external." " The laws of obligation for which an external law-giving is possible are external laws. Those among them, the obligation to which can be known a priori through the reason without external law making, are external but natural laws." 1 They are to be distinguished from positive law. Hence the first section of the Metaphysic of Morals is a treatise on natural law—an elaboration of a code of laws which are assumed to be independent of historical circumstance and discoverable by reason alone. All are deducible from the principle of reciprocal freedom. " Law (Recht) is the sum of the conditions under which the will of one can be united with the will of another according to a general law of freedom," and its general principle is, " Every action is right, which enables or whose maxim enables the freedom of will of every individual to consist with everyone's freedom according to a 1

M: of M., B. E., vi. p. 224.

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general law." *• The purpose of law is freedom. Its action consists, according to Kant, in words which were afterwards borrowed by Bosanquet, in " hindering hindrances " 2 to freedom. This principle of reciprocal freedom is far reaching. It is an a priori principle, as it is founded on the absolute worth of the human personality. It has, as an a priori principle, had a profound effect on the elaboration of law. But it is not a principle from which can be developed a system of natural law or natural rights without any reference to the purposes pursued by those whose freedom is safeguarded by rights. That this abstraction can be made is assumed both by Rousseau, with whom the theory originated, and by Kant; but in practice Kant's system of natural law implies historical assumptions and conditions as much as any other. He seems to have thought that a system must be altogether a priori, or altogether empirical; the alternative view of an a priori principle informing empirical conditions hardly seems to have occurred to him. The defects of Kant's philosophy of law can be seen most easily in his section on public rights. His a priori principles lead him to say that government depends upon consent. "The members of such a society (Societas civilis), that is, a State, when united for the purposes of law, are citizens, and their juristic attributes, inseparable from their nature as citizens, are : " (i) Legal freedom : that a man render obedience to no other law than that to which he has given his consent. " (2) Civic equality : that a man recognize in the people no superior save on the understanding that he has the moral power to bind that superior by legal obligation as truly as the superior can bind him. " (3) Civic independence : that a man owe his existence and maintenance not to the arbitrary will of any other person, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the community. 1 2

M. of M., B. E., vi. p. 230. M. of M„ B. E., vi. p. 231.

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185 " (4) Civic personality : that a man in question of right be represented by no one but himself." x But these a priori democratic principles are rendered of very little effect by the other direction in which Kant's a priori principle of regard for law leads him. The extent to which any State falls short öf these democratic principles is of no consequence to the moral obligation on all citizens of any State to observe the law. " The origin of the supreme power is, for the people which is under it, in practice unexplorable. The subject is not to begin reasoning about its origin, as though one could begin to doubt whether one owed obedience to it. For since the people, in order to judge with right behind them over the sovereign power, must already be thought of as limited under a universal law-giving will, it cannot and must not judge otherwise than as the present sovereign wills. . . ." 2 " A law which is so holy that 'it is a trespass even to cast doubt on it in practice, or to suspend its operations for only a moment, is represented as though it came not from man, but from some supreme and perfect law-giver; and that is the meaning of the text,' all authority is from God.' This must not be taken to imply an historical origin of the civic constitution. It expresses an idea, as a practical principle of reason, that the existing law-giving power must be obeyed, be its origin what it may. From this follows the proposition : the ruler in the state ha.s towards his subjects rights, but no legal duties. Further, if the organ of the Governor, the regent, acts against the laws, e.g. in impositions, impressment, and such actions against the principle of equality in the division of State burdens, the subject has in virtue of such unrighteousness right to make complaints, but no right of resistance." 3 " The ground of the duty of the people to endure even the almost unendurable measure of sovereign power, is this : that its resistance to the supreme legislative power can 1 2 8

M . of M., B. E., vi. p. 314. M. of M., B. E., vi. p. 318. M. of M., B. E., vi. p. 319.

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never be anything but contrary to law, and must be thought of as destroying the whole legal constitution." In a long note Kant goes so far as to say that the judicial condemnation of a monarch by his subjects, such as the trial and execution of Charles the First, is a crime of a far deeper dye than the assassination of a monarch. It elevates into a principle the entire reversal of the proper relations between a sovereign and his people. " It is like a sin, which is eternal, and can never be expiated, like those sins which cannot be forgiven either in this world or the next." 1 For Kant the absoluteness of law as such entirely overrides any question of the Tightness of this or that law, and he arrives at a position which is in this respect like that of Hobbes. The result is that the democratic principles enunciated in the earlier part of this discussion on public law come to be entirely nugatory except in so far as the sovereign may be inspired by them. But a system of natural law has little meaning except as something to which an appeal can sometimes be made against positive law. Legal absolutism, as Kant expounds it, is an impossible position, for enacted and written law and human law-givers have sometimes to be disregarded in the name of the principles of law itself. It is perfectly true that the individual has no private right of resistance. The authority of law is superior to his individual wants and desires. As T. H. Green says, we can only resist the State in the name of the State, because our resistance will make the State more adequately express its peculiar and characteristic purpose. We can put this, as Green does, by saying that there can be no right of resistance except when that right is a duty. But we must maintain that the principle of universality which is the essence of law does not find its perfect expression in the mere fact that all the citizens of the State are subject to law. That is an expression, but not the essence, of the universality of law. So far from being the essence, this external universality is inevitably 1

M. of M., B. E., vi. p. 321.

187 KANT'S ETHICS an inadequate expression of universality, as Aristotle explains in his distinction between legal justice and equity. No doubt it is dangerous to say that there are occasions when we may be justified in disobeying the law. We have such a power' of sophisticating ourselves, that we can easily make up our minds that we are acting at the behest of a higher law, when we are only justifying our selfishness. It is not easy to recognize the absoluteness of a principle while refusing to recognize the absoluteness of its expressions. But all this means that we resist the State at our peril. It does not mean that we ought not sometimes to act at our peril. What is true of the pretended absoluteness of State law is also true of the pretended absoluteness of moral laws. The Kantian rule of universality is a rough-and-ready test of true universality. Moral rules are valid against our individual selfishness or inclinations. But situations may arise where the literal following of a moral rule is a violation of the universal principle of which the rule is an imperfect expression. Kant wrote a small treatise On the Supposed Right to tell a Lie, where he tried to maintain that there can be no possible exceptions to our duty to tell the truth. But his assumption in the discussion of such problems is always that those who disagree with him are maintaining that there may be a right to disregard a moral rule in our own interests. He never really faces the contention that it is sometimes our duty to disregard a moral rule. No doubt this again is dangerous teaching. The freedom of the Gospel really makes far more rigorous demands upon us than the external rigour of the Mosaic law, and we may easily cheat ourselves and denounce the rigidity of the moral rule when we are really preparing to acquiesce in a lower standard of conduct. These are important practical considerations. They are so important that we might be tempted to say, like the Grand Inquisitor of Ivan's story in The Brothers Karamazov, that freedom is such a dangerous thing, and there are so few people who can be trusted with it, that we had all better stick to the

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absoluteness of an external moral authority. Others might take that course, but not Kant, not a philosopher who makes autonomy his supreme principle in moral philosophy. Kant's political philosophy, and especially his account of natural law, makes it clear then, that he did hold that moral commands and prohibitions were derivable from the mere notion of law as such, and that this position involved him in the formalism of which he is so often accused. But the other part of the metaphysic of morals, the doctrine of virtue, makes it equally clear that this is not the whole of his teaching, but that equally fundamental in his view is another way of regarding the universality of moral conduct and the nature of practical reason. Kant seems to have held on to these two views of the nature of practical reason, and never to have found a satisfactory relation between them. " The doctrine of right (Rechtslehre)," says Kant, " was only concerned with the formal condition of external freedom."x " It leaves to every man's free will what purpose he will set himself for his action. Its maxim is determined a priori: that the freedom of the actor should be consistent according to a universal law with the freedom of every other man." 2 " Ethics, on the other hand, provides matter of action, an object of free will, a purpose of pure reason, which is at the same time represented as an objectively necessary purpose—for man a duty. For since the inclinations of sense lead men to purposes as material for choice which may conflict with duty, so the legislative reason can retain its influence only by a moral purpose set over against those; and this must, therefore, be given a priori, independently of inclinations."3 The doctrine of virtue (Tugendslehre) is dominated by the conception of an a priori purpose of reason, a purpose which is in itself a duty, as the doctrine of 1

M. of M., B . E., vi. p . 380. * M. of M., B. E., vi. p. 382. 3 M. of M., B. E., vi. p . 382.

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right is dominated by the conception of a priori law. " There must be an a priori purpose and a categorical imperative corresponding to it. For since there are free actions, there must also be purposes, to which, as object, these are directed. And among these purposes there must be some, which are at the same time, i.e. in the very conception of them, duties. Were there none such, then as no action can be without a purpose, all purposes for the practical reason would only be means to other purposes, and a categorical imperative would be impossible." * There must, then, be ends willed by reason as such. Kant is here generalizing what was implied in the instance which discussed the question of a man's duty to develop his talents. The purposes which are willed by reason as such and are therefore duties are " our own perfection and the happiness of others." Reason, he holds, wills the development and the perfecting of our own nature—our bodily powers, our intelligence and our moral will. For as the good will is essentially the rational will, the rational will must will its own activity, and all that leads to the perfecting of such activity. When Kant proceeds to discuss these " duties of virtue," he says some things about them which are of great importance for an understanding of his whole conception of conduct. Ethics, he holds, unlike the doctrine of right, gives laws not for our actions but for the maxims of our actions. He means by this that it prescribes the principles on which we are to act, but leaves the application of these principles and the resolution of conflict between them to our moral judgement in individual situations. It follows from this that " ethical duties are of wide, as legal duties are of narrow, obligation." The former are what are sometimes called duties of imperfect obligation. The adjective " imperfect " is however misleading. The obligation is not less ; it is only less clearly defined. How far we are in any circumstances to be generous, for example, or to » M. of M., B. E., vi. p. 385.

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pursue our neighbour's happiness, is matter for our moral judgement. Yet those virtues are duties. " All duties involve the idea of necessitation through the law. Ethical duties involve a necessitation which only an inner legislation can give : legal duties a necessitation which can be given also by external legislation. In both there is the notion of compulsion."1 " Virtue is the strength of a man's maxims in following his duty. All strength is known by the hindrances which it can overcome ; with virtue these are the natural inclinations, which can come in conflict with the moral prescription; and since it is man himself who puts these hindrances in the way of his maxims, virtue is not only compulsion of oneself (for that might mean only our natural inclination compelling the others), but a compulsion according to a principle of inner freedom."2 As Kant had said in the Fundamental Principles, there is no categorical imperative, and therefore no duty for a holy will. The notion of duty arises from the conflict within us, from the opposition of our rational will by our desires. But while Kant still maintains that we can never have a holy will, that is not because we cannot come to do with pleasure what we once did only from the compulsion of duty, but because " virtue is always in progress; it is an ideal which is unrealizable but not unapproachable ; if it is not going forward, it is inevitably going back." Reason, as we have learnt from the first Critique, is the faculty of the infinite, and its demands can never be realized. Yet though this is so, it does not follow, as it has been supposed to follow from certain expressions in the Fundamental Principles, that if we take pleasure in an action, that shows that we are not doing our duty. There is, Kant holds, a genuine moral pleasure, and moral action in which we do not take such pleasure is so far imperfect. We must do our duty by others, whether we love them or not; but if we do our duty by them, that will make us love 1

M. of M., B. E., vi. p. 394. * M. of M., B . E., vi. p. 405.

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them and take pleasure in our good actions towards them. Kant holds with the child in Mrs. Ewing's story, who said " Does first and feels afterwards," but he would have insisted on the importance of the second part of that maxim as well as on the importance of the first part. From this second part of the Metaphysic of Morals, then, we get a very different notion of moral conduct and the part played in it by reason from that which seems to be given in much of the Fundamental Principles and in the first part of the Metaphysic itself. The opposition and conflict between the practical reason and the natural inclinations is common to all Kant's moral teaching. But in some of his teaching that conflict is conceived as one between law as such and inclinations. From this it follows that the categorical imperative is founded on the mere form of the law. It is supposed that the formal character of law, its universality, can itself, with no reference to any content of law or purpose to be achieved by it, produce definite and valid rules of action. To the validity of these rules, just because they are supposed to be deducible from the concept of law as such, there can be no exceptions. Nor can anyone take pleasure in acting in accordance with them. Respect is the only way in which we can regard the law. Pleasure is the sign of our following our inclinations, and therefore of our action being heteronomous and unmoral. The objections which can be raised to this formal and niggardly doctrine are too well known to need to be repeated. A certain Dr. Collenbusch once-wrote a letter to Kant, in which he said : " Dr. Kant's morality is a morality quite pure from all love, and this makes me ask, ' What is the difference T^eiween the morality of the devil and the morality of Dr. Kant ? ' " When we read certain parts of Kant's ethical writings, we can feel a certain sympathy with Dr. Collenbusch. But the second part of the Metaphysic gives a different view of reason. Reason has its own purpose, and sets for itself its own end. There are such things as purposes in

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themselves reasonable; there is such a thing as rational willing. Reason may and does express itself in laws, but they are the laws which come not from ratiocination but from the legislation of reason when following the purposes it sets itself. We have here something like the Aristotelian view of vovs, which displays itself both in the apprehension of the end and of the first principles from which ratiocination proceeds, and also in the appreciation of the individual situation. This is only to take seriously the view that there is such a thing as the practical reason, a reason which displays itself in willing, and in willing alone, and is operative in the individual moral judgement as well as in moral legislation. How, then, did Kant conceive the relation between " legal duties " and " duties of virtue," or between legality and purpose ? To that no clear answer can be given. In the Metaphysic he seems to give the priority to purpose. " Were there no such duties" (he is talking of " duties of virtue ") "there would be no duties at all, certainly no external duties." 1 This is to suppose that the good, the purpose which is itself a duty, is prior to the right. The bare principle of law, that the freedom of man in action must be consistent according to general laws with the freedom of every other man, gets content and application once it is recognized that men as rational beings have purposes of their own. But at other times he seems to take literally the implication of the adjectives in the distinction between duties of perfect and of imperfect obligation, and to hold that, when there is a conflict between duties of these different kinds, those of imperfect must yield to those of perfect obligation. This same preference of legality to purpose is involved in the denial of the right of the citizens under any circumstances to disobey or to resist the law. But that the preference of rational purpose to legality, of the rationality of the pure will to the rationality of mere universality, is more fundamental to Kant's thought will be apparent if we go back to the Fundamental Principles 1

M. of M., B. E., vi. p. 417.

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193 and see how Kant deduces his categorical imperative from the principle of autonomy. The principle implied in right conduct has been found to be the principle of willing universally. The distinction between moral and immoral conduct is not that the one is willed and the other not, but that in immoral conduct the universalizing principle of the will is subordinated to a particular purpose dictated by our phenomenal nature. In moral conduct the universality of the will has to be the determining principle. This is to say that the principle of moral willing is freedom. Not that man is not free in immoral willing, but that then he is using his freedom only to subject himself to accidental and arbitrary circumstance. In moral willing his freedom is the determining principle of his action. But it can only be this if freedom is something more than merely negative, more than a mere indifference. It must have its own distinctive principles ; it must, as Kant says, be legislative. Freedom for Kant, then, is the same as autonomy : the will giving itself its own laws and determining principles. " If the will seeks the law which is to determine it anywhere else than in the fitness of its maxims to be universal laws of its own dictation, that is, if it goes out of itself and seeks this law in the character of any of its objects, there always results heteronomy. The will in that case does not give itself the law, but the law is given by the object through its relation to the will. This relation, whether it rests on inclination or on conceptions of reason, only admits of hypothetical imperatives : I ought to do something because I wish for something else. On the contrary, the moral, and therefore categorical, imperative says: I ought to do so-andso, even though I should not wish for anything else."1 Freedom, then, for Kant is not a freedom of indifference : it is not indeterminism. For man is only undetermined by circumstances because and in so far as he is determined by the moral law. On the other hand, the moral law is binding upon man because it is his own law; it is what he wills in » F. P., p. 441. G

KANT 194 so far as he is a personality. " Freedom," says Kant in the third section of the Fundamental Principles, " must be presupposed as a property of the will of all rational beings." * This does not mean that, before we can recognize the authority of the moral law, we must first prove that man is free. " There is," says Kant, " a sort of circle here from which it seems impossible to escape. In the order of efficient causes we assume ourselves free so that in the order of ends we may conceive ourselves as subject to moral laws; and we afterwards conceive ourselves as subject to these laws because we have attributed to ourselves freedom of will; for freedom and self-legislation of will are both autonomy, and, therefore, are reciprocal conceptions, and for this very reason one must not be used to explain the other or give the reason of it, but at most, only for logical purposes, to reduce apparently different notions of the same object to one single concept."2 Kant's answer to this apparent contradiction is that " freedom is the ratio essendi of the moral law, while the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom. For had not the moral law been previously distinctly thought in our reason, we should never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a thing as freedom, although it be not contradictory. But were there no freedom it would be impossible to trace the moral law in ourselves at all." 3 What that comes to is this. When we reflect upon the nature of moral judgements, we see that they involve a sharp distinction between what we ought to do and what we want to do. This does not mean that we may not at times want to do what we ought to do ; but that in considering what we ought to do, we find that that is determined by principles to which our wants and likings are irrelevant. That means that if we consider ourselves, as Kant says, from the point of view of anthropology, as particular persons with particular characters, inclined to this i F . P., p . 447. * F . P., p. 450. 3 C. of Pr. R., Preface, Note, p . 4.

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195 and averse from that, our inclinations being determined by the play upon our particular characters of the surrounding world of nature—from such a point of view moral imperatives cannot arise. Moral commands and obligations are completely outside this determined natural order. Yet such moral obligations are recognized. Moral judgements imply that, however we may have been determined to act by the circumstances of the natural order, there are principles which are just not deducible from the circumstances of the natural world; and that even when we do not act from such principles, we recognize their obligation upon us, and we recognize that we might have acted in ways not determined by the natural order. If we persist, and say that if we understood the natural order better we should see that, when we suppose ourselves to have acted under the idea of duty, we really have acted according to our inclinations as determined by the interaction of our inherited character and the physical world, Kant's answer is that this possibility must be admitted in the case of any particular action ; but that this is no explanation of the idea of duty itself, of the recognition of obligation to principles which are not deducible from the natural order. The distinction between what we ought to do and what we want to do is in principle irreducible. That is what Kant means by saying that the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom. We are, he says, beings that cannot act except under the idea of freedom. For moral action and moral responsibility have no meaning if the distinction between obligation and inclination is abandoned. That distinction involves the distinction between a categorical and a hypothetical imperative, between (to take them in the reverse order) an action, the determining principle of which is our desire for some object, and an action which we regard as universally obligatory on others as on ourselves. Such a universal principle can only be determined by reason. Moral action, as we have seen, implies that there are principles of action determined by the rational will; it thus implies the spontaneity, the creative constructive

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character of reason. Man is a creature of two worlds, the intelligible world of reason, of which he is aware in his recognition of his obligation to act according to its principles, and the world of nature, where as a physical creature he is conscious of inclinations and desires prescribed to him by his physical nature and by the effect upon it of the surrounding physical world. As free, he is undetermined by the natural order just because, as a moral being, he is determined by and subject to the laws of the moral order; and the laws of the moral order are the legislation of his rational will. " For I delight in the law of God after the inward man ; but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin." Kant's distinction and St. Paul's are in essence the same, though what St. Paul calls the law of God is for Kant the law of self-legislative reason. This distinction between the intelligible world and the natural world as revealed by science has been already discussed, Kant reminds us, in the first Critique. For it is the same distinction as that between things in themselves and things as they appear, or between noumena and phenomena ; and the difficulty of this dualism is resolved when we remember that we only know things as they appear, and that that necessarily implies the distinction between things as they appear and things as they are. " We must admit and assume behind the appearance something else which is not an appearance, namely, the things in themselves." So we must admit behind our phenomenal existence our real existence, or our noumenal self. The first Critique had shown that our knowledge of the phenomenal world implies a noumenal world. The speculative reason can give us no knowledge of things in themselves, for knowledge implies intuition, and intuition is always of space and time. The practical reason cannot give us knowledge of our real self, but it does make it actual for us in moral activity. It makes us experience the

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197 actuality of what for the speculative reason was only a possibility. We can now understand what Kant meant when he said that he had found it " necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." For Kant faith is not irrational or insufficiently grounded opinion. It is as much the product of reason as is knowledge, but it is reason in action as contrasted with knowledge. Reason dictates the moral law, and dictates that we should act as if we were free. In moral action we assume or act as if we were free. We act as if we were concerned with purposes transcending our finite existence, as though we said : " What's time ? Leave now for dogs and apes ! Man has for ever." We act as if our actions did not concern ourselves alone but were the concern of the nature of things, that is, as if there were a God. Kant has in the first Critique rebutted all attempts to prove the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, or the existence of God. But in the second Critique he shows that these are postulates of the practical reason, implications of the way in which our reason calls on us to act. He dismisses what is called natural theology to substitute for it practical theology. This position is easily misunderstood. Kant holds that we do not and cannot begin with knowledge of, or theoretical belief in, such metaphysical truths and then act in accordance with them. The practical reason has primacy over the theoretical. We begin with the consciousness of the moral law and of our obligation; that is the unshakeable fact evident to all. A man may be a conscious atheist, and yet recognize the moral law. Kant would say of him that in his atheism he denied the implications of his own moral consciousness, and that if he reflected rightly on that moral consciousness he would realize that he was affirming practically what he denied theoretically. So, on the other

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hand, we may all by our practical wrongdoing act as if there were no God in the world, however we may piously affirm that there is. Yet this faith is not just an unnecessary rationalization of our action (in the modern bad sense of the word rationalization). Moral action would be unmeaning if we were not free, if moral purposes did not transcend our finite existence, if they were not the concern of the nature of things; if, in short, the intelligible world, as implied by the practical reason, were not a reality. The distinctive character of Kant's position in the matter is that we can affirm the reality of something whose nature we cannot understand. But that is the distinctive character of his conception of reason. For reason, as we have seen in the Dialectic of the first Critique, is the faculty of the unconditioned. All our judgements and our actions, because they imply truth and goodness, imply in their ordinary everyday working an infinite which transcends experience, and yet gives to experience all the meaning it has for us. The simple distinction between a statement which claims to be true and a mere association of ideas, and equally the distinction between judging an action to be right or wrong and judging an action to be according to inclination, leads back to the reality of an intelligible world, which yet cannot be directly known. Its reality is witnessed to in the order of nature and in the moral will. Kant has given eloquent expression to this doctrine in a passage at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason : " Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the offener and the more steadily we reflect on them : the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon. I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the outer world ; it enlarges the connexion in which I

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stand in that world to an unbounded range with worlds upon worlds and systems upon systems, with limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality. It sets me in a world which has true infinity, but is discoverable only by the understanding. The former connexion was only accidental, but with this world I know myself to be in universal and necessary connexion, and through it with all these visible worlds also. In the former case, the view of these galaxies of worlds annihilates my importance as a part of the animal creation, which, after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, it knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits, and that a mere speck in the universe. But when I consider again, my worth as an intelligent being is raised to infinity through my personality. For then the moral law reveals to me a life independent of rny animal nature and of all the world of the senses, so far at least as follows from the fact that my being is designed to follow this law, which is not limited by the conditions and limits of this life but reaches to infinity."1 This distinction between the two worlds of autonomy and of heteronomy, of will and of nature, is fundamental to any philosopher who is in earnest, as Kant is, with the reality of the moral law and of moral struggle. No one who takes wrongdoing as seriously as Kant can escape dualism. How man can be a member of these two worlds, how freedom and the categorical imperative are possible we cannot understand. But " while we do not comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, we yet comprehend its incomprehensibility."2 If we had what Kant calls a holy will, if we were mere intelligences, then our natures would be transparent to thought. If we were only what physical science reveals, our nature again would be comprehensible. But 1 2

C. of Pr. R., pp. 161-2. F . P., p. 463.

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both these solutions are impossible. We are bound by a rational will, and yet we are members of the sensible world, with our desires and interests determined by that membership. This dualism is inescapable if we are to be true to the facts. Kant, as we saw, was far too much in earnest with moral problems to accept the smooth harmonies of the system to which Wolff had reduced Leibniz. His separation between the laws and principles governing the moral world, the principles of freedom, and the laws governing the natural world, is perhaps his greatest contribution to the understanding of moral questions, for all the metaphysical difficulties it may seem to involve. But for all this there are certain obvious difficulties in his account of the distinction between the world of freedom and the world of nature, at least as it is described at this stage of his thought. As we shall see, he became aware of those difficulties, and tried in the Critique of Judgement to find some way of mediation between the two worlds. As those are described in the Critique of Practical Reason, the two worlds are so different that it is hard to see how there can be any relation at all between them, or how man can possibly belong to both. The issue comes up most sharply when we consider the practical possibility of freedom. If moral responsibility is to be real, we must, Kant holds, when looking back on a wrong action, know that we might have done otherwise. If the intelligible world with its moral principle really impinges on the world we know, there must be actions which are only to be explained by the intrusion of the free will and are not to be explained by the order of nature. But Kant has shown in the first Critique that there can be no exception to the law of causation, and up to the time of his writing the second Critique he seems to have assumed that phenomenal causation is all of one kind. " The necessity of events in time, according to the physical law of causality, may be called the mechanism of nature, although we do not mean by this that things which are subject to it must be really material machines. We

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look here only to the necessity of the connexion of events in a time series as it is developed according to the physical law, whether the subject in which the development takes place is called automaton materiale, because the mechanical being is moved by matter, or with Leibniz spirituale, because it is moved by ideas."1 He goes on to say a little later, " It may, therefore, be admitted that if it were possible to have so profound an insight into a man's mental character, as shown by internal as well as by external actions, as to know all its motives, even the smallest, and likewise all the external occasions that can influence them, we could calculate a man's conduct for the future with as great certainty as a lunar or solar eclipse." Kant goes on at once to say that " nevertheless we may maintain that the man is free." His solution is to distinguish between the time series which is necessitated, and the moral world which is timeless. " When the law of our intelligible existence (the moral law) is in question, reason recognizes no distinction of time, and only asks whether the event belongs to me, as my act, and then always morally connects the same feeling with it, whether it has happened just now or long ago. For in reference to the supersensible consciousness of its existence (i.e. freedom), the life of sense is but a single phenomenon which, inasmuch as it contains merely manifestations of the mental disposition with regard to the moral law (i.e. of the character), must be judged, not according to the necessity that belongs to it as phenomenon, but according to the absolute spontaneity of freedom. If we were capable of another glance, namely, an intellectual intuition of the same subject (which indeed is not granted to us, and instead of it we have only the rational concept), then we should perceive that this whole chain of appearances in regard to all that concerns the moral laws depends on the spontaneity of the subject as a thing in itself, of the determination of which no physical explanation can be given." 2 1 2

GI

c. of Pr. R., p. 97. C. of Pr. R., p. 99.

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But this will not do. For from the moral point of view our life is not one single phenomenon, but a series of trj^rnphs and defeats, of autonomous and heteronomous actions, of actions where the moral will realizes itself and actions where it is defeated. We can and must explain our own actions and the actions by other people in these terms. Moral conduct must have a temporal character, must have its decisive moments. We may put this difficulty in another way by examining Kant's equation of the difference between autonomous and heteronomous action with the distinction between things in themselves and appearances. For that latter distinction implies that autonomous action is the reality and heteronomous only the appearance. But if that is so, the difference between autonomous and heteronomous action is only a difference of point of view. All actions, if we had complete scientific understanding, would be seen to be heteronomous, determined by the interaction of a man's inherited character and external circumstances; and, therefore, all actions would be immoral. Equally all actions, if we had an intuitive understanding, and could know things in themselves, would be seen to be autonomous, to be the working of the rational will; and therefore all actions would be moral. The distinction between making the will the determining principle of action and allowing the determining principle to be some object of the senses cannot possibly be only a distinction between points of view. If the rational will is the real self, why does it not always operate ? What is fundamentally the same criticism may be put in another way. Moral responsibility is as real for bad actions as for good actions. From this it would follow that freedom is the choice of a self which may either follow the dictates of the rational will or follow the prompting of its inclinations. But the self which chooses between these two alternatives appears to be left out between the rational will, which is the real self, on the one hand, and the empirical self, which is determined by inclinations, on the

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other. Kant's rational will and his mechanically determined world of sensibility are alike abstractions. We may remind ourselves that the other difficulties in Kant's moral theory, at least in his statement of it before the Critique of Judgement was written, are due to this same abstract separation of the rational will and the inclinations. So long as it is maintained the rational will is in a vacuum, issuing absolute moral laws with no regard to circumstances, while it is assumed that pleasure in our actions is always the sign that our inclinations and not our rational will are determining us, and that our actions have no moral value. I tried to show that there were signs even in the earlier works that this was not Kant's real view, and that in his later Metafthysic of Morals he says some things very different. But what he is trying to say cannot really be squared with the distinction between the two worlds of intelligible and sensible reality, as he presents that distinction in the Critique of Practical Reason. How far he succeeded in getting over these difficulties, which he himself came to recognize, we shall see when we consider the Critique of Judgement. Meantime, we must consider the light thrown on his ethical theory by his treatise on religion.

(2)

RELIGION W I T H I N THE BOUNDS OF REASON ALONE

Kant's philosophy of religion is, of course, not strictly a part of his ethical theory. Its value and interest may obviously be considered as a contribution to the philosophy of religion. There are many who have a high regard for Kant's ethical theory who would maintain that he had an inadequate conception of the nature of religion. Neverthele-S57~RamVT5luTö!^^ connected with his ethical theory that it may be better to consider it here. For there are some points in his theory of conduct which are brought out most clearly in his treatment of religion. Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone accepts, as

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the title implies, the well-known distinction between natural and revealed religion. But while Baumgarten describes natural religion as what we may know about God without faith, Kant'sjdistinclioiiis between theJaith in God which man may acquire from within, frontal! that isZ^ydyjed_jn_,j:uxning from,evil iQ..^oqd and seeking to imitate the moral ideal revealed to him by his own reason o!TT3ie~örIe~Ti"ärfd, and the faith which rests jrpjon an histol^TrfiYelation.on thejj.ther. An historical revelation needs for its continuance a learned class to sift the true from the false and to hand down the true tradition. But " i t is proper, it is rational to assume that not only ' Avise after the flesh,' learned men or men capable of rationalizing should be called to this illumination of their true salvation : the whole human race is to be capable of this faith. ' The foolish things of the world', even the ignorant and the most limited in conceptual power, must have some pretensions to such a doctrine and such an inner conviction." 1 " Now," he goes on, after explaining that an historical religion needs learning, " there is a practical knowledge, which though it is based entirely on reason and needs no historical learning, yet lies as near to every one, even the simplest, as though it were written in letters on his heart. It is a law which has only to be named, and every one at once understands what it is they are asked to consider. It brings with it in every man's consciousness unconditional obligation. This is the moral law. What is still more, either this knowledge leads by itself to faith in God, or at least it determines the conception of God as a moral law-giver, and so it leads to a pure religious faith which every man finds not only conceivable but worthy of the highest honour. It does this so naturally that if the attempt is made, it will be found in the case of every man, though he has been taught nothing about it, that it can be elicited from him by questioning,"2 Kant's religion, then, like his ethics, is to be religion for the common man ; and it can be that just because and in 1

R., B. E., vi. p. 181.

« R., B. E., vi. p . 181.

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so far as it is the direct outcome of the moral consciousness. Revealed religion serves only to make more vivid and present to the mind what is already implicit in the moral consciousness. An historical example of a man in whose life the good principle completely triumphed over the evil can and does make us more vividly realize the possibility and the conditions of that victory; but the power of the life of Christ upon us depends on our possessing in our moral consciousness the ideal and the claim which that life presents to us. There is, then, for Kant only one real religion, though there may be many presentments of it; and the purpose of an historical revealed religion, and of what Kant calls Church faith, is gradually to make it possible for men to do without revelation and live by pure religion alone. The relation between morality and religion is stated by Kant in the preface to the first edition of Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone as follows : " Morality, so far as it is based upon the conception of man as a free being and, therefore, as a being who binds himself through his reason to an unconditioned law, needs neither the idea of a being over him in order to know his duty, nor of a motive other than that furnished by the law itself, in order to do it. . . . Morality, therefore, in no way needs religion for its support (neither objectively as concerns what is to be willed, nor subjectively as concerns capacity to will it), but by means of the pure practical reason it is sufficient to itself."1 That is Kant's first position, and he stoutly repudiates any attempt to make morality dependent upon or subsequent to religion. The distinguishing mark of all false religion is that it makes something not in itself moral— church observance or creed or acceptance of authority— of value in itself, as though such things and not a good life could be acceptable to God. That is to make an end of what ought only to be a means. But once this first point is granted, then Kant can go on : 1

R., B. E., vi. p. 3.

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" Although morality needs for its own behalf no representation of a purpose which must go before the determination of the will, yet it may well be the case that it has a necessary relation to such a purpose, viewed not as the ground but as the necessary consequence of the maxims which are assumed in consonance with the moral law. No determination of will can take place in man without some relation to purpose, as no determination of will can be without effect. The representation of that effect, although it is not the determining ground of our willing and, therefore, not a purpose which precedes it, yet must be taken into account as a consequence of the will being determined by law to a purpose (finis in consequentiam veniens). Without that willing can find no satisfaction, if it thinks of no determined object, objective or subjective, which it has or should have in the action before it—an object set forth to show how, but not to what, it has to work. Willing, therefore, for morality needs no purpose in order to act rightly. The law which contains in principle the formal condition of the use of freedom is enough. But from morality there follows a purpose. For it cannot possibly be indifferent to reason how the question is answered : What is, then, to come out of our right acting ? Nor is it indifferent to that towards which we direct all our doing and not doing. This may not be entirely in our power, but we can at least see that our actions are consistent with it. This ideal which contains united in itself the formal condition of all the purposes which we ought to have (duty), as well as all that is conditioned by all these purposes which we have (the blessedness which follows upon the observance of them), is only the idea of an object. It is the idea of the highest good in the world. For its possibility we must assume a higher, moral, most holy and almighty Being who can alone unite both elements which the idea contains. But this idea is on the practical side not empty. It helps our natural requirements to think of a final purpose to all our doing and not-doing which can be justified by reason. Without it our moral decisions would be hindered. But

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the best of it is that this idea proceeds from morality, and is not its basis. It is a purpose which cannot be made such without moral principles. Therefore, it cannot be indifferent to morality whether it does or does not conceive a final purpose of all things. Its conception does not increase the number of our duties, but gives them a special point of relation in the uniting of all purposes. Only thus can objective practical reality be given to the union of the purposiveness of freedom with the purposiveness of nature." 1 We may try to translate this into simpler terms. As we have already seen, the fundamental moral distinction for Kant is that between an action in which the ultimate determining principle of our will is a want or inclination, prescribed to us by our particular nature or environment, and an action where that ultimate principle is reason itself. This does not mean that we are not to will particular purposes in particular situations. Of course, our willing is continually directed in the light of a particular situation to bring about this particular result rather than that. But the decisive question is whether we will this rather than that because it is prescribed by a universal principle of reason as applied to this situation, or because we want this rather than that. If the final principle of our action is that we want this particular result, then, according to Kant, our will is not moral. The representation of the consequences of our action ought never, therefore, to be the determining principle of our action. This applies just as much, as we have seen, to the representation of exalted as of trifling purposes. If we start with wanting something, regard the fact of that want as an all-sufficient reason for action, and use our reason only to realize our want, then our action is heteronomous, and of no moral value. In moral action the determining principle must be the practical reason itself. But at the same time it is obvious that we cannot will without expecting, and indeed willing, the consequences of our action. If we were convinced that the world was 1

R., B. E., vi. pp. 4-5.

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entirely alien to our purposes, so that none of our actions could come to any fruition, we should know that our actions would be futile ; and we cannot will what we know to be futile, although we are bound to will even if we have no guarantee of the success of our action. A will which really ignored consequences would be a will which willed nothing. And in a world in which our moral purposes were known to be incapable of fulfilment, it would not be enough for us to say, " Let us at least do our duty." For although our first business is to do our duty, it cannot be our duty to will what has no consequences, for that is not willing. We continually are called upon to do our duty and leave the consequences to faith. But then for that faith must be possible. The principle implied in Kant's position is seen if we consider what is involved in willing as a member of a kingdom of ends. Moral action is action along with and having respect to other people. We are ordinarily in our actions willing something to which others are to contribute. The realization of what our will is is therefore normally not entirely in our power. We do our part in a co-operative enterprise, trusting that others will do theirs. We must be able to will that the maxim of our action should be a law for others as well as for ourselves. A simple duty like truthspeaking or the keeping of promises implies that we will that others beside ourselves should speak the truth and be honest. If we knew that no one else could speak the truth or keep a promise, the whole situation would be altered. Yet, on the other hand, if we refused to speak the truth or keep our promises unless we got a guarantee that every one else would do the same, we should not be following the moral law. We are to do our part, trusting that others will do the same. We must do this, for we are, if acting morally, willing that the maxim of our action should be a universal law. This implies that we must for right action have faith in something that is not within our power, and yet that we must not demand that that faith should become knowledge. The nerve of this position may be seen most clearly if

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we compare it with that of Hobbes. " He that would be modest and tractable, and perform all he promises in such time and place as no other man should do so, should but procure his own ruin, which is against all the laws of nature. But he that, having surety that other men shall regard the laws of nature, doth not do so himself, endeavoureth not peace but war." 1 If you are guaranteed the kingdom of heaven as the result of your actions, you are called on to act as a member of i t ; if not, not. From which follows Hobbes' position that the setting up of a guarantor in the person of the sovereign must precede all morality. This is to make the result willed in action its determining ground. Kant is right in thinking such a position immoral. " For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye ? Do not even the publicans the same ? " We are not to make bargains in obeying the moral law. We are to give, "asking nothing again." And yet at the same time such a " bestowing virtue," as Nietzsche called it, implies necessarily trust and faith in the consequences of our actions. The faith is the outcome of the action, not its determining ground; but it is not an accidental outcome. The action implies faith. Notice what a revolutionary conception of the relation between reason and faith this position involves. Instead of the two being separate as though we were first rational and then faith gave us something more, faith is for Kant part and parcel of rational willing. True faith is, therefore, for Kant, always rational faith. It is the faith implied in rational will. These considerations will enable us to answer what might seem to be the most obvious argument against Kant's theology. We might agree that, of course, our actions have purposes and take effect in the world without us, but maintain that those purposes are limited. However badly we may think of the world, however much we may consider it to be quite indifferent to our exalted ideals, yet we might hold this impersonal universe accidentally allows some 1

Hobbes' Leviathan, c. xv.

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scanty opportunities for the fruition of good actions. We may make some men's lives for a short time happier, we may at least, by being kind and merciful and upright, shed some faint light in the darkness that surrounds us. If we give up faith in God, there are still purposes the accomplishment of which is within our powers, and to those we should confine ourselves. The fallacy of the Kantian theology, it might be argued, is not that it demands that will should take its willed effect in the real world, but in its assumption of one final all-embracing purpose of all our actions. Kant's answer to such objections would be that the moral law assumes the infinity of the good will; that we must will that .the principle of our action should be a universal law of nature ; that we will as members of a kingdom of ends. This implies that we must in our willing be seeking to bring about something the full accomplishment of which is beyond our power. If it be asked in objection, how can we be made responsible for what is not in our power—and does not Kant himself say : " I ought, therefore I can " ? —the answer is that we are responsible for doing our duty, that is, for playing our part in the accomplishment of a universal purpose. That is within our power ; the accomplishment is not. That is obviously true of any co-operative social action, and Kant holds it to be true of all moral action. The universality of the purpose of moral action follows in Kant's opinion from the very nature of the moral law. The universality of the moral law is inconsistent with the view that the universe is indifferent to our moral ideals. That is why Kant can say that if we act as reason demands, we act as if there were a God. But the as if is an attempt to translate into intellectual terms the simpler conception of trust or faith, and the translation weakens its force. Faith for Kant is not primarily faith " that," but faith " in," and such a faith is always primarily shown in action. After this very general statement in the Introduction of the relation between morality and religion, it is perhaps strange to find that the first section of Religion Within the

KANT'S ETHICS 211 Bounds of Reason Alone is concerned with the " radical evil in human nature." But because for Kant religion is essentially practical, it is primarily concerned, not like Nicene theology, with the being and attributes of God, but with the dealings of God with 4fae individual soul, with justification and sanctification. The only rational purpose which can be conceived for the world is the moral perfection of men, and the way in which that purpose can be attained can only be understood when we face the nature of the problem by realizing the power of evil. " It is a characteristic of Christian morality," says Kant, " to distinguish the morally good from the morally evil, not as heaven and earth, but as heaven and hell are distinguished."1 And in this, he asserts, Christianity is philosophically correct. For the real problem of conduct arises from the fact that man makes evil the principle of his willing. Inclinations in themselves are neither good nor bad. As goodness consists in the self-legislation of the will, the rational principle itself determining the will, so evil can only be in the will, and can consist only in the will deliberately subordinating itself to inclination. There are passages in Kant's ethical work which.lend themselves to the interpretation that Kant thought that the good will alone is free, and that evil consists in the will being inactive and allowing the inclinations to work by themselves. This is taken to imply that we are not responsible for our bad actions. Now there is a sense in which the good will alone is free, if by a free action is meant one which is not determined by inclination. But the characteristic of a bad action which makes it a bad action, and not merely reflex behaviour, is that the will deliberately puts itself under the control of the inclinations. To do that is for Kant to take evil up into the wilf itself. There are, then, in willing two absolutely opposed principles; and goodness is primarily a matter of a change of principle, or of what religion calls conversion. Man finds in himself these two radically opposed principles of conduct; he finds his will in bondage 1

R „ B. E., vi. p. 60.

Note.

KANT to the evil principle, and yet he acknowledges the authority of the moral law over his will. How, then, is the good principle to overcome the evil ? That is the vital question for morality as for religion. Man, conscious of the power of evil in his own will, despairs of the victory of the good. He needs a conviction that he can make a new start, and a conviction that that new start will really be a beginning of another kind of life, in which he can persevere. In theological language, he needs the conviction of justification and the promise of sanctification. Reformation theology, and especially the evangelical pietism in which Kant had been brought up, had insisted that man's weak and divided nature was helpless without the operation of the Grace of God. Now Kant offers no explanation of the presence within the will of these two opposing principles ; he insists, indeed, that this is, like free will itself, a mystery whose incomprehensibility alone we can comprehend. Equally he professes no explanation of how the good principle may obtain victory over the bad. Of that reason alone can give no account. But as a moralist he is insistent that though we need the Grace of God to overcome, the only way in which we may hope for it is to seek to deserve it. We are not to read the doctrine of justification by faith, as it has sometimes been read, as though we could do nothing till we were given a mysterious conviction of forgiveness, or as though the assurance that God would work in us might be taken as an excuse for our making no efforts of ourselves. To believe that is to fall into the fatal heresy of all false religion. Kant takes from the theology in which he had been reared the doctrine of conversion. We need an entire change of principle. He can give his own sense to the seemingly extravagant doctrine that good works before conversion are of no avail. " The appetites or inclinations, which in themselves are neither good nor bad, are opposed to principles in general; hence any noble principle of morality has a certain disciplinary value in controlling them ; but mere discipline may only bring about a seeming 212

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peace, and not overcome the true enemy, namely, the perverted will. Unless virtue contend against that enemy, all virtues are, if not, as a Father of the Church said, sflendida vitia, at least splendid poverty, mere tinsel, as it were, the outside appearance of something fine, but possessed of no intrinsic moral value." 1 But conversion is our turning to a new principle of action. Such a " change of life " is absolutely necessary, and it is also in a sense sufficient. For it implies in principle the victory of the good. That the change will be lasting, that it will show itself in all the details of our lives, cannot be proved. We shall have set-backs and failures. But the change itself is so decisive and far reaching that it carries with it a faith and assurance that being so fundamental it must persevere. That we ourselves have to turn from the evil principle of action to the good does not mean that we can do without the Grace of God, but it does mean that we have done what is essential to deserve it. From this conception of the change of principle implied in conversion to true morality there follows Kant's distinction between Church and State. Because we must, if we follow the rational will, will as members of a. kingdom of ends, we are committed to membership of a community of individuals seeking to bring about the dictates of reason or the kingdom of God on earth. Such a community cannot be a compulsory association, for in the true sense of morality compulsory morality is a contradiction in terms. The State, therefore, which is necessarily a compulsory organization, must be quite distinct from this " ethical society," of which every good man is a citizen. As the will to good is necessarily universal, there can only be one such society, the universal Church invisible. This Church universal is only an idea, but, like other ideas of reason, it is necessarily implied in our action. Actual Churches are full of human imperfection ; they tend to be untrue to the conception of the freedom of the children of God, and to forget that the service of God is a free moral 1

R., B. E., vi. p. 58. Note.

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service ; they too often make religion consist in statutory observances of one kind or another, and act as if they were a state. But they are true members of a Church universal, in so far as they use all their powers to make their members devote themselves to that service of God which is perfect freedom. So Kant completes his account of what is implicit in the doctrine that the autonomy of the will is the chief principle of morality. If we commit ourselves to the governance of the rational will within us, we commit ourselves to a principle and a purpose transcending our individual selves, to something, therefore, which, though within us, is also beyond us. We are thereby, if we whole-heartedly accept this principle of action, trusting in something other than ourselves, and taking part in a universal purpose, in the furtherance of which we, with all other rational beings, in so far as they are true to their real nature, are necessarily united.

V THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT (i) THE PLACE OF THE THIRD CRITIQUE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

IN THE

the Critique of Judgement should be regarded as part of the original scheme of the Kantian Criticism is not clear. It will be remembered that Kant, in his letter of June 1771 to Marcus Herz, where he first talks of the work which was to become the Critique of Pure Reason, says that he has been concerned with what is " involved in the theory of taste, metaphysics, and moral theory." That seems to look forward to the third, the first, and the second Critiques. In his next letter to Herz, dated 21st February 1772, he mentions that he has " sketched in a manner with which I was fairly satisfied the principles of feeling and taste and the faculty of the reflective judgement with their effects, the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, and so could now make a plan for a work which should have some such title as The Bounds of Sensibility and Reason." That work was to have two parts, and the second part had two sections : (1) General Principles of Feeling, Taste, and the Desires of the Senses; (2) The First Principles of Morality. There we have aesthetics ranked with metaphysics and moral theory as part of the general Critical programme. We have also taste connected with feehng, and, what is more significant, with the faculty of reflective judgement. On the other hand, Kant would not, after 1781, have connected the good, as he does in the sentence quoted above, with the agreeable and the beautiful, nor would he WHETHER

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have talked of the general principles of the desires of the senses. In this second letter to Herz he goes on to say that in the consideration of the programme just quoted he has omitted a fundamental problem. That problem is the real problem of the first Critique; and when he has finished expounding it in this letter, the projected work on The Bounds of Sensibility and Reason has become a projected " Critique of Pure Reason, which contains the nature of theoretical as well as of practical knowledge, so far as it is purely intellectual. The first part contains the sources, method, and limits of metaphysic ; the second part will work out the pure principles of morality." In the consideration of the Critical problem the theory of taste and of the reflective judgement has apparently disappeared, and the programme now looks forward only to the first and second Critiques. Kant seems to have made up his mind that there were no a priori principles concerned in aesthetics. Indeed, he definitely says this in a note in the first Critique on the meaning of the word aesthetic. That note, however, was significantly altered in the second edition. " The Germans are the only people who currently make use of the word ' aesthetic ' in order to signify what others call the critique of taste. This usage originated in the abortive attempt made by Baumgarten, that admirable analytic thinker, to bring the critical treatment of the beautiful under rational principles, and so to raise its rules to the rank of a science. But such endeavours are fruitless. The said rules or criteria are, as regards their chief sources, merely empirical, and consequently can never serve as determinate a priori laws by which our judgement of taste must be directed. On the contrary, our judgement is the proper test of the correctness of the rules. For this reason it is advisable either to give up using the name in this sense of critique of taste, and to reserve it for that doctrine of sensibility which is true science—thus approximating to the language and sense of the ancients, in their far-famed division of knowledge into alaO^ra KOX vorjrd—or else to

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share the name with speculative philosophy, employing it partly in the transcendental and partly in the psychological sense." 2 The words I have italicized are additions of the second edition. If they are omitted, the rest is evidence that Kant, when he wrote the first edition of the first Critique, had given up the notion that aesthetics in the sense of a critique of taste had any concern with Transcendental Philosophy. When they are added, a second change in Kant's view appears. He still regarded Baumgarten's ^Esthetic as mistaken. He still held that in aesthetics " our judgement is the proper test of the correctness of the rules." But he seems now to hold that there is some sense in which speculative philosophy has to do with a critique of taste. The second edition of the first Critique appeared in June 1787, the second Critique at the end of the same year, and in December Kant wrote a letter to Reinhold, in which he told him he was sending him a copy of the second Critique. In the same letter he announces the plan of the Critique of Judgement in significant words. " Without being guilty of conceit, I can assure you that the longer I proceed on my way, the less concern I have that any contradiction or alliance of opponents against it will appear—and that is not an unusual thing to expect— which could do my system any real harm. This is an inner conviction that grows on me. For as I proceed to other undertakings, not only do I find the system always consistent with itself, but I find this also. If ever I cannot rightly make out the method of inquiry into some object, I have only to look back to the general sketch of the elements of knowledge and of the powers of mind pertaining to them which my system involves, and I make discoveries of which I had no inkling. For example, I am now busy with the Critique of Taste, and in this occupation I have discovered a new kind of a priori principles other than any I had known before. The faculties of mind are three : the faculty of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure and i B 36.

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pain, and the faculty of desire. For the first of those I have discovered a priori principles in the Critique of Pure [theoretic) Reason : for the third in the Critique of Practical Reason. I looked for a priori principles for the second, and at one time thought it impossible to find them. But the systematic connexion which the division of these faculties had allowed me to discover in the human mind, which it will be sufficient employment for the rest of my days to admire, and, when possible, to explain, this systematic connexion has brought me to the position that I now recognize three parts of philosophy, each of which has its a priori principles, and can with assurance determine the range of the knowledge possible in such a way. The three are theoretical philosophy, teleology, and practical philosophy. The second of these I have certainly found the poorest in a priori principles of determination. I hope to have this in manuscript, though not ready for the printer, by Easter." Kant, as usual, was over sanguine. In March 1788 he says that in spite of his unaccustomed duties as Rector of the University, he hopes " to finish his Critique of Taste by Michaelmas, and so complete his critical work." In May 1789, in a third letter to Reinhold, he says that his Critique of Judgement, of which the Critique of Taste is a part, will be published at Michaelmas. The work eventually appeared in 1790. The correspondence shows that its scope was enlarged. The Critique of Teleological Judgement is certainly later than the Critique of Msthetic Judgement. In the process of reflecting on the " new kind of a priori principles implied in taste," Kant was led to see that these principles are the specific principles of what he called the reflective judgement, exemplified in their purity in art, but applied in the teleological judgement to nature. It was this discovery which gave this Critique its place in the Critical system as a whole. This history has had an unfortunate effect on the form of the work, which is a curious mixture of systematic thinking and discursiveness. In the preface Kant states the logical problem with which the Critique is concerned.

THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT The constitutive a priori principles of knowledge, whose validity the first Critique has established, are the work of the understanding ; the constitutive a priori practical principles with which the second Critique has been concerned, are the principles of reason. " But now comes Judgement, which in the order of our cognitive faculties forms a middle term between understanding and reason. Has it also got independent a priori principles ? If so, are they constitutive, or are they merely regulative, thus indicating no special realm ? And do they give the rule a priori to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, as the middle term between the faculties of cognition and desire, just as understanding prescribes laws a priori for the former and reason for the latter ? This is the topic to which the present Critique of Judgement is devoted." 1 Kant wrote two introductions to this Critique. The one, which he discarded as being too difficult, has the suggestive title, On Philosophy in General, a title which would suit as well the introduction in the Critique as published. Both introductions contain a systematic account of the whole Critical philosophy, a statement of the relations of the two worlds of nature and of freedom, the two capabilities of knowledge and desire, the two faculties of understanding and reason; and they suggest that a bridge is to be made between nature and freedom by art, between knowledge and desire by feeling, between understanding and reason by the faculty of judgement, between law and obligation by the concept of purposiveness or finality. Now Kant puts forward the faculty of judgement as concerned with feeling, with art, and with purposiveness or finality, and he promises to show how an analysis of aesthetic judgement will solve the difficulties involved in the contrasts just stated. He adds that the application of the general a priori principles of judgement to our knowledge of nature has an interest of its own, and will be treated in what should be regarded as an appendix, the Critique of Teleological Judgement. But after this magnificently systematic introduction i C. of J., p. 168.

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the character of the work changes. The form is still systematic, but it is the systematic framework of the first Critique, with Analytic, Dialectic, Methodology, and all the rest of it, applied to material for which it is not suited. For Kant largely works out the principles of aesthetic for their own sake. Much of his material had been already worked up without any reference to the general principles of the Critical philosophy, and the relation of much of the discussion to the general problem stated in the introduction is not very obvious. This does not mean that the Critique of Msthetic Judgement is not important. It has had a very great influence on modern theories of ^Esthetics. The Critique of Teleological Judgement is also in itself of great interest. It destroyed the bid-fashioned teleology which stood in the way of any scientific treatment of biological problems, and is still of importance and value. The exposition of Kant's philosophy of religion which is to be found at the end of the whole work is also illuminating. The separate value of these discussions can be grasped at once, but their interrelation is apt to be lost; and it is clear that it was primarily to their interrelations that Kant attached such great importance. The key to this interrelation is Kant's new conception of the reflective judgement, and to the examination of that we must turn. The difficulty of the subject is that Kant seems to base his demarcation of the separate spheres of knowledge, art, and conduct, and therefore his whole division of philosophy, on an abstract logical division, which will not bear the weight he puts upon it. It seems as though some of the difficulties he has already got into in his sharp separation between nature and freedom are connected with his too sharp distinction between understanding and reason. Yet in the third Critique, which is to overcome these difficulties, the paradoxical course is taken of insisting on a third distinctive faculty, that of judgement. " Concepts of nature contain the ground of all theoretical cognition a priori, and rest, as we saw, upon the legislative

THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT authority of understanding. The concept of freedom contains the ground of all sensuously unconditioned practical precepts a priori, and rests upon that of reason. Both faculties, therefore, besides their application in point of logical form to principles of whatever origin, have in addition their own peculiar jurisdiction in the matter of their content; and so, there being no further a priori jurisdiction above them, the division of philosophy into theoretical and practical is justified. "But there is still further in the family of our higher cognitive faculties a middle term between understanding and reason. This is judgement, of which we may reasonably presume by analogy that it may likewise contain, if not a special authority to prescribe laws, still a principle peculiar to itself upon which laws are sought, although one merely subjective a priori. This principle, even if it has no field of objects appropriate to it as its realm, may still have some territory or other with a certain character, for which just this very principle alone may be valid. "But, in addition to the above consideration, there is yet) (to judge by analogy) a further ground upon which judgement may be brought into line with another arrangement of our powers of representation, and one that appears to be of even greater importance than that of its kinship with the family of cognitive faculties. For all the faculties of the soul, or capacities, are reducible to three, which do not admit of any further derivation from a common ground : the faculty of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and the faculty of desire. For the faculty of cognition understanding alone is legislative, if (as must be the case when it is considered on its own account free of confusion with the faculty of desire) this faculty, as that of theoretical cognition, is referred to nature, in respect of which alone (as phenomenon) it is possible for us to prescribe laws by means of a priori concepts of nature, which are properly pure concepts of understanding. For the faculty of desire, as a higher faculty operating under the concept of freedom, only reason (in which alone this

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concept has a place) prescribes laws a priori. Now between the faculties of knowledge and desire stands the feeling of pleasure, just as judgement is intermediate between understanding and reason. Hence we may, provisionally at least, assume that judgement likewise contains an a priori principle of its own, and that, since pleasure or displeasure is necessarily combined with the faculty of desire (be it antecedent to its principle, as with the lower desires, or, as with the higher, only supervening upon its determination by the moral law), it will effect a transition from the faculty of pure knowledge, i.e. from the realm of concepts of nature, to that of the concept of freedom, just as in its logical employment it makes possible the transition from understanding to reason."1 How can all this, it may well be asked, depend upon a distinction of judgement from the understanding on the one hand and from reason on the other ? Kant has in the first Critique shown that judgement is the characteristic and essential act of thought. Does not all this imply a new conception of it, and is he not here putting a great weight on a logical distinction which had hitherto escaped him ? Kant's conception of judgement as elaborated in the third Critique is new. As reason, in the sense of the faculty of the. a priori, is originally in the first Critique identified with the understanding, and then in the Dialectic is found to be distinguished into understanding on the one hand and reason in its special sense on the other, so now this a priori faculty suffers a third division, and the faculty of judgement appears between understanding and reason. Kant has already said something about the faculty of judgement in the first Critique in the introduction to the Schematism of the Categories. " If understanding in general is to be viewed as the faculty of rules, judgement will be the faculty of subsuming under rules, that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule (casus datce legis). 1

C. of J., pp. 176-7.

THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT General logic contains, and can contain, no rules for judgement. For since general logic abstracts from all content of knowledge, the sole task that remains to it is to give an analytical exposition of the form of knowledge as expressed in concepts, in judgements, and in inferences, and so to give formal rules for all employment of understanding. If it sought to give general instructions how we are to subsume under these rules, that is, to distinguish whether something does or does not come under them, that could only be by means of another rule. This in turn, for the very reason that it is a rule, again demands guidance from judgement. And thus it appears that, though understanding is capable of being instructed, and of being equipped with rules, judgement is a peculiar talent which can be practised only and cannot be taught. It is the specific quality of so-called mother-wit, and its lack no school can make good. For although an abundance of rules borrowed from the insight of others may indeed be preferred to, and, as it were, grafted upon, a limited understanding, the power of rightly employing them must be left to the learner himself ; and in the absence of such a natural gift no rule that may be prescribed to him for this purpose can ensure against misuse." x Kant goes on in this passage of the first Critique to say that transcendental logic is different from general logic in that " its peculiar task is the advising and securing of judgement, by means of determinate rules, in the use of the pure understanding. Transcendental philosophy has the peculiarity that besides the rule (or rather the universal condition of rules) which is given in the pure concept of understanding, it can also specify a priori the instance to which the rule is to be applied." 2 How this is done is described by Kant in his account of the principles of pure understanding. So much, then, for judgement in the first Critique, a faculty for which there are no rules, and one would say, therefore, a faculty with no a priori principles—rather a 1

A 133 ; B 172.

2

A 135 ; B 174.

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natural aptitude, or as we should say, common sense. How, then, does it appear in the third Critique as marking out for itself a division of the a priori ? " By a reconsideration of the logical nature of judgement," is the answer, in which Kant distinguishes two kinds of judgement, reflective and determinant. " Judgement in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle or law) is given, then the judgement which subsumes the particular under it is determinant. This is so even where such a judgement is transcendental, and, as such, provides the conditions a priori in conformity with which alone subsumption under that universal can be effected. If, however, only the particular is given, and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgement is simply reflective." 1 The distinction between determinant and reflective judgement corresponds to the distinction between deduction and induction, and its formulation marks a further stage in Kant's logical progress. In the first Critique he did indeed see that concepts got their reality only in judgement, being " functions of unity in judgement." But he still wrote then as if concepts were somehow formed independently of the activity of judgement, waiting on judgement only for their application. He has explained in the Schematism of the Categories how the a priori forms of judgement find their application in forms of temporal determination. The general conditions of objectivity supply a priori principles to which all judging has to conform, in the application of which judgement is applying fixed principles. All thinking is and must be done according to the categories, but Kant has already observed in the first Critique that the mere application of the principles of pure understanding takes one a very little way towards the relation of the multiplicity of the given in an intelligible system. " Pure understanding is not, however, in a position, through mere categories, to prescribe to appearances any 1

c . of j . , p. 179.

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a priori laws other than those which are involved in a nature in general, that is, in the conformity to law of all appearances in space and time. Special laws, as concerning those appearances which are empirically determined, cannot in their specific character be derived from the categories, although they are one and all subject to them." 1 What we have to recognize is that the empirical universal is not just met with in the given ; it implies a power of universalizing in the mind, and this is the work of what Kant calls the reflective judgement. Its work is seen in the simplest act of generalization; its distinctive character is best seen in the generalizations of scientific genius. While we must all think in accordance with the categories, science depends for its success on the power of the scientific genius to conceive universals, hypotheses, analogies, and principles, when ordinary men see nothing but a welter of facts. Kant is no doubt mistaken in so far as he makes a sharp distinction between the determinant and the reflective judgement, just as it is wrong to make a sharp distinction between deduction and induction. But he is clearly right in drawing attention to the inductive element in judgement; and he is asking a question of great importance when he asks whether there are any a priori principles implied in the use of this reflective judgement. Scientific generalizationJs..a rational activity. It cannot be fegardeöTäTdeduced from a certain number of established principles. It produces its generalities and systems by regarding the facts, and then creating or eliciting the system. Yet though it is inspired by the facts, these cannot be its only source of inspiration. Were it so, science would be merely the fundamental a priori principles plus observation. This independent rational activity of scientific generalization must have its own principles. One word remains to be said about the reflective judgement. We have seen in the first Critique the all-important part which Kant makes imagination play in thinking. But 1

H

B 165.

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if imagination is involved in the determinant judgements discussed in the first Critique, how much more obviously is it not involved in the reflective judgement ? If in the determinant judgement the imagination is controlled by the understanding, may we not say that in the reflective the imagination takes the lead ? We may now look at Kant's statement of the general problem in the fifth section of the Introduction. " Looking at the grounds of the possibility of an experience, the first thing, of course, that meets us is something necessary—namely, the universal laws apart from which nature in general (as an object of sense) cannot be thought. These rest upon the categories, applied to the formal conditions of all intuition possible for us, so far as it is also given a priori. Under these laws judgement is determinant; for it has nothing else to do than to subsume under given laws. For instance, understanding says : All change has its cause (universal law of nature) ; transcendental judgement has nothing further to do than to furnish a priori the condition of subsumption under the concept of understanding placed before it: this we get in the succession of the determinations of one and the same thing. Now for nature in general, as an object of possible experience, that law is cognized as absolutely necessary. But besides this formal time-condition, the objects of empirical cognition are determined, or, so far as we can judge, determinable, in divers ways, so that specifically different natures, over and above what they have in common as things of nature in general, are further capable of being caused in an infinite variety of ways ; and each of these modes must, on the concept of cause in general, have its rule, which is a law, and, consequently, imports necessity : although according to the constitution and limits of our faculties of cognition we may entirely fail to see this necessity. Accordingly, in respect of nature's merely empirical laws, we must think in nature a possibility of an endless multiplicity of empirical laws, which yet are contingent so far as our insight goes, i.e. cannot

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be cognized as a priori. In respect of these we estimate the unity of nature according to empirical laws, and the possibility of the unity of experience, as a system according to empirical laws, to be contingent. But now such a unity is one which must be necessarily presupposed and assumed, as otherwise we should not have a thoroughgoing connexion of empirical cognition in a whole of experience. For the universal laws oi nature, while providing certainly for such a connexion among things generically, as things of nature in general, do not do so for them specifically as such particular things of nature. Hence judgement is competent for its own guidance to adopt it as an a priori principle, that what is for human insight contingent in the particular (empirical) laws of nature contains nevertheless unity of law in the synthesis of its manifold in an intrinsically possible experience— unfathomable, though still thinkable, as such unity may, no doubt, be for us. Consequently, as the unity of law in a synthesis, which is cognized by us in obedience to a necessary aim (a need of understanding), though recognized at the same time as contingent, is represented as a purposiveness of objects (here of nature), so judgement, which, in respect of things under possible (yet to be discovered) empirical laws, is merely reflective, must regard nature in respect of the latter according to a principle of purposiveness for our cognitive faculty, which then finds expression in the above maxims of judgement. Now this transcendental concept of a purposiveness of nature is a concept neither of nature, nor of freedom, since it attributes nothing at all to the object, i.e. to nature, but only represents the unique mode in which we must proceed in our reflexion upon the objects of nature with a view to getting a thoroughly interconnected whole of experience, and so is a subjective principle, i.e. maxim, of judgement. For this reason, too, just as if it were a lucky chance that favoured us, we are rejoiced (properly speaking, relieved of a want) where we meet with such systematic unity under merely empirical laws : although we must

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necessarily assume the presence of such a unity apart from any ability on our part to apprehend or prove its existence." x For Kant the reflective judgement, then, is distinguished from the determinant, in that it starts with particulars and multiplicity, and asks what kind of principle of unity can make them into a system. It must act on principle, for without principles there can be no unity. It cannot get the principles from objects, because it is confronted with multiplicity, and empiricism can never give unity to multiplicity. It cannot impose principles upon nature, for the right to impose or prescribe principles is limited by the rule that such prescribing principles can only be such as are necessary to make the distinction between subjective and objective. These are the principles of the pure understanding, and when their work is done and their force exhausted, there remains all the particularity of empirical rules and instances which, so far as the principles of pure understanding are concerned, are contingent. " The reflective judgement cannot prescribe to nature, for reflexion on the laws of nature adjusts itself to nature, and not nature to the conditions according to which we strive to obtain a concept of it." 2 What the reflective judgement can do is to prescribe a principle to itself. It can assume that nature is purposive to our understanding, and is such that the more intelligible our principles are, the more we shall understand nature. This is a regulative principle. We must acf^ on it, but we have no guarantee that nature is made for us to understand i t ; we are to act like that, and see what happens. Success in following this a priori principle, just because it is not guaranteed, produces pleasure. Here, then, we have pleasure connected with a priori principles. We have here another aspect of Kant's view of the relation of mind to objects. The principles of intelligibility are supplied by the mind. Only the mind, Kant always maintains, can produce a priori principles, principles of » c. of J., pp. 183, 184. 2 c. of j . , p. 180.

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its own activity. But it uses these principles to see what success it can get with them, i.e. to see how far nature will respond to such principles. Kant always objects to any dogmatic theory of pre-established harmony : but here he is saying that we must conduct our investigations as if nature were purposive to our understanding, i.e. as if there were a harmony. The phrase which Kant uses, Zweckmässig, translated ' purposive,' had in the philosophical language of the time a more general meaning. Zweckmässig denotes the character of a harmonious whole, denotes, indeed, very much what Leibniz meant by harmony. We assume, Kant holds, that nature is such that we can come to understand it as a systematic, harmonious whole, as though it had been made for us to understand it. But that is a postulate, a regulative rule for our own judgement, a rule of whose success we have no guarantee, and whose actual success is always, therefore, a source of excitement and pleasure, of never-ending surprise. But that is only part of what he has to say. Acting on this postulate we regulate our scientific thinking, our attempt to reduce the mere multiplicity of the world to a harmonious whole, by our a priori principles. These are the principles by which the reflective judgement is guided in its dealing with particulars. In Über Philosophie überhäuft, Kant gives us an illustration of this, the division of genus and species. " The reflective judgement which seeks concepts even for empirical presentations, must for this purpose assume that nature in her boundless multiplicity has yet hit upon such a division of herself into genus and species as to make it possible for our faculty of judgement to reach clear insight in the comparison of the forms of nature, and to get empirical concepts and a connexion of them wijrh one another by mounting to more general, though still empirical, concepts." 1 The concepts, be it noted, are empirical, but the principles on which they are formed are a priori. For any scientific 1

Hartenstein, vi. p . 382.

Note.

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theory has to be intelligible. But the characteristic of intelligibility comes from the mind's activity. This involves a development in the notion of intelligibility. " Intelligible " means more than "not contradictory ": more also than " in accordance with the constitutive a priori principles of the understanding;" it means such a combination of unity and multiplicity as the mind can apprehend, and communicate. The concepts are empirical. They have to fit the facts. " Reflexion on the laws of nature adjusts itself to nature, and not nature to the conditions according to which we strive to obtain a concept of it." Nevertheless the mind's dealing with empirical facts is never mere apprehension. Great scientific discoveries always involve the work of the imagination. They are first generalizations, theories which will unite under a single principle a wide range of empirical fact. Both the creative activity of the mind and the facts have to co-operate, and Kant's point is that the reflective judgement must first be inspired by the principle of the mind's harmonious working if it is successfully to do its work in making the scattered manifold facts into a harmonious theory. How this principle is operative in scientific thinking may be illustrated by the way in which a physicist will sometimes say that the theory of relativity is superior to other theories because it is " simpler " or " a more beautiful generalization," or has brought together into one theories which before were separate. The test of the theory is not that it fits the facts. For, after all, there is no such thing as the facts. As Kant says, we are confronted with the boundless multiplicity of nature. The test is rather the greater success with which a theory will unite intelligibly a large number of facts. What " intelligibly " means can be appreciated, but it can hardly be further described. We use words like " harmonious," " coherent," " systematic." We are in these trying to describe a characteristic of the mind's creative activity, which we recognize in individual cases but which has no determinant rules. The reflective judgement is always dealing with particular empirical rules and instances, and making out of

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them a whole into which their empirical character enters, and to which that character contributes : and the reflective judgement in making that whole is guided by its appreciation of what is intelligible. Kant here remains true to the principle which he laid down in the preface to the first Critique, that " reason has insight into that only which it produces after a plan of its own." The development of the third Critique is that Kant now sees that reason, besides prescribing the fixed principles of the understanding, without which objectivity is not possible, deals with the empirical again according to its own principles, in such a way that the mind both " adjusts itself to nature " and yet regulates its activity by its own ideal of intelligibility. Here, as elsewhere, Kant is saying that if the mind is to apprehend the world outside it, the mind must be at its best. The secret of objectivity is that the mind should govern its operations, not by casual association, but by the principles of its own unity. To understand nature the mind must discipline itself by reason, and also, we are now going to learn, enliven its powers by art. For we can now understand what is at first sight perplexing in the structure of the Critique of Judgement. We might expect, after this discussion in the Introduction, that the Critique was going to concern itself with an examination of scientific procedure. Kant, in the Critique of Teleological Judgement—the second part of the whole Critique of Judgement—sa}^, e.g. that both mechanism and teleology are regulative principles used by the reflective judgement in trying to reduce the manifold of causal laws to a system. That seems to be a natural working out of the problem posed in the Introduction. But the Critique of Teleological Judgement is, he says, an Appendix. The real Critique of the reflective judgement is the Critique of Msihetic Judgement. We have seen that Kant began by writing a Critique of Taste. It is that which turned into a Critique of Judgement, because Kant realized the importance of art or of the judgement of the beautiful in a critical appreciation of knowledge.

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But what can art or the beautiful possibly have to do with such logical problems as we have been discussing ? The answer is that Kant has got to show that there are principles implied in the mind's activity being intelligible. The imaginative powers of the mind may act in all sorts of ways. They may be strictly controlled by definite concepts ; they may be completely incoherent and irregular. But they may also work just intelligibly, so that others can easily follow and understand their working. A Bach fugue is not determined by its law, nor is it incoherent and irregular ; it is supremely intelligible. So we mean something when we talk of nature as being " purposive for our understanding," without meaning that it is such that it is deducible in detail from some a priori principle. We know what the activity of our mind is like when it is at its most intelligible, and we assume in science that the more intelligibly we think, the more we shall understand nature as it is. We are to see to it that our thinking should have its most characteristic nature, and then see whether nature will conform to it. How are we to isolate the mind's contribution to this joint process and show that intelligibility as such has a positive character—that, besides the determinant and abstract principles of the pure understanding, there is a positive characteristic of intelligibility seen in the way in which the mind handles individual situations and problems ? Kant's answer is that there are certain judgements which call for universal assent, i.e. they are not just accidental and particular like the judgement that we find this or that agreeable; yet they do not base that claim of universality on description of a common object (they are not meant to be objective as are ordinary empirical judgements, such as " this is a book," or " that table is four feet broad "), nor on the fitness of the object for a definite purpose or ideal. They are not judgements that this is good for this or that purpose, or that it is morally good. They are not determined by any objective concept. They are not based on a reason or principle which can be stated independently of them, so that they

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should be determinant judgements. They are essentially individual, based on the mind's direct and immediate reflexion on objects. Their universality then, as it is based on nothing objective, must be pure subjective universality, sheer intelligibility as such. These judgements are the judgements of the beautiful. Kant puts the ground of this claim to universality in different ways. They are concerned simply with the form of an object, not with what kind of thing it is or ought to be. Beautiful objects when we reflect on them enliven the cognitive powers, in that they stimulate the understanding and the imagination to their most harmonious working. They are the expression of communicable form. They are evidence of a communis sensus among mankind. And what can this assumption of communicable form mean but that there is a form which is as such intelligible ? " If pleasure is connected with the mere apprehension of the form of an object of intuition, apart from any reference it may have to a concept for the purpose of a definite cognition, this does not make the representation referable to the object but solely to the subject. In such a case the pleasure can express nothing but the conformity of the object to the cognitive faculties brought into play in the reflective judgement, and so far as they are in play, and hence merely a subjective formal purposiveness of the object. For that apprehension of forms in the imagination can never take place without the reflective judgement, even when it has no intention of so doing, comparing them at least with its faculty of referring intuitions to concepts. If now, in this comparison, imagination, as the faculty of intuitions a priori, is undesignedly brought into accord with understanding (as the faculty of concepts) by means of a given representation, and a feeling of pleasure is thereby aroused, then the object must be regarded as purposive for the reflective judgement. A judgement of this kind is an aesthetic judgement upon the purposiveness of the object, which does not depend upon any present concept of the object and does not provide one. When the form of an object HI

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(as opposed to the matter of its representation or sensation) is, in the mere act of reflecting upon it, without regard to any concept to be obtained from it, estimated on the ground of a pleasure in the representation of such an object, then this pleasure is judged to be combined with the representation of it necessarily, i.e. not merely for the subject apprehending this form, but for all in general who pass judgement. The object is then called beautiful: and the faculty of judging by means of such a pleasure (and so also with universal validity) is called taste." 1 Kant does not himself use the phrase, but what all his teaching comes to is that the beautiful is the mere intelligible, or the intelligible as such. That is the upshot of his analysis of the aesthetic judgement. So far we have been discussing the logical importance of the reflective judgement. But Kant, as we have seen, holds that the reflective judgement mediates between the understanding and the reason, or between the two worlds of nature and of freedom. vIiow does this come about ? In the first place, by a new understanding of the nature of pleasure. Kant in his earlier ethical writings represented pleasure as the passive effect on the mind of its stimulation by objects. Our feelings of pleasure^are then the mark pf our animal_or_phenomenal^..nature^qi: our being part of the me^KIn^llv^^ the bejMtihiHs J^ej;xpj;essicA.fifjQU the free spontane^ojis^clivity-oLthe-Jj^ in^us~b"y reflexion upon jpjbjects. Here at least is the mind in its freecTom, affected by objects in a way which is not incomp^IbTe~^ffi""tHä"t~freedom. Here is something between the sharp alternations of action from respect for the moral law and heteronomous action determined by accidental pleasure. In the second place, the_jeflective judgement in considering empirical rules of causation—i.e. rules formed by the mind when considering objects, and therefore at least partly dependent on the nature of the outside world— 1

C. of J., p p . 189-90.

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discovers different kinds of causation. All that the category of cause requires is that there should be determination in time, which we can recognize as having a distinctive character. The Third Antinomy and the Critique of Practical Reason assumed that there were only two kinds of causation, the causation of the noumenal will acting under the law of reason and the mechanically determined causation of physics. The reflective judgement finds it can make a systematic whole of experience only by assuming a connexion between particulars which is neither the one nor the other of these. The universal of art is intelligible and rational, and yet free, the creation of the free play of the mind's powers. The whole problem of the nature of freedom is altered when we consider artistic activity. In the third place, the aesthetic judgement may not only express an enlivening of the understanding and the imagination ; it may also involve the activity of the reason. " Susceptibility to pleasure arising from reflexion on the forms of things (whether of nature or of art) betokens, however, not only a purposiveness on the part of objects in their relation to the reflective judgement in the subject, in accordance with the concept of nature, but also, commonly, a purposiveness on the part of the subject, answering to the concept of freedom, in respect of the form, or even formlessness, of objects. The result is that the aesthetic judgement refers not merely as a judgement of taste, to the beautiful, but also, as springing from a higher intellectual feeling, to the sublime."1 The creative will which is the source of moral freedom can express itself in art, and in the sublime can express even its transcendent nature, and so art can become the symbol of morality. Perhaps the most marked characteristic of Kant's aesthetics is that he insists on maintaining the distinctiveness of the beautiful from both the true and the good, or the independence of the artistic activity from either knowledge or morality. In all, of course, the mind is involved with its faculties of understanding, judgement, ' C . of J., p. 192

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and reason, and therefore there is action in knowing, and knowing in acting, and art in both. But though understanding and reason are involved in both knowing and acting, they are in a different relation in the two spheres, and so art may be and is concerned with the intelligible, and yet be neither knowing nor acting. Art is not a handmaid of either, but nevertheless we understand better the functions of reason and understanding in the service of morality and of knowledge when we experience their free functioning in art. I quoted earlier a remark of Bergson's that Kant's attitude to some of his problems would have been very different if he had not identified science with physics, if he had considered more the biological sciences. The third Critique would seem to offer what Bergson desires of Kant in the Critique of Teleological Judgement and the consideration of biological problems there But actually Kant found the key to the difficulties Bergson notices, and indeed to the study of biology generally in the consideration of the nature of art and the aesthetic judgement. (2) THE CRITIQUE OF ^ESTHETIC JUDGEMENT

Robert Bridges, in his Testament of Beauty, speaks slightingly of philosophers' theories of a r t : " How in its naked self Reason were powerless showeth when philosophers will treat of Art, the which they are full ready to do, having good intuition that their master-key may lie therein : but since they must lack vision of Art (for elsewhile they had been artists, not philosophers) they miss the way." If this criticism of a philosophical treatment of art were true, it would hold, if of anyone, of Kant. He certainly " lacked vision of Art," and there is no doubt that the poverty of his artistic experience has made him sometimes miss the way. The remarkable thing is how far he got.

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Vorländer, in a careful examination of all the evidence, has shown that even in out-of-the-way Königsberg Kant was not without opportunities of artistic appreciation. There are one or two good collections of pictures there. There was good chamber music to be heard, and occasional operas, including the Magic Flute, were performed in the theatre. But Kant's earliest biographer says : " H e never seemed to pay much regard to paintings or engravings, even the best. I have never noticed that he ever looked specially at any of the universally admired collections which there were in people's houses or in galleries, or that he ever showed any special appreciation for the work of the artist. The engraving of J. J. Rousseau in his sittingroom was the only picture in his house." He had rather more appreciation of music, but not much. He makes the extraordinary remark in the Critique of Msihttic Judgement, that one of the disadvantages of music is that you cannot help hearing it, comparing it in that respect to the perfumed handkerchief ! " Music has a certain lack of urbanity about it. For, owing chiefly to the character of its instruments, it scatters its influence abroad to an uncalledfor extent (through the neighbourhood), and thus, as it were, becomes obtrusive and deprives others outside the musical circle of their freedom. The case is almost on a par with the practice of regaling ourself with a perfume that exhales its odours far and wide." Kant adds a bitter note on those who have recommended the singing of hymns at family prayers, " for they compel their neighbours either to join in the singing or else abandon their meditations." 1 He had some real feeling for poetry. He admired Milton, but he really preferred Pope and the satirists. He liked Latin poetry more than Greek, and didactic poets more than lyric. Persius, Ovid, Phaedrus, and Terence were his favourites. He admired Frederick the Great's poetry, and had no use for that of Goethe and Schiller ! How could a philosopher so equipped undertake an aesthetic ? How could he—as is more remarkable—write ' C of J., p . 330.

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an aesthetic which won the heartfelt admiration of Goethe and Schiller ? -VThe explanation is that though Kant had almost no appreciation of art, and though his remarks on the arts in the Critique of Judgement are puerile, he had nevertheless " a vision of beauty." He had a remarkable appreciation of the beauty of nature. In his artistic judgements he was pedantically early eighteenth century : in his appreciation of nature he was a romantic. He loved the sea ; he admired the wild and desolate aspects of nature which the poets he admired thought only horrid. His vivid visual imagination even made him kindle with enthusiasm over descriptions of mountain scenery. And between his appreciation of " correct" poetry and romantic nature, he had enough " vision of beauty " at least to understand in a remarkable way that appreciation of beauty was an independent activity, not to be confused, in spite of all his personal predilection for didactic poetry, with knowledge or morality. The peculiarity of his aesthetic experience has to this extent affected his aesthetic in that he is much better in the appreciation of nature than of art; and more especially in that he makes a sharper division between the beautiful and the sublime, than he could have done if he had any appreciation of romantic poetry. The particular development he made of the familiar contemporary distinction of the beautiful and the sublime is one of the most interesting things in the Critique of JEsthetic Judgement, but the sharpness of the distinction as he draws it is one of its chief difficulties. The general plan of the work would suggest that the beautiful and the sublime are two species of what may in a wider sense be called the beautiful. That is implied when Kant distinguishes the judgement of the beautiful from that of the agreeable on the one hand and that of the good on the other. But his distinction between the analytic of the beautiful and the analytic of the sublime, and some of the things he says about the sublime, almost imply that the judgements of beauty and of sublimity have no relation to one another.

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We can, however, begin with the general problem presented to Kant by the aesthetic judgement. When we call anything beautiful, we intend, he holds, something quite different from saying that it is agreeable, or that we happen to like it. There is an element of universality about the judgement of beauty which there is not about the judgement of the agreeable. It has sometimes been said that Kant too easily takes for granted the universality of the aesthetic judgement. He should, it is argued, have begun by proving that aesthetic judgements are universally valid. But Kant no more assumes that judgements of beauty are universally valid than he assumes that judgements of fact are always true. He assumes in the first Critique that judgements of fact claim to be true ; that we do not mean the same thing when we say that A and B are both instances of Y, as when we say we associate A and B together in our minds. That judgements of fact claim to be true is enough to distinguish judgement and association of ideas. Similarly, he starts in the Critique of Msthetic Judgement with the assumption that we mean something different when we say that a thing is beautiful from what we mean when we say that we happen to like it ; and that something different implies some kind of a claim to universality which the judgement of the agreeable does not make. The fact that we may make mistakes as to what is beautiful, or that our insight in judging the beautiful can be trained, does not affect the significance of the claim all such judgements make. Kant begins his analysis by saying that the judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement, and its determining ground cannot be other than subjective. " The representation is referred wholly to the subject, and what is more to its feeling of life—under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure—and this forms the basis of a quite separate faculty of discriminating and estimating, that contributes nothing to knowledge."1 Further, " the delight which determines the judgement of taste is in1

C. of J., p. 204.

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dependent of all interest." We are not in reflecting on the beauty of an object concerned with its existence, nor with the question whether I like to have such objects, or think they ought or ought not to exist. Both the agreeable and the good involve an interest; the judgement of beauty is disinterested. From this proceeds the first definition of the beautiful. " Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful."1 Secondly, " the beautiful is that which, apart from all concepts, is represented as the object of a universal delight." Just because the judgement of taste is disinterested, it cannot rest on " any inclination of the subject." " The subject must regard it as resting on what he may also presuppose in every other person, and, therefore, he must believe that he has reason for demanding a similar delight from every one. Accordingly, we shall speak of the beautiful as if beauty was a quality of the object, and the judgement logical (forming a cognition of the object by concepts of it) ; although it is only aesthetic and contains merely a reference of the representation of the object to the subject ; because it still bears the resemblance to the logical judgement that it may be presupposed to be valid for all men." The judgement of the beautiful differs in this from that of the agreeable, which makes no such implication of universality, and that of the good, which implies a concept or rule. This is the remarkable character of the judgement of the beautiful. It starts with the individual object. It does not judge it beautiful for anything or because of anything. No reasons can be given for an object being beautiful. The judgement is entirely individual. " If anyone does not think a building, view, or person beautiful, then he refuses, so far as his inmost conviction goes, to allow approval to be wrung from him by a hundred voices all lauding it to the skies."2 . . . " If anyone reads me his poem, or brings me to a play, which, all said 1

C. of J., p. 211.

2

C. of J., p. 284.

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and done, fails to commend itself to my taste, then let him adduce Batteux or Lessing, or still older and more famous critics of taste, with all the host of rules laid down by them, as a proof of the beauty of his poem ; let certain passages particularly displeasing to me accord completely with the rules of beauty (as set out by these critics and universally recognized) : I stop my ears : I do not want to have any reasons or any argument about the matter. I take my stand on the ground that my judgement is to be one of taste, and not one of understanding or reason."1 And yet in spite of this the judgement claims universality, claims not that every one else will agree, but that every one ought to agree. " We want to look at the object with our own eyes, just as if our delight depended on sensation. And yet, if upon so doing, we call the object beautiful, we believe ourselves to be speaking with a universal voice."2 " The judgement of taste does not postulate the agreement of every one (for it is only competent for a logically universal judgement to do this, in that it is able to bring forward reasons) : it only imputes this agreement to every one. The universal voice is, therefore, only an idea. It may be a matter of uncertainty whether a person who thinks he is laying down a judgement of taste is, in fact, judging in conformity with that idea; but that this idea is what is contemplated in his judgement, is proclaimed by his use of the expression ' beauty.' For himself he can be certain on this point from his mere consciousness of the separation of everything belonging to the agreeable and the good from the delight remaining to*him."3 This will imply that we make mistakes about what is beautiful because we take note in our judgement of considerations which are irrelevant, and perhaps Kant would have made a better case for the universality of the aesthetic judgement if he had more realized how extremely difficult it often is " t o separate everything belonging to 1

2

c. of j . , p. 284. • c . of J., p. 216.

c. of J., p. 216.

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the agreeable and the good." The problem of how this " subjective universality " is possible, is advanced in a section where Kant considers " the relative priority in a judgement of taste of the feeling of pleasure and the estimating of the object," and asserts that if we began with an immediate sensation of pleasure, our judgement of the beautiful could not possibly have any universality. The pleasure must be the result of reflexion : " it is the universal capacity for being communicated incident to the mental state in the given representation which, as the subjective condition of the judgement of taste, must be fundamental."1 " The cognitive powers brought into play by this representation are here engaged in a free play, since no definite concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition. Hence the mental state in this representation must be one of a feeling of the free play of the powers of representation for a cognition in general. Now a representation, whereby an object is given, involves, in order that it may become a source of cognition at all, imagination for bringing together the manifold of intuition, and understanding for the unity of a concept uniting the representations. This state of free flay of the cognitive faculties attending a representation by which an object is given must admit of universal communication : because cognition, as a definition of the object with which given representations (in any subject whatever) are to accord, is the one and only representation which is valid for every one." 2 But if this pleasure, as we have seen, is disinterested and is not bound by a concept, it cannot be concerned with what the object is, nor with the immediate character of the sensations involved in its apprehension. For these latter are not communicable. The only thing which can be communicable is form. The pleasure in the beautiful, therefore, can only be concerned with the apprehension of form. " The determining ground," says Kant, " of a pure judgement of taste is simple purposiveness of form." The 1

c. of J., p. 217.

* c. of j . , p. 217.

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beautiful object is one the apprehension of which involves an activity felt to have universality. But if the agreeable and the good and what sort of a thing the object is are irrelevant to that feeling, the only thing left is the kind of activity which the apprehension of the object's form involves. This implies that we have a universal sense of form. This is what Kant calls " the idea of a common sense." " Cognitions and judgements must, together with the attendant belief in them, admit of being universally communicated ; for otherwise a correspondence with the object would not be due to them. But if cognitions are to admit of communication, then our mental state, i.e. the way the cognitive powers are attuned for cognition generally, and, in fact, the relative proportion suitable for a representation (by which an object is given to us) from which cognition is the result, must also admit of being universally communicated, as without this, which is the subjective condition of the act of knowing, knowledge, as an effect, would not arise. And this is always what actually happens when a given object, through the intervention of sense, sets the imagination at work in arranging the manifold, and the imagination, in turn, the understanding, in giving to this arrangement the unity of concepts. But this disposition of the cognitive powers has a relative proportion differing with the diversity of the objects that are given. However, there must be one in which this internal ratio, suitable for quickening one faculty by the other, is best adapted for both mental powers in respect of cognition of given objects generally; and this disposition can only be determined through feeling and not by concepts."1 This is only to say that there is such a character as intelligibility ; that we mean something when we say that such and such an author has or has not the gift of saying intelligibly what he has to say; that we can indeed talk of style. What Kant has to say about beauty and its connexion with knowledge depends on his conception of 1

c. of J., p. 238.

244 KANT the part played by imagination in both. The perception of beauty is not, as we have seen, mere awareness or passive apprehension. It involves reflexion, a certain play or activity of the mental faculties. The same is true of knowledge. This does not mean that the mind " makes " the perceived object out of a chaos of sensations. For Kant, perception and knowledge are never the same. Knowledge involves a concept; and a concept, Kant has told us, is a function of unity among representations. It involves comparison of what we see now with what we have seen elsewhere, and that involves the reproductive imagination. Hitherto Kant has been anxious to distinguish between association and judgement. Judgement, as we have seen, is association governed by a rule. What he has now to say, is that there is also a distinction between the casual or purely empirical play of the imagination and the use of the imagination in our apprehension of beauty. The poet and the scientist both use their imagination in a way which is quite different from that of the casual imagination in day-dreaming, or what is called free association. But the poet's use of the imagination, while creative and intelligible and through and through directive, is not controlled by a definite rule. It is significant without being significant of anything definite. It has what Kant calls " a conformity to law without a law," or " purposiveness without a purpose." It is free and yet has order. " It is only the subjective harmonizing of the imagination and the understanding without a corresponding objective harmony—which latter would mean that the representation was referred to a definite concept of the object— that can consist with the free conformity to law by the understanding (which has also been called purposiveness without a purpose) and with the specific character of a judgement of taste." 1 " The subjective condition of all judgements is the judging faculty itself, or judgement. Employed in respect of a representation whereby an object is given, this requires the harmonious accordance 1

C. of J., p. 241.

THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT of two powers of representation. These are the imagination (for the intuition and the arrangement of the manifold of intuition) and the understanding (for the concept as a representation of the unity of this arrangement). Now, since no concept of the object underlies the judgement here, it can consist only in the subsumption of the imagination itself (in the case of a representation whereby an object is given) under the conditions enabling the understanding in general to advance from the intuition to concepts. That is to say, since the freedom of the imagination consists precisely in the fact that it schematizes without a concept, the judgement of taste must be founded upon a mere sensation of the mutually quickening activity of the imagination in its freedom, and of the understanding with its conformity to law."1 The beautiful, then, is that which calls forth a harmony of the cognitive powers. But the aesthetic criticism of the day was also occupied with an experience in which disharmony was involved and the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime rested on the existence of this disturbing kind of aesthetic experience. " The feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful, and so it is an emotion that seems to be no sport, but dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination. Hence charms are repugnant to i t ; and since the mind is not simply attracted by the object, but is also alternately repelled thereby, the delight in the sublime does not so much involve positive pleasure as admiration or respect, i.e. merits the name of a negative pleasure."2 Our pleasure in the beautiful in nature depends at least partly on the fact that we find in nature objects fitted to our understanding, as though our postulate that nature must be so were finding in the existence of beautiful objects an unexpected confirmation. But our pleasure in the sublime is quite different. " Whereas natural beauty 1

C of J., p. 287.

a

c . of j . , p. 245

y

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(such as is self-subsisting) conveys a purposiveness in its form, making the object appear, as it were, preadapted to our power of judgement, so that it thus forms of itself an object of our delight; that which excites the feeling of the sublime may appear, indeed, in point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgement, to be ill adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagination, and yet it is judged all the more sublime on that account."1 The judgement of the sublime cannot, then, have the same foundation for its universality as the judgement of the beautiful; and yet Kant holds that equally with that judgement it is distinguished by its universality from the judgement of the agreeable. Kant tries, therefore, to ascribe to it a universality even more subjective. Objects may be called beautiful because we may claim that other people should have the same feelings in contemplating them as we have; but objects may not, he thinks, be properly called sublime. " All that we can say is that the object lends itself to the presentation of a sublimity discoverable in the mind. For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation. Thus the broad ocean agitated by storms cannot be called sublime. Its aspect is horrible, and one must have stored one's mind in advance with a rich store of ideas, if such an intuition is to raise it to the pitch of a feeling which is in itself sublime—sublime because the mind has been incited to abandon sensibility, and employ itself upon ideas involving higher purposiveness."2 There are two points in this which Kant does not distinguish. He holds that the feeling for the sublime involves a certain degree of moral cultivation, and is not and cannot be so universal as the feeling for formal beauty. The claim of the judgement of »C. of J., p. 245.

* c. of j . , p. 245.

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the sublime to universality is more ideal than the claim of the judgement of formal beauty. When we say an object is beautiful, we claim that others would agree if they would abstract entirely from considerations of interest or goodness and adopt the aesthetic attitude properly. But we can assume agreement about the sublime only from those who have cultivated their moral feelings. Kant seems to go further and say that the judgement of the sublime has even less to do with the object than the judgement of the beautiful. The object is only the occasion for the feeling of sublimity. But if the form of the object is relevant at all, the judgement of the sublime is on all fours with the judgement of the beautiful. We do not mean, when we call anything sublime, to say that we have a capacity for feelings of sublimity, and this spectacle happens in our case to touch off that capacity. We surely expect others to regard it as sublime, as we expect others to regard as beautiful what we call beautiful. The real reason for Kant's insistence on the greater subjectivity of the sublime is probably that he was more alarmed at the conclusions about the world which might be drawn from the feeling of sublimity. If men argued from the feeling of beauty that nature was really purposive for our understanding, that is an error of no great consequence. After all, we have to postulate that it is so purposive. But if we argue that nature really is sublime, we shall be trying to find God in nature, and not in the moral law, in the earthquake and the fire, and not in the still small voice ; and that, for Kant, is a most mischievous error. When, however, that makes him write as though the mere lack of form made anything sublime, he is surely mistaken, and his own analysis of the experience of sublimity does not bear him out. The sublime is much nearer the beautiful than he will allow. " The sublime," says Kant, " is that, the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense." The sublime, he thinks, may occur in two forms, " the mathematically and the dynami-

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catty sublime." The mathematically sublime is the aesthetic representation of infinity. " Nature is sublime in such of its phenomena as in their intuition convey the idea of their infinity. But this can only occur through the inadequacy of even the greatest effort of our imagination in the estimation of the magnitude of an object."1 " When the size of a natural object is such that the imagination spends its whole faculty of comprehension upon it in vain, it must carry our concept of nature to a supersensible substitute- (underlying both nature and our faculty of thought), which is great beyond every standard of sense."2 The failure of imagination calls up the absolute standard supplied by the idea of reason. " The feeling of the sublime is therefore at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from the fact that this very judgement of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense is in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law." 3 " Just as in the estimate of the beautiful imagination and understanding by their concert generate subjective purposiveness of the mental faculties, so imagination and reason do so here by their conflict—that is to say, they induce a feeling of our possessing a pure and self-sufficient reason, or a faculty for the estimation of magnitude, whose pre-eminence can only be made intuitively evident by the inadequacy of that faculty which in the presentation of magnitude of objects of sense is itself unbounded." i The feeling of the sublime comes from the fact that the mind is set in motion in the endeavour to grasp the sublime object, and the imagination is both active and conscious that for all its efforts it cannot grasp the object, but in being compelled to try more it becomes conscious of the illimitable demands of reason. But clearly the object must be such as to set off the imagination—it must, that is, 1

C. of J., p . 250. « C. of J., p . 257.

s C. of J., p . 255. * C. of J., p. 258.

THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT have something of the nature of the beautiful in it. The same holds of the dynamically sublime. The feeling of the dynamically sublime comes from the contemplation of the might of nature. " The irresistibility of the might" of nature forces upon us the recognition of our physical helplessness as beings of nature, but at the same time reveals a faculty of estimating ourselves as independent of nature, and discovers a pre-eminence above nature that is the foundation of a self-preservation of quite another kind from that which may be assailed and brought into danger by external nature." 1 The contemplation of the sublime awakens in us the activity of reason, and makes us conscious of the illimitable demands which reason involves—one might almost say, which reason is. From this Kant derives what is perhaps the most interesting part of his aesthetics, the relation of the aesthetic judgement and of art to the ideas of reason. " The sublime," he says, " may be described in this way : It is an object of nature, the representation of which determines the mind to make the very incomprehensibility nature a source of the presentation of ideas.

of

" In a literal sense, and according to their logical import, ideas cannot be presented. But if we enlarge our empirical faculty of representation (mathematical or dynamical) with a view to the intuition of nature, reason inevitably steps forward, as the faculty concerned with the independence of the absolute totahty, and calls forth the effort of the mind, unavailing though it be, to make the representation of sense adequate to this totality. This effort, and the feeling of the unattainability of the idea by means of imagination, in itself lets us see that the mind is intended for the employment of the imagination in the interests of the mind's supersensible province. It compels us subjectively to think nature itself in its totality as a presentation of something supersensible, without our being able to make such a presentation objective."2 " This idea of the supersensible, which no doubt v/e cannot further determine—so 1

c. of J., p. 261.

* c. of j . , p. 268.

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that we cannot cognize nature as its presentation, but only think it as such—is awakened in us by an object, the aesthetic estimation of which strains the imagination to its utmost, whether in respect of its extension (mathematical), or of its might over the mind (dynamical) 'n " For though the imagination, no doubt, finds nothing beyond the sensible world on which it can lay hold, still this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers gives it a feeling of being unbounded ; and that removal is thus a presentation of the infinite." 2 I said earlier that Kant's distinction of the beautiful and the sublime was too absolute. The opposition which he sometimes ascribes to the two, reflects the contrast in his own aesthetic experience to which I referred at the beginning of this section. The experience of the sublime is an experience of beauty. The imagination is working in accordance with law, and yet without a law. The difference is one of emphasis. In the sublime the emphasis is on the freedom, creativeness, and infinity of the mind's activity ; in the beautiful it is rather upon its harmony. Kant makes the beautiful that which calls out the harmonious working of the imagination and the understanding, the sublime that which calls out the harmonious working of the imagination and the reason. But the distinction between the understanding and the reason, although real and important, is not as clear cut or rigid as Kant sometimes assumes. On his own showing in the Preface to the first Critique the specific problems of reason arise from the work of cognition, which is the special problem of the understanding. However true it may be that the understanding in knowledge is always working with definite concepts and within a framework of time and space, its working always assumes the infinity of that framework and the relativity of those concepts. The understanding is working inside what Plato called 'hypotheses', but its working assumes a whole of experience to which those hypotheses are not adequate. If the understanding did not 1

c. of j . , p. 268.

2

c . of j , p. 268.

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recognize the demand for the unconditional which Kant thinks it the special function of reason to make, it would not do its own work properly. This does not mean that the distinction between working within assumptions and the demand for the unconditioned is not an important one. It is; but it has not the clear-cut nature which Kant sometimes gives to it, as though the understanding and the reason were two completely distinct faculties. 1 So in aesthetics Kant's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime is a real distinction. We may call it that between the correctness and the profundity of art. Examples are perhaps easier. We all recognize that some works of art may be just as good as they could be, may have an artistic perfection in which we can find no flaw, and yet that they are slight or have a narrow range, compared to others in which we can perhaps recognize many defects, which have, nevertheless, a greatness which the former kind are without. Some distinction of this kind is suggested, for example, in any comparison between Jane Austen and Walter Scott.1 Jane Austen is a far more perfect artist than Scott. Of that there can hardly be any question. Yet she seems to achieve that perfection by a very definite limitation of her interests and scope, as she herself recognized in the oft-quoted remark about " her little piece of ivory." Scott is full of defects. He is far more uneven than Jane Austen. But he has a range and depth to which Jane Austen does not pretend. It looks as though there were some connexion between definite limitation and aesthetic correctness which corresponds to Kant's view that the beautiful is concerned with the harmony of the imagination and the understanding, the sublime with the harmony of the imagination and the reason. When Kant comes to the discussion of genius, he seems to have left the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime behind. What he has to say there will certainly 1 The example was given me by Professor Alexander, though he is not responsible for the use I make of it.

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apply to both. Kant's remarks about the division of the arts and his discussion on the qualities of the different arts are hardly worth notice ; but the section in the Critique on Art is redeemed by what Kant says about genius. " Fine arts must necessarily be regarded as arts of genius." " Genius : (i) is a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given: and not an aptitude in the way of cleverness for what can be learned according to some rule; and consequently originality must be its primary property. (2) Since there may also be original nonsense, the products of genius must at the same time be models, i.e. be exemplary; and, consequently, though not themselves derived from imitation, they must serve that purpose for others, i.e. as a standard or rule of estimating. (3) It cannot indicate scientifically how it brings about its product, but rather gives the rule as nature. Hence, where an author owes a product to his genius, he does not himself know how the ideas for it have entered his headfnor has he it in his power to invent the like at pleasure or methodically, and communicate the same to others in such precepts as would put them in a position to produce similar products. (4) Nature prescribes the rule through genius not to science but to art, and this also only so far as it is to be fine art." 1 That which is most essential for genius is " soul " (Geist). " The principle is nothing else than the faculty of presenting (esthetic ideas. But by an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any thought whatever, i.e. concept, being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible." 2 " If we attach to a concept a representation of the imagination belonging to its presentation, but inducing solely in its own account such a wealth of thought as would never admit of comprehension in a definite concept, and as a consequence giving authentically an unbounded expansion to the 1

C. of J., pp. 307-8.

« C. of J., p. 314.

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concept itself, then the imagination here displays a creative activity, and it puts the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion." 1 " Genius displays itself, not so much in the working out of the projected end in the presentation of a definite concept, as in the portrayal or expression of cesthetic ideas containing a wealth of material for effecting that intention. Consequently the imagination is represented by it in its freedom from all guidance of rules, but with a guide for the presentation of the given concept. Lastly, the unsought and undesigned subjective purposiveness in the free harmonizing of the imagination with the understanding's conformity to law presupposes a proportion and accord between these faculties such as cannot be brought about by any observance of rules, whether of science or mechanical imitation, but can only be produced by the nature of the individual." 2 " Genius is the exemplary originality of the natural endowments in an individual in the free employment of his cognitive faculties."3 Genius is " exemplary originality." What is fundamentally the same paradox runs through all Kant's aesthetics. The universality of beauty is " universal subjectivity ", involves " purposiveness without a purpose or finality without an end " and " conformity to law without a law." The characteristic of art and of aesthetic experience for Kant is that it is free. It is not tied down to definite meanings or to definite purposes. It is, therefore, not knowledge, and cannot be knowledge. It is not morality. Kant, as I said before, is as anxious to vindicate the independence of art and of aesthetic experience as he was to vindicate the mutual independence of the worlds of moral freedom and scientific knowledge. Yet an examination of this third independent sphere of mental activity throws a new light on the relation of all three spheres ; for it throws a new light on the nature of the rational. The mind in art can be free and yet be rational. The beautiful ' C . of J., p . 315.

2

C. of J., p . 317.

» C. of J., p . 318.

KANT 254 does nothing but enliven the powers of the mind ; but enlivening does not mean merely exciting. It means discovering the right or best or most harmonious mental activity, an activity which claims universality, and yet has to be immediately recognized in individual instances. Kant is never tired of insisting that the universality of the aesthetic judgement cannot be checked by anything but itself. It may give rise to rules, but it is not derived from rules. It finds support in, but is independent of, the agreement of others. All this implies that we can immediately recognize the rationality of our own activities, and we recognize that rationality in an activity which we also recognize to be free, and which is concrete and individual. The main difficulty of Kant's ethics was that he made the individual a member of two worlds, each of which was a world of rigid rules with no room in either of them for the individual or for any real kind of spontaneity. For ;with all his insistence on the spontaneity of the practical reason, all that practical reason seemed to produce was rigid abstract rules. The Critique of Judgement does nothing to blunt the contrast between good and bad action; for the contrast between the beautiful and the agreeable is the contrast between pleasure in the mind's freedom and pleasure in the mind's casual associations. / Kant is right in insisting that the beautiful is the symbol of the good, because it is pleasure in the rational working of the mind. But Kant's earlier ethical writings imply that rational activity displays itself in abstract rules, and that any consideration of the individual instance, like any consideration of pleasure, meant a yielding to heteronomy and to irrationality of the will. But if rationality or intelligibility as such displays itself in the experience of beauty and in artistic production, we can see how the will may be determined only by the principle of its own activity, so that its determining principle may be the mere form of law, without that involving the rigid following of this or that moral law. It is significant to find Kant saying in this Critique that " general precepts learned at the feet either

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of priests or philosophers, or even drawn from one's own resources, are never so efficacious as an example of virtue or holiness, which, historically portrayed, does not dispense with the autonomy of virtue drawn from the spontaneous and original idea of morality (a priori) or convert this into a mechanical process by imitation." 1 ._-I noticed earlier in this chapter that Kant's doctrine that the autonomy of the will is the supreme principle of morality implied that there is such a thing as rational willing, which is not the same as willing that which is by an intellectual activity seen to be rational. In Kant's ethics this idea struggles, not always successfully, with the notion that the moral law is discovered simply by applying to moral problems the logical principle of non-contradiction. Kant's analysis of the reflective judgement as operative in the perception of the beautiful shows that there may be a rationality of the will which is as lar removed from legalism as it is from slavery to casual inclination. The other outstanding difficulty in Kant's theory before the Critique of Judgement is, of course, his sharp contrast between the world of freedom and the world of nature, making it impossible to understand how an action could be free, i.e. be such that it might have been done otherwise, and yet part of the mechanically determined world. How the principles of the reflective judgement as revealed by the analysis of its operation in aesthetic experience help towards a solution of this difficulty will be seen in an examination of the last part of the Critique of Judgement— the Critique of Teleological Judgement. (3) THE CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGICAL JUDGEMENT

Kant has three purposes in view in writing the Critique of Teleological Judgement: firstly, a criticism of the now old-fashioned teleology which used the notion that all things are made for man's benefit as a key to scientific 1 C. of J., p . 283.

KANT 256 explanation; secondly, a restoration and elaboration of his doctrine that the moral law alone gives us any ground for supposing there to be a real purpose in the world ; and, thirdly, an examination of the way in which we may legitimately use the concept of purposiveness or finality in strictly scientific explanation. Kant has no use for what he calls relative purposiveness or finality, that is, the doctrine that the presence of certain objects in nature is to be explained by their utility for other things in nature or for man. The most ordinary form of this doctrine is, of course, that crude teleology which holds that all things are designed for man's use—the teleology which can be perplexed about the existence of vermin and other undesirable objects. Kant objects to this doctrine that it assumes that the end which things are found to serve is the actual end of nature. " But this is a matter which can never be decided by any mere study of nature." 1 Moreover, men can certainly use for their purposes things which existed before they were so used. Hence the fact that things serve man's purposes is no reason for supposing that they were designed to do so. The real objection to such crude teleology is that, in treating all life except human life merely as means, it disregards the individuality which is the mark of all life. But the concept of purposiveness is needed in scientific explanation to explain the peculiarities of living beings, if it is needed at all. Any teleology which regards life as merely means makes no distinction between living and non-living. It is, as Bergson says, only mechanism backwards. This ordinary teleology, then, is both unwarranted by our knowledge and useless as a means of scientific explanation. The concept of final cause, therefore, must be modified before it is applied to nature. Kant's moral teleology we have already considered. It is enough to remind ourselves here that he maintains that if man can be treated as a real end of nature, that can only be in virtue of his rational will and in virtue 1

C . of J., p. 369.

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of man's place in the moral world of freedom. That we can reahze in practice ; but we can have no understanding of how that moral world is related to the world of nature, and our understanding of moral law gives us no insight into the detail of nature, and can, therefore, never serve as a help in scientific explanation. The Critique of Msthetic Judgement has helped to break down the apparent opposition between the worlds of freedom and of nature ; but it has done nothing to warrant a naturalistic explanation of moral facts or a moral explanation of natural facts. The independence of both ethics and science is not to be impaired. We are, then, Kant holds, to have nothing to do with any kind of teleological realism in science. There is nevertheless a real and necessary use of teleological principles in natural science, if they are regarded as principles of the reflective, and not of the determinant, judgement. Kant recurs to the point he has made in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgement. " But in respect of the particular laws with which we become acquainted through experience alone, there is such a wide scope for diversity and heterogeneity that judgement must be a principle to itself, even for the mere purpose of searching for a law and tracking one out in the phenomena of nature. For it needs such a principle as a guiding thread, if it is even to hope for a consistent body of empirical knowledge based on a thoroughgoing uniformity of nature, that is, a unity of nature in its empirical laws. Now from the fact of the contingent unity of particular laws it may come to pass that judgement acts in its reflexion upon two maxims, one of which it receives a priori from mere understanding, but the other of which is prompted by particular experiences that bring reason into play to institute an estimate of corporeal nature and its laws according to a particular principle."1 Kant means by the principle "received a priori from mere understanding " the principle of mechanism. Why he 1 c. of J., P . 386. 1

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calls it that will be discussed later. Here I wish to notice that the other principle of the reflective judgement, which is the teleological principle, is " prompted by particular experiences." Kant means by this that we are forced to think of a teleological explanation of nature when we try to understand living things. But when we do that, we are at once compelled to recognize that if this principle is to be of any use in explaining living things, it will not be the ordinary concept of purposiveness. We cannot, Kapt has already explained, use what he has called the concept of relative purposiveness. But neither can we regard the living thing as a technical product.; " In such a natural product as this, every part is thought as owing its presence to the agency of all the remaining parts, and also as existing for the sake of the others, and of the whole, that is, as an instrument or organ. But this is not enough—for it might be an instrument of art, and thus have no more than its general possibility referred to an end. On the contrary, the part must be an organ producing the other parts—each consequently reproducing the others. One wheel in a watch does not produce the other, and still less does one watch produce other watches by utilizing or organizing foreign material: hence it does not of itself replace parts of which it has been deprived, nor, if these are absent in the original construction, does it make good the deficiency of the rest, nor does it, so to speak, repair its own casual disorders. But these are all things which we are justified in expecting from organized nature. An organized being is, therefore, not a mere machine. For a machine has solely motive power, whereas an organized being possesses inherent formative power, and such, moreover, as it can impart to material devoid of it—material which it organizes. This, therefore, is a self-propagating formative power, which cannot be explained by the capacity of movement alone, that is to say, by mechanism."1 Kant defines an organism as follows: "An organized natural product is one in which every part is reciprocally 1

C. of J., p. 374.

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means and ends." We have an analogy for that in our own activity. For the category of means and end is strictly inapplicable to moral conduct and certainly to artistic production. In the relation of part and whole in a work of art we seem to have the nearest analogy to a natural organized product. But works of art do not produce themselves, and we are not warranted in ascribing an artistic consciousness to organisms. We must say, therefore, " that intrinsic natural perfection, as possessed by things that are only possible as physical ends, and that are therefore called organisms, is unthinkable and inexplicable on any analogy to any known physical or natural agency, not even excepting—since we ourselves are part of nature in the widest sense—the suggestion of any strictly apt analogy to human art. " The concept of a thing as intrinsically a physical end is, therefore, not a constitutive conception either of understanding or of reason, but yet it may be used by reflective judgement as a regulative conception for guiding our investigation of objects of this kind by a remote analogy with our own causality according to ends generally, and as a basis of reflexion upon their supreme source." 1 These organisms, Kant is confident, cannot be explained merely by mechanical principles. " It is quite certain that we can never get a sufficient knowledge of organized beings and their inner possibility, much less get an explanation of them, by looking merely to mechanical principles of nature. Indeed, so certain is it, that we may confidently assert that it is absurd for men even to hope to entertain any thought of so doing or to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass from natural laws that no design has ordered." 2 It might be thought that Kant is presuming too much, that if he had known of the discoveries of " another Newton " whose name was Darwin, he would not have taken his stand upon this supposed impossibility. We 1

C. of J., p. 375.

* C. of J., p. 400.

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have by this time seen so many instances of well-intentioned persons playing the part of King Canute to the advances of mechanical science, that we are disposed to regard such pronouncements with some contempt. But this criticism both misunderstands the line Kant is taking up on the principle of mechanism, and the grounds on which he bases this and other statements of the necessary insufficiency of merely mechanical explanation. One of Kant's most fundamental principles, set forth in the section of the-Critjque of Pure Reason called " The Interest of Reason in these Conflicts," is that scientific investigation is to be unfettered, and that there are to be no enclaves where the writ of science does not run. He does not hold in this Critique that we can warn off science from seeking a mechanical explanation of organisms. He is only concerned to say that such an explanation will be insufficient, and will need supplementation by another principle. Mechanism and teleology are both regulative principles of the general law of causation, and each is to be pushed as far as it will go. That Darwinism has not refuted him is clear from the following passage. " It is praiseworthy to employ a comparative anatomy and go through the vast creation of organized beings in order to see if there is not discoverable in it some trace of a system and indeed of a system following a genetic principle. For otherwise we should be obliged to content ourselves with the mere critical principle—which tells us nothing that gives any insight into the production of such beings—and to abandon in despair all claim to insight into nature in this field. When we consider the agreement of so many genera of animals in a certain common schema, which apparently underlies not only the structure of their bones, but also the disposition of their remaining parts, and when we find here the wonderful simplicity of the original plan, which has been able to produce such an immense variety of species by the shortening of one member and the lengthening of another, by the involution of this part and the evolution of that, there gleams upon

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the mind a ray of hope, however faint, that the principle of the mechanism of nature, apart from which there can be no natural science at all, may yet enable us to arrive at some explanation in the case of organic life. This analogy of forms, which in all their differences seem to be produced in accordance with a common type, strengthens the suspicion that they have an actual kinship due to descent from a common parent. This we might trace in the gradual approximation of one animal species to another, from that in which the principle of ends seems best authenticated, namely, from man, back to the polyp, and from this back even to mosses and lichens, and finally to the lowest perceivable stage of nature. Here we come to crude matter; and from this, and the forces which it exerts in accordance with mechanical laws (laws resembling those by which it acts in the formation of crystals), seems to be developed the whole technic of nature which, in the case of organized beings, is so incomprehensible to us that we feel obliged to imagine a different principle for its explanation."1 The insufficiency of mechanical explanation follows, not from the apparently stubborn character of some facts like the existence of organisms, but from the nature of causal explanation itself. That principle, as we have seen, is described by Kant in the first Critique as a regulative principle. For cause implies the synthesis of the heterogeneous. All we can anticipate depends, as Kant has shown, on the place in our experience of the homogeneous forms of time and space. We can by aid of the imagination anticipate ordering in time and space, but in causation, although we are concerned to establish objective determination in time, that determination depends upon the nature of that which is determined. Things occur when they do in time and space because of their specific characters. Of course, if things or phenomena were entirely heterogeneous, had no affinity with one another, experience would remain a chaos. They must display 1

C. of J., p. 418.

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character and recognizable rules. But if phenomena were entirely homogeneous, there would be no change either. We never know change except by perceiving something changing over against what is not changing. We can never in our apprehension of causation do without perception, and perception implies qualitative as well as quantitative differences. But the principle of mechanism concerns itself exclusively with the quantitative aspect of change. This principle is, as Kant says, " received a priori from the understanding." The understanding states that all objective determination in time involves a rule. " Everything that happens, that is, that begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows according to a rule." The principle of mechanism takes that rule as mere uniformity of repetitions of abstract identity. As our analysis of what we perceive resolves what at first sight seems a single change into a complex of many smaller changes, so, when under the guidance of mechanism, we concentrate on the identity in the rule and omit the variety in the instances, the qualitative differences in what we experience seem to be reduced to quantitative differences, to order variations of infinitely simple constantly recurring identities. Hence the idea of mechanism, according to which with sufficient knowledge the future would be entirely predictable because the present would be entirely mathematical. But if that were to happen, the necessity for perception would disappear, and the principle of causation would become entirely constitutive, not, as Kant maintains it to be, partly regulative. But this would be impossible, for we can anticipate only the homogeneous; and if there is nothing but the homogeneous there can be no change. Causation implies affinity and likeness, but not identity. It implies, therefore, rules with instances, but varying instances. But the principle of mechanism carried to its logical conclusion as it is by Descartes, reduces everything to undifferentiated matter which is equivalent to extension, and undifferentiated motion, and these are both, what Kant called absolute time and

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absolute space, " not-things "—undinge. Causation depends on the perception of individual changes, and that cannot exist without qualitative differences. That implies, as Kant insists in this Critique, that in the actual empirical facts " there is always something accidental to the understanding." The rule cannot contain the individual. The individual is not deducible from the rule any more than the particular rule is deducible from the general law of causation. But mechanism, if regarded as a complete explanation of phenomena, would eliminate the individual. Because all individuals have character and universality, quantitative analysis can apply to them, but only in so far as it recognizes the existence in them of something irreducible by quantitative analysis. The faculty of the reflective judgement seeks the rule, as judgement about causation must do, from the reflexion on individual instances. It has got to start with finding universality in the individual. And, therefore, the principle of mechanism which ignores and cannot deal with individuality cannot be a sufficient principle for the reflective judgement. Mechanism must be supplemented by the principle of purposiveness. Neither is sufficient in itself. Both are, in Kant's phrase, regulative. We are to push each of them as far as they will go. We may be confident that reality is such that somehow both mechanism and purposiveness are reconcilable. " It is an open question whether in the unknown inner basis of nature itself the physico-mechanical and the final nexus present in the same things may not cohere in a single principle, it being only our reason that is not in a position to unite them in such a principle, so that our judgement, consequently, remains reflective, not determinant." 1 The principle of mechanism has, then, to be supplemented by the principle of purposiveness. This latter principle is suggested, as we have seen, by the study of certain peculiar objects in the natural world, namely, organisms. Kant has explained that when we attribute 1

C. of J.( p. 388.

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purposiveness to organisms, we only do so by analogy. We have no right to think of them as deliberately designed. They are quite different from artistic products. Their essential characteristic lies in the relation in them of parts and whole. " An organized natural product is one in which every part is reciprocally ends and means." But that also involves that the organism is not just the sum of its parts. The idea of the whole is essential to the understanding of the parts and their functions. The whole is a definite determining reality. " What we require, therefore, in the case of a body which in its intrinsic nature and inner possibility has to be estimated as a physical end, is as follows : Its parts must in their collective unity reciprocally reproduce one another alike as to form and combination, and thus by their own causality produce a whole, the conception of which commonly—in a being possessing the causality according to conceptions that is adequate for such a product—could in time be the cause of the whole according to a principle, so that, consequently, the nexus of efficient causes might be no less estimated as an operation brought about by final causes."1 But only if we so think of the whole as having a determining function in the nature of the parts, while the parts have a determining function in the nature of the whole, can we take individuality seriously. Otherwise, as we have seen, it is accidental, and the abstract rule or identity is the only reality. For the whole, according to mechanism, is only the sum of the parts, and the parts in turn, so far as they have any structure, are only sums of still smaller parts, and so on ad infinitum. But such a conception is really, as we have seen, unintelligible. If individuality is real, the individual must have a real determining part to play;« and yet that part must be consistent with the individual itself being a real part of a real and larger whole, and so on—till we think of the principle of wholeness as playing a part in all nature. Thus the principle of purposiveness is first forced upon us by the nature 1

c. of j . , p. 373.

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of organisms. These have just got to be taken as individuals, as what Bergson called " wholes partially enclosed by nature." We cannot just divide them up as we cut dead wood. Unless we recognize their real boundaries, we just cannot get on with them at all. Yet they are not isolated individuals j their boundaries are crossed in all sorts of ways, and we have to recognize that as they are wholes of parts, so they are in turn parts of a larger whole. It does not, of course, follow that the larger whole of which they are parts is itself an organism. To assume that would be to make the conception of organism a determinant conception. But it does follow from what has been said about mechanism, that the kind of relation between parts and whole implied in mechanism would not explain that larger whole. It must be a real whole and, therefore, have something of the same sort of relation between whole and parts as is found in an organism. Therefore, the reflective judgement, in working out all the detail of causal change which it finds in the world, and trying to find some sort of unity and system in experience, is bound to use this principle of purposiveness as well as the principle of mechanism. In considering the upshot of Kant's Critique of Teleological Judgement, it has to be remembered that all this Critique is an appendix. The real examination of the principle of reflective judgement has been done in the examination of the vEsthetic Judgement. Judgements of beauty have been found to imply that there is such a thing as mere intelligibility, and that we can be guided by it in our work of systematizing our experience. As the first paragraph of the Critique of Teleological Judgement says : " We do not need to look beyond the critical explanation of the possibility of knowledge to find ample reason for assuming a subjective purposiveness on the part of nature in its particular laws. This is a purposiveness relative to comprehensibility—man's power of judgement being such as it is—and to the possibility of uniting particular experiences into a connected system of nature. In this system, then, we may 11

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further anticipate the possible existence of some among the many products of nature that, as if put there with quite a special regard for our judgement, are of a form particularly adapted to that faculty. Forms of this kind are those which by their combination of unity and heterogeneity serve, as it were, to strengthen and entertain the mental powers that enter into play in the exercise of the faculty of judgement, and to' them the name of beautiful forms is accordingly given." 1 It has been urged in criticism of Kant's attitude in this Critique that his results are too subjective. He has shown that we have an a priori appreciation of comprehensibility. It is agreed that what he has really done in this Critique is to show that the principle of mechanism and the principle of purposiveness as ordinarily understood are alike unintelligible, and that the conception of change can only be properly understood through the principle of organism. We have already noticed that Kant gets into difficulties in both the first two Critiques by his conceiving of reason too abstractly. What he is really doing in the Critique of Judgement is to begin to escape from the conception of the abstract to that of the concrete universal. Kant is quite right, it is said, to criticize mechanism and purposiveness. They are abstract and unintelligible. Why did he not realize that his criticism of metaphysics in the Dialectic of the first Critique was a critique of bad metaphysics, not of metaphysics as such ? The assumption of the intelligibility of the real is the presupposition of all thinking; and if we can discover, as Kant supposes, the character of intelligibility, are we not truly capable of discovering a priori the nature of the real ? Kant refused to see this, and consequently has left his system unfinished. This is the view of all those interpreters of Kant who think Kant ought to have been a Hegelian. " The secret of Hegel," says Hutchison Stirling, " may be indicated at shortest thus : As Aristotle—with considerable assistance from Plato—made explicit the abstract universal that was 1

c. of J., p. 359.

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implicit in Socrates, so Hegel—with less considerable assistance from Fichte and Schelling—made explicit the concrete universal that was implicit in Kant." From mechanism to organism is the passage made in the Critique of Teleological Judgement. What is that but the passage from the abstract to the concrete universal ? What but Kant's persistent subjectivity prevented Kant from discovering " the secret of Hegel " ? Kant's answer to this is that that would be all very well if we had an intuitive understanding. He has said something about such a conception in the first Critique, and he returns to it in the Critique of Teleological Judgement in a passage which throws much light on his fundamental attitude in this matter. " We are also able to form a notion of an understanding which, not being discursive like ours, but intuitive, moves from the synthetic universal, or intuition of a whole as a whole, to the particular—that is to say, from the whole to the parts. To render possible a definite form of the whole a contingency in the synthesis of the parts is not implied by such an understanding or its representation of the whole. But that is what our understanding requires. It must advance from the parts on universally conceived principles to different possible forms, to be subsumed thereunder as consequences. Its structure is such that we can only regard a real whole in nature as the effect of the concurrent dynamical forces of the parts. How, then, may we avoid having to represent the possibility of the whole as dependent upon the parts in a manner conformable to our discursive understanding ? May we follow what the standard of the intuitive or archetypal understanding prescribes, and represent the possibility of the parts as both in their form and in their synthesis dependent upon the whole ? The very peculiarity of our understanding in question prevents this being done in such a way that the whole contains the source of the possibility of the nexus of the parts. This would be selfcontradictory in knowledge of the discursive type. But the representation of a whole may contain the source of

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the possibility of the form of that whole, and of the nexus of the parts which that form involves. This is our only road. But now the whole would in that case be an effect or product, the representation of which is looked on as a cause of its possibility." 1 To this it may be objected that Kant's criticisms of the discursive understanding are perfectly sound; that what he himself has shown is that intelligibility involves the harmonious union of understanding arid intuition; and that however true it may be that the understanding and intuition are each in themselves abstract, concepts without intuition being empty and intuitions without concepts being blind, they can be and are united. Is not the judgement of the beautiful the judgement of an intuitive understanding ? Does not our appreciation of a work of art involve just that apprehension of a whole determining and making intelligible its parts which, he ays, an intuitive understanding would give if we had one ? In short, is not all this subjectivity on Kant's part due to a distinction between the understanding and intuition which belongs to a pre-Critical stage of his thought ? Once this stumbling-block is removed, all these limitations, of Kant's surely disappear. Such arguments have been regarded by many critics as convincing, but they are really foolish. For they suppose that in the unity of understanding and intuition we can get the advantages of both and the defects of neither. The intuition is concrete, but it is limited ; the understanding can transcend the spatial and temporal limitations of intuition, but it is abstract. The very nature of an organic whole, as Kant defines it, presupposes that we can only know the whole through the parts and the parts through the whole, and, therefore, presupposes that we can take in in one synthesis parts and whole. We can do that when we are confronted with wholes of a limited range. We can do it when we hear music, for example. We can indeed by practice extend the range of such 1

C. of J., p. 407.

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intellectual apprehension—as we progress, e.g., from being able to hear as one a simple folk tune to the grasp of, say, Beethoven's Sonata, Opus n o . But the limits remain. We are finite beings; our powers of experience are limited, as is our grasp of space and time; and nothing can alter this. In the union of understanding and intuition we can have knowledge; but it is not a priori knowledge, and the principles that guide our reflective judgement cannot possibly be determinant, i.e. we cannot possibly get the details out of the principle without intuitions. If we use principles of understanding alone we can predict of all experience, not just of our experience, but such prediction is necessarily abstract and schematic. When we use the reflective judgement to make our concrete experience more systematic, we begin with the individual. We are guided by the a priori principle of intelligibility, and we get knowledge when by the help of such a principle we make our experience inteUigible. But we are still limited by the limitations of our experience. That experience is not merely passive. Our judgements on it are guided by an a priori principle, which transforms our disconnected casual experience into something very different. But the a priori principle guides our judgement on individual experience, and is never a substitute for it. Kant's doctrine of subjectivity is always a doctrine of the subjectivity of the a priori. For all his preoccupation with the a priori, he is always concerned to defend the irreducibility of the empirical element in our knowledge. He criticized the argument from design in the first Critique, not by saying that we do not actually perceive design in nature or by saying that " nature " is only our construction, but -by saying that we cannot from discovering design in nature ignore the lack of design which we^ilso find and jump by an a priori argument to an omnipotent designer. So here he maintains, not that we cannot by help of the teleological principle know nature, but that we must not go beyond our empirical evidence. We can perhaps best appreciate Kant's position if we

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compare it with the position reached by Hegel as a result of giving up Kant's limitations. Hegel's doctrine of the concrete universal is based on Kant's conception of organism, but it supposes that we can regard all reality as a concrete universal. So perhaps we may; but then we cannot know reality as a whole without knowing its individual constituents. Hence arises the assumption that we can know reality as a whole already existing, as though philosophy could somehow transcend time and regard the process of reality as already complete. Hegel no doubt supplies the corrective to this when he insists that every philosopher is the child of his time, and that philosophy can only understand the process that is completed. But he seems sometimes, especially in the Philosophy of Nature, to suppose that we can really transcend the temporal process, and to maintain that philosophy, because it has not the abstract character of scientific thinking, can attain a knowledge of reality without the aid of empirical science. He has not Kant's firm respect for the empirical. Kant has shown in the Critique of Judgement that the beautiful is the type of comprehensibility. If we take a musical composition, then, as an instance of a concrete universal, we may assert that it is in principle intelligible through and through in all its details. All the notes must have some individual character of their own. Otherwise there would be no composition. But they are what they are because of the nature of the whole. The whole is constituted by and yet determines its parts. The only way to know the whole is to hear it. There is no other way. We recognize in it rule and law or form. By the study of musical form we can hear it and understand it better. But to analyse the form is not to understand it unless we also hear it. Yet we can know the composition better when we have studied the abstract form. Such study enables us to understand the lines along which the composition could develop; but we could never deduce the composition from an understanding of musical form, however elaborate such an understanding was. The study of form is like the

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work of the understanding in knowledge of nature. To secure knowledge in the proper sense of the word we need intuition—the apprehension of the individual concrete structure. On Kant's view—and surely it is the true one—we are, in trying to apprehend reality, in the position of listeners while the musical composition is being played. It matters not how much we insist that the composition is intelligible. If intelligibility involves experience, the limits of our experience set limits to the extent to which we can understand the intelligible. The notes we are hearing now get their character partly from those that precede. The more we learn about those, the more we can understand the present. The present in turn is helping to shape the character of the whole composition. But the nature of the whole we cannot know. Who are we to anticipate the creation of the master musician ? But our appreciation of what has gone before, and of what we are now hearing, enables us to anticipate something of what is to come, and makes us more ready to understand it when it does come. But more than that we cannot do. For the playing is not yet ended. (4) THE UPSHOT OF THE CRITICAL SYSTEM

Let us now look back at the account of the three Critiques which has occupied the last three chapters and see what it comes to. Kant began, as we saw, by distinguishing scientific enquiry from a mere collection of empirical observations on the one hand and from metaphysics with its antinomies on the other. He takes for granted the triumphant progress of the physical sciences. Their validity he never doubts, nor calls in question their success. He so much takes them for granted that they are to be the standard of other enquiries. Discredited metaphysics is set over against triumphant science and told to find out how its younger brother has managed to do so much better than

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itself. We are to ask how the sciences became scientific. When we have thoroughly understood that, we may go on to ask how or whether metaphysics and ethics can follow their example. Though Kant mentions other enquiries which he regards as scientific, such as logic and mathematics, when he talks about science he has ordinarily in mind what are called the natural sciences, and in particular physics. As early as the Berlin Prize Essay of 1764 Kant had rejected the notion that metaphysics could be modelle/1 on mathematics for the notion that it should consider the example of the natural sciences. In logic and in mathematics Kant considered that the mind was concerned with its own activities and its own constructions. It was the natural sciences which had succeeded in making scientific our understanding of what is independent of ourselves, and were therefore the true model for metaphysics. The means by which the natural sciences had become scientific was their successful use of the a priori. Kant takes for granted that all enquiries become scientific in so far as they are informed by a priori principles. Therefore an examination of the scientific becomes an examination or a critique of the a priori and its function in knowledge. But whereas the other scientific enquiries, logic and mathematics, consist of a priori propositions and have the mark of intuitive certainty, the characteristic of the natural sciences, which made Kant talk of their " sure path," is not their intuitive certainty but their steady progress. They had, for rather more than a hundred years when Kant wrote, gone on bringing more and more facts under their sway; and since Kant's time they have gone on in the same way. The mark of their sway is successful prediction, their being able to say of a wider and wider range of experience that under such and such circumstances such and such will be observed. In Kant's words, they " prescribe to experience." Scientific knowledge so regarded is always in process and always involves time. It is not a completer or more

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intelligible apprehension of what has been already in some sense presented to the mind. It is never merely apprehension. It is concerned always with the meaning of what we can apprehend, with what that tells us of the past or of the future, of something other than, though of the same nature, as itself. It is a looking behind and before. It can of its very nature never be complete or rounded off. It can never have, that is, what Kant regarded as the characteristic of logic as a science. It has always new worlds to conquer. It continually enlarges, not the depth, but the range of our understanding of the world in which we are living, pushing back the limits within which our position in a definite time and space confines us, but never getting beyond limits altogether. Its standard is not its own self-completeness but its own self-improvement. As it improves it enables the mind to relate more and more what is observed at any time and place to what is observable at any other. It comes to see the world as more and more interconnected, so that what we apprehend at any one time and place will tell us what is to be seen at any other. This implies of course that there actually is a thoroughgoing interconnectedness and mutual relevance of existence. We manage to predict and anticipate from our tiny grasp of reality by means of system and rule. Though that system may be at least in part our own construction, if there were not some answering interconnectedness in things, we could make no way with it Nevertheless we never apprehend the world as a system: for its infinity eludes us. As scientific thinking progresses, our own little span of consciousness changes its character. It becomes less and less a succession of independent separate apprehensions with little or no relation to one another, and more and more an ordered unity It brings to bear more significance on each new apprehension as we progress in time or move in space, because we have systematized all we have experienced in the past. It is our systematizing

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what we bear along with us that makes the difference. Present experience tells us more and more of possible experience, because our present experience has at its command more and more in our past that is relevant to the situation in the present. We may contrast this view of science with that suggested in Plato's famous simile of the line. Science there is represented as taking us away frem the world of becoming and decay to the apprehension of timeless realities. But for Kant scientific knowledge is only of phenomena. The abstract processes of mathematics which* for Plato were the first stages of the apprehension of another world are for Kant not in themselves knowledge, but only an instrument by means of which we guide and extend observation and the anticipation of observation. Science for Kant does not take us deeper into things or lead us through experience to another world of realities. It only immensely widens and makes more discriminating our ordinary experience, which is always a mixture of'direct observation and inference. It is important to realize how revolutionary and fundamental is this Kantian conception of the nature of knowledge. Kant equates knowledge with science. But the conception of science, as taken from the natural sciences, implies that being scientific is a matter of degree, as when he says, " Every particular natural discipline contains in it only so much of genuine science as it contains of mathematics." 1 For the ideal of science is that it should be complete and systematic. That is an ideal which is never attained. Yet any knowledge must have some system in it. This implies an abandonment of the Platonic distinction between opinion and knowledge, with its implications of an infallible and a fallible state or activity of mind on the one hand, and knowable and opinable objects on the other. For Kant any enquiry—that is an enquiry into any aspect of reality—may become scientific. Whether it becomes scientific or not depends on us; on our 1

Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science, Preface.

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exercising the right kind of activity upon it. At the same time scientific activity is never infallible. It always claims to be true, but it is not an apprehension of anything, though it involves apprehension. It is an activity of the imagination which may go wrong. Whether or how far we attain knowledge does not depend upon the status of our object, but upon our activity in regard to the object being rightly or wrongly guided. In place of the contrast between opinion and knowledge, Kant is concerned with the contrast between disconnected observation and systematic science. Once we have attained the standpoint of systematic science, what would have been without that standpoint disconnected observations take their place in the system and become significant of other possible observations. One of the most revolutionary, though perhaps least remarked, features of this view of knowledge is the part which it assigns to the imagination. If a mark of science is its power of accurate prediction, it must always be imagining the future. A scientific hypothesis is not an apprehension but an imaginary schema. Verification is a process of checking the predicted or the imagined by perception. The creative, constructive powers of the mind, of which Kant says so much, are powers of the imagination. Hume in his doctrine of the association of ideas was perhaps the first to see the vital importance of imagination in knowledge, but he never satisfactorily distinguished between the use of the imagination in knowledge and its other uses. What Kant has done is to distinguish first between imaginative thinking and unregulated association, and later between imaginative thinking and imaginative art. Thinking for Kant involves imagination, ,but not all imagination is thinking. To become thinking, and to be used in the service of knowledge, it has to be governed by certain rules, the rules of the understanding. For Kant it is the understanding which gives rules to the imagination in its task of connecting and anticipating experience. The natural sciences are, as the name suggests, con-

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cerned with the knowledge of nature, something which in its manifold and various complexity is for us there to be discovered. And yet the paradox of the situation is that the method of empirical observation, of patiently observing the facts as we meet them, takes us such a little way, the facts being so infinite and our powers of observation so limited. The empirical enquiries have become scientific by informing their observation with a priori thinking. As we have seen, the extent to which what we observe will tell us of other things, not yet but to be observed, depends on the mind, and on the activity we bring to bear on our observations. It is our thinking which is going to make the observed facts significant of other facts and going to give science its powers of prediction and anticipation. We can perhaps see at once how organizing our own mind and its methods of imagination will help us to bring to bear upon our present experience what is relevant to it in our past experience, as though thinking were making a card index of our memory. But why should our organizing our memory of what we have observed tell us anything about what we have not observed ? The answer to that question, as Hume had already pointed out, is that scientific thinking implies more than organizing our memory—Hume had assumed that this was done by the laws of association of ideas— it implies also that certain principles of connexion (the most obvious of which is the law of causation) will hold of all that we experience—all we are going to experience, as well as all we have experienced. But Hume had both made the principle of causation indispensable for our knowledge of the external world and denied that we could show that it was in any way valid. Kant, as we saw, recognized that there were other principles besides causation implied in our knowledge of the external world. He saw that he had. to find a list of the principles implied in objective judgement, and found them by considering the nature of objective judgement, by considering, that is, what distinguishes the workings of the imagination when

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claiming to predict truly and its workings when making no such claim. Then he asked himself how these principles are valid, which he found to be the same thing as asking how they are really principles of objectivity. His answer is that these principles are not to apply to things directly but to our perception of things, and that raises the question whether there are any principles implied in objective perception. The answer to that question is a double one. The first point is that we observe in all our intuition an element of form—time and space—and can see that relations in that form are independent of the other elements of what we perceive. Time and space being homogeneous, we can extend them indefinitely in imagination, and imagine one time and one space as a framework into which all our experiences are to be fitted. A priori thinking or imagining in terms of time and space will apply to what we perceive, because what we perceive has an-a priori form. That is the importance of Kant's discovery of 1770, that time and space are a priori forms of intuition, that is^. of receptivity or of what is given. Time and space are nevertheless transcendentally ideal, because in the reference from the imagined to the perceived we never move out of the sphere of experience. Kant takes for granted that intuition is a complex process, contributed to by both the mind and nature, and that there is no way of getting behind that connexion so far as its general conditions are concerned. Time and space are forms implied in that interconnexion of mind and the external world which is perception. But this answer is not enough. Time and space are implied in all imagining, not only in that which is or claims to be objective thinking, and therefore they cannot be in themselves principles of objectivity. The second part of the answer which is given in the Transcendental Deduction is this. There is such a thing as objective perception or perception of an object. Just as there is imagination which involves objectivity and imagination which does not, so there is perception which

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claims to be perception of an object and perception which does not. Consider the story of the drunk man who said, " You think I saw a rat run across the floor, but I didn't." When we ask how there can be perception of an object, the answer is that such perception, unlike intuition strictly and properly so called, is not mere receptivity. In order to be aware of perceiving an object, our mind has already had to be active. It has had to distinguish in the content of its perception between those-variations which are du,e to the perceiving self and those which are due to the object. When we ask how that is done, how we distinguish, e.g., between succession in our apprehending and an apprehension of objective succession, we" find that we do it by assuming the validity of principles such as causation. But these are the principles which have been found to distinguish judgement which claims to be true from mere imagination or association of ideas. If we are to distinguish things as they appear to us from our activity in apprehending and interrelating them, we must assume that they have a systematic interconnectedness in time and space. Without that the perception of an object as distinguished from the perception of a content which is in itself neither objective nor subjective would be impossible. Therefore the distinction between objective and subjective can acquire any meaning only on the assumption that these principles can inform things as they appear to us, as space and time inform them. For unless we can apply the principles of objectivity to what we perceive, we cannot get this distinction at all. Therefore we can work out our scientific hypotheses on the basis of the validity of the principle of causation and the other principles of the pure understanding and be confident that the same principles will apply to the observation which checks the scientific hypotheses, because unless they do we cannot get the experience of objectivity. The paradox is that while we begin by asking how the activity of the mind can prescribe to, or be confident that it will be confirmed by, " brute fact," the answer

THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT is that if you really want " brute fact " to check your anticipation, you have to apply to your perception or intuition the same principles of objectivity as you apply to your imagination when you want to think truly. This is Kant's ' empirical realism and transcendental idealism.' It is empirical realism because all cognitive operations, even those of the most elaborate type, start from and come back to the experience of perceiving an object. Though Kant never thinks of " perceiving an object" as a state of transparent apprehension in the manner of some modern realists, neither does he think of it as a process of the mind creating what it likes out of an undifferentiated chaos. It is a process of disentangling according to rules the contribution made to the content of what we perceive by the thing on the one hand and by ourselves on the other. This process of course involves an activity of the mind but it is a process rendered possible only by attending also to what is actually apprehended. What we apprehend becomes immensely more significant owing to our thinking, and we often have to make an effort to distinguish what we apprehend and what we imaginatively infer; but our thinking can never start without apprehending and must always come back to it. This empirical realism, this dependence upon what we actually observe to be there and not produced by us, is also transcendental idealism. We cannot give up our piecemeal empirical contact with the real in these objective perceptions and rely only on the principles which give those perceptions objectivity and significance to give us, independently of perception, a knowledge of universal characteristics of the real. If we do that, we shall fall into contradictions. The principles are rules by which the mind can get objective knowledge under conditions. But if we forget the conditions and forget that we have proved the validity of these rules which govern our imagination in thinking only by showing that thinking is concerned with anticipations of objective perception, where the rules also apply;

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if we give up the fundamental condition of starting from and ending with the empirical perception of an object, our principles will give us no knowledge. If Kant had left off there, he would have been what might be called a pure phenomenalist. Knowledge on such a view never gets beyond appearances but only enables us to anticipate other appearances. To have scientific knowledge on this view is like having a map. It does not enable us to see anything we could not somehow have seen without it. But it enables us to go our way about more' expeditiously because it enables us to anticipate what we shall see under all sorts of conditions. But deeper insight into the nature of things it does not give. The result of the criticism of Reason, the a priori element in knowledge, is to establish it as the servant of empirical observation. But this is not by any means the whole of the story. It is not even the whole of the story in so far as the description of the natural sciences is concerned. If the a priori element is to be the servant of empirical observation, what inspires empirical observation ? We might hold—and some phenomenalists do hold—that empirical observation is inspired by our ordinary wants and desires, and that science is only an elaborate application of Hume's statement that "reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions ". Kant holds that if that were so, modern science as we know it would not exist. Science exists because it is the creation of reason, of a will to a complete and systematic understanding of the world for its own sake. Without that never-ceasing demand to clear up remaining difficulties, to investigate the unknown, to press back the existing limits of our knowledge, the sciences would never have come into being at all. Reason thus appears in a new form. Within the general sphere of the a priori, which Kant has so far understood by reason, appears a new distinction, that between understanding and reason. The principles which determine objectivity, whose application is confined to phenomena, are called

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the principles of the understanding. Reason, as distinguished from the understanding, is the author of the ideal of completeness, without which science and indeed the conception of truth itself would not exist. This ideal of reason shows itself partly in demanding from the activities of the understanding a completeness and an absolute character which they cannot produce. Hence arise the antinomies. But it also shows itself in what Kant calls the regulative use of the ideals of pure reason. We are in science continually inspired by an ideal of intelligibility and this ideal is the creation of reason. If we will only remember that knowledge is an activity, and remind ourselves that the nature of an activity depends upon the purpose and will that inspire it, then we shall see at once the decisive difference which there is between knowledge as a finding out what for other practical reasons you want to know and knowledge which is inspired by its own purposes. Science implies that there is a purpose of reason, something universal and compelling, whose reality is unescapeable. But this ideal of reason is only one. example of the supremacy of reason on the practical side, and its implications are worked out in Kant's ethics. Kant held that ethics could only tread the sure path of a science by not copying the natural sciences. It is indeed possible to have a natural science of man's behaviour, treating him as one among other things in, the interconnected world of the natural sciences. Kant calls such a science " anthropology ". But such a science is incapable of explaining the nature of obligation, the distinction between what is and what ought to be, between right and wrong, good and bad. It can analyse the effects of willing in the world, but it cannot understand willing itself. Because it cannot do that, it cannot understand conduct. We can only do that by reflecting on the nature of moral choice. Then we see all that our sense of obligation and of moral conflict implies, the bindingness upon us of a moral law which cannot be explained by our circumstances—which is

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indeed reason, not our individual reasoning, but universal reason speaking within us. From the consideration of the simplest, most everyday action we can realize the fact of obligation, the decisiveness of the contrast between duty and inclination, the irrelevance of the deterministic world of science to our willing, and the difference between it and the legislative freedom and spontaneity of reason. If scientific thinking only extends the range of our observation and never gives us a deeper understanding of the nature and significance of things, in moral activity on the other hand we are confronted with the law of the universe. " The moral law infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in "which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world."1 We know only the surface of things, but in our action we are in contact with their inner reality. If Kant in iSie first Critique seems to have left only a modest place for reason in knowledge, he gives an exalted place to reason in conduct. If we may imagine Kant writing a parallel to Plato's simile of the cave, it would be something like this : It is as though we were travelling through a country in a dim light, able to see directly only a very little as we went. But, as we go, we make more and more effective a lamp which we carry. The light which our lamp produces is curious. As we improve it, it does indeed enable us to see directly a little more than we saw before. But what chiefly happens is that the things which, before we improved our lamp, we saw dimly and separately, begin to reflect more and more. While we can still see directly only a few yards in front of us, yet as we turn our lamp on to one object after another in that narrow circle we walk in, these objects become mirrors and reflect things outside that circle which we cannot directly see. The light, does not act on all objects alike. They do not become one undifferentiated mirror in which1 what is 1

C. of Pr. R., p . 313.

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outside our small circle of light is reflected. We have to focus our light differently to make different objects reflect, and they reflect different things in the as yet dark realm of possible experience. We find out how to do this correctly because we can check the reflexions in the mirrors by moving, carrying our small circle of light with us and bringing that to bear on the objects of which we have seen the reflexion. When the direct light confirms the reflexions, we know that we have focussed the lamp properly for that kind of object. When it does not, we know that we have focussed our lamps wrongly and call our theories false. Of course in doing all this we are learning not only how to focus our lamp but something about the objects on which we direct it. For that some will give one reflexion and others another, when we turn the lamp with the same focus upon them, is a fact about the objects, not about the lamp. But what they reflect is all that the use of our lamp will tell us. As we progress in the use of the lamp, we see more and more that the country is far too vast for us to see it as a whole in any reflexions we can get from the most skilful focussing of the lamp. And yet, if we are to know where to direct our steps, we have got to know the lie of the land. The objects we can see in the lamplight suggest paths in this or that direction, but the suggestions are contradictory or confusing, and if we follow them we get no further. But if we open the lamp, we find within it a compass pointing in one direction, and we know that if we follow that we shall go as we should go if it were broad daylight and we saw the whole country. The compass does not show us any more of the country. The light reflected by our lamp from objects tells us nothing as to how we are to go. The direction given by the compass and the information given by the lamp have no relation to one another. The second Critique leaves off with this account of the two worlds in which man finds himself—the world of

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determined phenomena and the world of autonomous will, worlds which seem to have no relation to one another. But there cannot really be two worlds. The contrast is between the world as known and the world as experienced in action, the assumption being that the world as it is known is not the world as it really is. This implies a radical distinction between knowing and acting, which, if pressed, involves almost as many difficulties as the view that there are two separate worlds of phenomena and things in themselves. It can be maintained that we never act with perfect knowledge but always in faith; and that there is always a difference between the world as we assume it to be in our action and the world as we know it; and that however far our knowledge may advance our action always goes beyond it. This view would enable us to maintain the distinction between phenomena and things in themselves, if we regard things in themselves as things as we should know them were our knowledge perfect, it being in the nature of knowledge that there cannot be perfect knowledge of an infinite world. The thing in itself is thus in Kant's words a merely limiting concept.1 This must imply that we can and do come to know reality more and more as it is. It is not compatible with the view which some passages in the first Critique seem to imply, that there is a difference in kind between the objects of knowledge and the real. As we have seen, Kant tried in the third Critique to get over the difficulties created by the too sharp contrast between knowledge and action set forth in the first two Critiques. He could not possibly give up the empirical element in scientific knowledge, nor the view that we are confronted with an infinity of reality which we cannot possibly anticipate in thought. He must leave therefore entirely untouched his doctrine that the categories can prescribe to experience only because they prescribe no more than the form of the question we put to reality and therefore the form of the answer. If we are to advance in our knowledge of reality, it can only »A 255 B 3 1 1 .

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be in the universally significant nature of some of the empirical contents of our knowledge. Kant therefore turns to the principles which guide our comprehension and systematization of our empirical knowledge. Reason, as we have seen, sets an ideal before knowledge as it sets an ideal before conduct. That ideal is never fully and completely realized any more than are any of the ideals of conduct prescribed by reason. But nature of herself in the beautiful shows objects already fitted to the mind. So the ideal of intelligibility and significance which reason produces, if it is used as a regulative ideal, may and does find itself, as knowledge increases, more and more fulfilled. In the notion of the regulative use of reason first put forward in the Critique of Pure Reason and elaborated as an account of the reflective judgement in the Critique of Judgement, Kant treats science as equally with conduct depending on faith. Reason sets before us an ideal of intelligibility which can never be completely attained. But if we guide our investigations by that ideal we can and do progress in the understanding of reality. What then of metaphysics ? Is there any place left for it ? Kant's answer is that metaphysics must turn itself into criticism. The business of philosophy is to understand the different parts played by reason in the separate spheres of knowledge, of conduct, and of art. But to suppose that metaphysics can by such reflexion obtain a systematic understanding of reality is a mistake. Reason is in Kant's eyes essentially systematic, and we can by philosophical reflexion see how its activity is one and yet divides itself into these three spheres or three characteristic activities. But to see that is not to see reality as a system. For reason in each of its separate activities is infinite and has an infinite task. Kant's real objection to dogmatic metaphysics is that it must necessarily circumscribe, by seeking to contain, what ought to be the independent activities of science, of conduct and of art. That these activities come from a unity and that they are all somehow concerned with one reality, and that they

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therefore may illumine one another—all this Kant might admit; but not that they should lose their living independence in an all-embracing system. Kant at any rate did not see how metaphysics in any other sense than criticism could exist without so fettering these independent activities. If Kant confines metaphysics to a criticism of reason in the wide sense of the a priori element in mental activity, it is curious that, for all he has to say as to the limits of reason in its various fields, he leaves us wjth such an ambiguous account of the nature of reason itself. He seems to have begun with a view of reason as a completely a priori activity, forming its concepts in complete isolation from experience. His account of the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories assumes that reason, being a perfect unity, will exhibit in itself a complete and sufficient list of a priori concepts. These are supposed to be arrived at by pure logic. The problem for Kant at this stage is to explain their applicability to the world of experience. But when we come to the principles of the pure understanding, it appears that the connexion between the categories and the principles is not as compelling as it is supposed to be and that the list of principles is derived from a consideration of what is involved in ordering experience in time and space. The differentiation of the forms of synthesis is partly dependent upon the nature of what is to be synthesized. In the Analytic, reason appears to be identified with the understanding. But in the Dialectic the two are distinguished. Yet in part of the Dialectic—the Antinomies—it seems to be implied that reason as distinguished from the understanding is only a drive towards the unconditioned, the forms of the unconditioned being produced by the different categories of the understanding. Yet again elsewhere in the Dialectic we are confronted with ideas of reason— God, Freedom and Immortality—which are quite distinct from anything suggested by the categories. When we come to Kant's account of the proofs of the existence of God, we find him assuming in his account of the ens

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realissimum that reason will give us unaided a complete and final account of the nature of God; it is only the fact of God's existence which it cannot settle. Then in the Appendix to the same section of the Dialectic we find reason producing the ideas which are to guide our scientific discovery. Again, when we come to Kant's account of ethics, he seems to suppose that reason produces the moral law entirely of itself with no reference to experience. This is Kant's prevailing though not his consistent view. It alternates with the view that reason informs experience as its determining principle. But how persistent the first view is can be seen in his statement in Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone that the moral ideal in its completeness could always be presented to each man by his reason alone. To read the Gospels is, according to Kant, only to learn that a man did once live according to that ideal; it does not teach us more about the moral ideal itself. There are in Kant's conception of reason in ethics two elements, which are distinguished more clearly in his late work, The Metaphysics of Morals, but are at least implicit in the Fundamental Principles—reason as law and reason as purpose. Reason as purpose sets ideals of conduct before men'; reason as law is concerned with the actions which such purposes necessarily imply. But the same fundamental distinction is apparent in the first Critique. Kant began by thinking of reason äs essentially insight into necessity. That implies the identification of reason with the understanding. But in the Dialectic reason, as that faculty which is concerned with ideals, is distinguished, as we have seen, from the understanding both in conduct and in thought. In the Critique of Judgement a role which was assigned to reason in the Appendix to the first Critique is now given to judgement, and reason is assigned definitely to the faculty of desire. Yet the account of genius and of the function of art.in expressing ideas of reason at least suggests that art is an activity of the reason. The ambiguity in Kant's account of reason is matched

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by and not unconnected with the ambiguity in his account of the imagination. We have noticed that a distinctive feature of his account of knowledge is the central part it gives to the imagination. In the details of his argument, as in the deduction of the first Critique, for example, Kant has much to say about the work of imagination and its a priori activities. In the third Critique the nature of the intelligible displays itself in an ideal harmony of the imagination and the understanding. Yet in Kant's plot, so to speak, the imagination is never given that central part am'ong the other activities of the mind which it would seem to deserve. The explanation of this is of course that Kant got his plot or his architectonic from formal logic and that he started with it. The importance of the imagination only appeared when the Transcendental Deduction was being worked out, and Kant never seems to have realized the revolutionary effects which his teaching was bound to have upon logic. The consequence is that, because Kant in the beginning of the first Critique distinguishes the understanding as the activity of the mind from intuition as the receptive element, it has sometimes been supposed that Kant identified the imagination and the understanding—a source of much misunderstanding of the Transcendental Deduction. The direction in which Kant's thought was moving is seen in the Critique of Judgement, where he identifies the powers of the mind with the understanding and the imagination—where the beautiful is universal because it arouses these two powers in their proper harmony. We should get a very different view of reason from that with which Kant begins if he had really taken seriously what that implies: that in the a priori activity of mind there are always the two elements typified by the understanding and t'lie imagination—the elements of law and of spontaneity—and if he had considered their relation to one another, not by relegating them to different spheres, but by seeing that the conflict between necessity and freedom had somehow to be reconciled within reason itself.

VI THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY To write an adequate account of the influence of Kant would be to write the history of post-Kantian philosophy. In him, as truly perhaps as in Descartes, philosophy made a new beginning. There was no side of the subject in which his influence did not work a revolution. Even those later philosophers, who most disagreed with him, had to take him into account; and most of those who came after him were influenced by one or other aspect of his teaching. But an adequate treatment of such a theme is not possible in a single chapter at the end of a book on Kant. All that can be attempted is to trace in broad outline the very different ways in which his thought affected his successors. Kant himself was, in the first Critique, curiously confident of the completeness of his system. It is clear that he did not realize how much the Critical system developed in his own hands. That it did develop we have already seen in considering the Critique of Judgement. We have also seen in the end of last chapter that on his own showing the unity of reason, of which he made so much, did not guarantee the completeness and finality of his list of a priori concepts, as he declared it ought to do. Kant's last, and unfinished, work, known as the Opus Postumum, shows that in his last years he was endeavouring, under the pressure of criticism from some of his disciples, to restate that most contentious, of his doctrines, the relation between phenomena and things in themselves. Kant's experimental method of writing makes it very rash to draw conclusions from an unfinished work, even as regards the direction in which his thought was tending. There is an exaggerated a priorism in the Opus Postumum which K

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seems to show Kant going back from the development foreshadowed in the Critique of Judgement. But whether, before he had felt satisfied with the Opus Postumum, he would have recognized that the attempt to make so much more of the content of knowledge a priori is as impossible as it seems to most readers of the Opus Postumum, we simply cannot tell. What is evident in the Opus Postumum is that Kant in his last years held on to the main positions reached in the Critiques, and was nevertheless ready to make yet another attempt to reconcile them more satisfactorily. Such an attitude is characteristic of all Kant's thought. There were certain positions he took for granted: the validity of the natural sciences, their somehow dealing with a world independent of the mind, their being nevertheless themselves dependent upon the creative constructive powers of the mind. These are the things he takes for granted about the sciences. On the other hand, he was equally clear that ethics was not a natural science, that it implied what he calls a law of freedom, and that no scientific account of the facts could explain moral obligation. Kant, as we have seen, was equally determined to defend the integrity of moral experience and the integrity of science. But that is only possible, he was convinced» by some doctrine of the limitations of the insight of science into the nature of reality. Unless he could maintain that the fact that a principle was valid in science did not show that it held of the real, he could have found no way of reconciling the determinism of science with the freedom of morality. The distinction " transcendentally ideal and empirically real," or the distinction in some form or other of phenomena and things in themselves, was vi+al to him. But he was quite capable of holding on to the necessity of that distinction without making it in itself intelligible, as he was capable of proposing various ways of explaining it. >The consequence was that Kant's system proved far more unstable than he had supposed. For even if it be regarded as in substance sound, as in the previous chapters I have tried to show it to be, there are various difficulties

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 291 in it which needed clearing up. It was always possible to suggest a way of clearing up any one of these difficulties at the cost of giving up one or other of the positions which Kant would have insisted on holding on to. Those who/came after him, trying to clear up the difficulties he had left, and not having his firm determination to hold on to each of the different fundamentals of his system, developed Kantianism along different lines into something very un-Kantian. Kant's account of the method of the natural sciences, at least, of physics, has on the whole met with general acceptance—as it was bound to do. It was obviously open to someone to deny the sharp distinction which Kant draws between constitutive and regulative principles, and to maintain that all scientific principles are regulative or experimental. That is what Pragmatism has done. But the account of scientific method given by Pragmatism is based on Kant's analysis. It was also obvious that the example given by Kant in the Critique of Judgement, in distinguishing between the principles applicable to physics and those applicable to biology, would be followed up. I have already quoted with approval a remark of Bergson's that Kant's system, as he expounded it, depended on an identification of science with physics, and was bound to be profoundly affected when the biological sciences were taken into consideration. Perhaps Kant's greatest defect was his non-appreciation of history. The century which followed his death was the century when history came into its own, and the distinctive nature of the historical sciences was bound to lead to developments in Kant's account of knowledge. But those developments may all be described as variations on a theme of Kant's. Dilthey, for example, in his description of the Geisteswissenschaften, or in all his various attempts to write a Critique of history, is certainly a Kantian. With the general acceptance of Kant's account of scientific method is bound up his doctrine of the limitations of scientific knowledge. But it is possible to accept the

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view that scientific knowledge is essentially inadequate or abstract, and yet to maintain that there is a different kind of knowledge, metaphysics, which does give us an insight into the nature of reality as a whole. Kant, it might be maintained, was quite right in criticizing the metaphysics of his predecessors. He was quite right in holding that metaphysics should not follow the method of mathematics. But he never sufficiently considered whether the moral of his own critical work did not imply that there was a method which metaphysics might follow. What Kant did, it has been argued, was to start with a pre-Critical assumption of the relation between mind and the independent world, which he did not review in the light of the conclusions of the Critical system. If he had seriously attacked that pre-Critical assumption, he could no longer have denied the possibility of metaphysical knowledge. His own method of asking what are the implications of the fact of knowledge or the principles of the possibility of experience cannot only tell us as he seems to suppose about the nature of the mind. It must imply something about the relations of the mind to reality, and, therefore, something about the nature of reality. It was along these lines that Kantianism was developed by the German idealists, sometimes called the German Romantic philosophers, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The movement started in Kant's lifetime on the lines suggested in a famous passage in a work of Jacobi's : " I must confess that this circumstance (viz. that objects make impressions on the senses) has been a stone of stumbling to me in my study of the Kantian philosophy, so that time and again I har/e been compelled to retrace my steps and to restart the Critique of Pure Reason ever anew, since I was always finding myself bewildered, in that without this presupposition J could not make entry into the system, and that with this presupposition I could not remain in it." The general moral of Kant's treatment of objectivity is that we distinguish between the subjective and the objective by principles of our thinking. Is it not incon-

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 293 sistent with that to accept a distinction between the form and the matter of knowledge, ascribing the form to the mind and the matter to independent objects ? For the matter of knowledge is sensation, and sensation is notoriously the most subjective element in knowledge. The moral drawn from this is that we should treat Kant as Berkeley treated Locke, and deny the impossible assumption of unknowable things-in-themselves. Of course, we must do justice to the element of " otherness " or " givenness " in knowledge; but we can best do that by recognizing and understanding the place of this element within knowledge itself. Fichte worked out this idea along the lines suggested by the Kantian ethics. Kant had held that in moral activity we realize, as we do not in science, the ultimate nature of the real, but had denied to such activity the nature of knowledge. But it can be argued that such a denial depends wholly on the assumption that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge we have got. Scientific knowledge, it may be freely admitted, implies a dualism of subject and object; for it presupposes the knowing and active mind over against its object, and the subject can never really be the object of knowledge. But we may in philosophical reflexion on the nature of knowledge and on the assumptions of conduct rise above th':^ dualism, and see reality as an activity which includes botii subject and object. For surely to reflect that in moral conduct we are as nowhere else in contact with the nature of the real is a reflexion about the nature of the real. Schelling, in developing the same general idea that scientific knowledge was abstract and quantitative, anc: that the business of philosophy was to rise above this abstraction and consider reality as a whole, took another road obviously suggested by Kant. As we have seen, the analysis of art in the Critique of Judgement suggests that in art the opposition between the abstract universal and the mere particular is broken down, as is the distinction between understanding and intuition, Kant had always said that we might know reality, and not only phenomena,

KANT 294 had we an intuitive understanding. But is not that exactly what art is, and are we not, therefore, to look for the truth about reality not to science but to poetry ? How this development from Kant was taken up by Coleridge and affected the Romantic movement in England is, of course, an old story. Hegel, however, was the philosopher who made much the most significant development of Kantian thought in this direction. There are still many who think that Hegel is Kant being consistent with himself, or at least making explicit what was implicit in Kant's main doctrines. Hegel, says Hutchison Stirling, in words I have already quoted, with assistance from Fichte and Schelling, made explicit the concrete universal that was implicit in Kant. Hegel, that is, began his development from Kant with logic. Kant's system had really involved a new logic, because it involved a new conception of the nature of knowledge; and the drawbacks of Kant's system, it was argued, came from his imposing the distinctions of the old logic on the living nature of the new. The distinction between the understanding and intuition which is the mark of Kant's dualism is the result of an abstract static conception of the nature of universal concepts. Once accept the logical principle which is really implied in Kant, that judgement—the act, and not the concept—is the unit of thought, then we shall see that thought is a process, implying within itself differences which are always being overcome. The reconciliations so much needed in the Kantian system are obtained in process or development. The element of abstraction or distinction of which Kant had made so much is a necessary element in all knowing, but it is an element to be overcome. Natural science, with which Kant had been most concerned, is the affair of the discursive or abstract understanding, and what Kant says about it is correct. It is not, just because of the abstractions which it makes in order to cover a wide range of experience, adequate to the nature of reality. But then neither is scientific thought intelligible in itself. A more

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 295

correct view of the nature of thought will show us that in the first place the contrasts which Kant thought to be due to the two different sources of knowledge, the mind and the independent world, are contrasts which necessarily arise within the nature of thought itself, if thought is to be thought. And ia the second place, that as they arise within the nature of thought itself, so are they in the same way reconciled. If now we remember that the transcendental unity of consciousness is, as Kant has shown, the first presupposition of knowledge, we may argue that that implies the intelligibility of the real. Abstract thinking, such as scientific thinking is, has necessarily for its object something short of the real, but if we hold to the Kantian principle that we achieve objectivity, not by going beyond ourselves, but by thinking our best, then, when our tljinking becomes really concrete, we shall apprehend concrete reality. Thought at its best will tell us what intelligibility really involves, and tell us, therefore, what is the general nature of the real. For the rational is the real, and the real is the rational. No one can^'deny fhat Hegel supplied one jgreat defect in Kant's system, which has been already noticed. Because ofTSlnsisten5e_onjthej;eajityjinjd^ ha:3^^^^^preciation of the mstorical and of development, which no_one,.lmdiad-before him. Hegel's Philosophy of Lä^jisjm,imingD.ae^advaii^ and the abstractions of Kantian ethics are really overcome i n T H e ^ ^ T ^ T " "n-'«^" l,.-,-. •... K- ""\i'-'fi iCk :>.., 'o-p' ^ /^-"""BSTthough there are elements in the thought of these three philosophers, and especially in the thought of Hegel, which are a real advance on Kantianism, and yet a natural development from it, Kant would certainly have thought that they had overcome his dualism at a price not worth paying—the price of encroaching on the independence of science. Natural philosophy is the weakest part of Hegel's work. Its faults come from the over-emphasis on unity, from the supposition that everything must be capable of deduction from a single principle. Kant held

296

KANT

on to there being something irretrievably empirical about science. Once that is granted, as was argued in the discussion on the Critique of Teleological Judgement] then the distinction between understanding and intuition can never be really overcome. Thejuuf^fyf j^pgfili^nig]]! is achieved by jhe.jJaaiMi£aiment--of'-eRe-e^-the-imtdam^ntal •thinjBj^hicljuKaJi±.took--foF"granted. The next development in German philosophy was thought of by its author as a return to Kant. Schopenhauer was in bitter opposition to Hegel, but he conceived that his own philosophy was the proper development from Kant. He accepted the contrast in Kant between science which is knowledge but only of phenomena, and action which is in contact with the real but does not know it. This opposition which the idealists sought to overcome Schopenhauer exaggerated. He gave to Kant's theory of knowledge the most subjective interpretation possible, and made the Kantian will, which is not knowledge, into a blind unconscious will, which is the real nature of the universe. That is how he, in the contrast between the world as idea and the world as will, accepted and developed the Kantian distinction between phenomena and things in themselves. All these systems are metaphysics in the sense in which Kant denied the possibility of metaphysics. Another obviously possible development of Kant is to accept the phenomenalism of the Critique of Pure Reason and abandon the metaphysical implications of the Critique of Practical Reason. That will mean accepting ^he general Kantian view that science is not able to tell us anything about the nature of reality; abandoning Kant's conception that science nevertheless forces us to ask questions about the real which science cannot answer, and proceeding to make the best of science as a knowledge of phenomena. This will, of course, involve giving up the distinctive Kantian ethics. Such a view will tend to equate ethics with what Kant called anthropology. If we add to this a recognition of the importance of historical development, we get Comte and Positivism.

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 297 In Germany, after the influence of Hegel had begun to grow less, there arose in the 'seventies of last century a widespread philosophical movement which took as its motto, " Back to Kant." It produced a great school of students of Kant, of whom perhaps Vaihinger and Adickes are the best known. This intensive study culminated in the formation of the Kantgesellschaft, and the publication of the review Kantstudien, and finally in the publication, not yet completed, of a classical edition by the Berlin Academy of all Kant's writings—his letters, and his innumerable notes and jottings, as well as the works published in his lifetime. But this " return to Kant " has not been merely antiquarian. It has produced a genuine development of Kantian philosophy, seeking to deal on Kantian lines with the new problems created by the prodigious growth of the natural sciences since Kant's time. Wilhelm Dilthey is, perhaps, its most typical representative. He accepted Kant's attitude to metaphysics and his view of the phenomenal nature of knowledge. He accepted also his insistence that ethics is not a natural science in the sense that physics is. But while maintaining the distinction between the natural sciences and the sciences of the spirit, he endeavoured to do for the latter what Kant had done for the former, and to write a critique of history. That involved him in one interesting divergence from Kant. Kant had maintained that our knowledge of the self was of the same nature as our knowledge of the outside world, with the implication that if psychology were ever to become a science it would be a quantitative science after the manner of physics. Dilthey's criticism of history involved the view that our knowledge of the self is fundamentally of a different character from our knowledge of the physical world. How fruitful a line of inquiry this may become has already been shown in the ' Gestalt' school of psychologists and in the work of Husserl. The history of Kant's influence in England has been in some ways curious. The first notable impress of Kant on English thought we have noticed already. It came through KI

298

KANT

Coleridge, and from Coleridge to Wordsworth. It was the English Romantic poets who first turned against the then reigning school of English empiricism and associationism. But it was also through Coleridge that John Stuart Mill was brought into connexion with Kant and German philosophy. The particular manner, therefore, in which Coleridge conceived Kant was of considerable historical importance. Coleridge gives a detailed estimate of Kant in the Biograf hia Literaria. " The writings of the illustrious sage of Königsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts ; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions ; the adamantine chain of the logic ; and I will venture to add (paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from reviewers and Frenchmen), the clearness and evidence of the Critique of Pure Reason, of the Judgement, of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy, and of his Religion Within the Bounds of Pure Reason, took possession of me as with a giant's hand. After fifteen years' familiarity with them, I still read those and all his other productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The few passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought (as the chapter on original apperception), and the apparent contradictions which occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations referring either to ideas, which Kant either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he considered as consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto but of the speculative interest alone. Here therefore he was constrained to commence at the point of reflexion, or natural consciousness ; while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his school) the categorical

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 299 imperative of the conscience. He had been in imminent danger of persecution during the reign of the late King of Prussia, that strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden superstition : and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his old age, to act over again the fortunes and hair-bre'adth escapes of Wolf. The expulsion of the first among Kant's disciples, who attempted to complete his system, from the University of Jena, with the confiscation and prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the Courts of Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof that the venerable old man's caution was not groundless. In spite therefore of his own declarations, I could never believe that it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing-initself, than his mere words express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole plastic power to the form of the intellect, leaving for the external cause, for the materiale of our sensations, a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable." l It should be further noted that a page or two later Coleridge says : " I n Schelling's Natur •— Philosophie, and the System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, I first found a general coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself." Coleridge did, of course, get a great deal from Kant. The celebrated lines : " O lady ! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live," have an obvious relation to " Reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own." But it is equally obvious that .-he radically misunderstood Kant. How absurd are his grounds for attributing an esoteric meaning to Kant's remarks can be seen by considering the chronology. Kant only came into conflict with the Government, and could only have been in any danger of doing so after the death of Frederick the Great—that is, 1

Op. Cit„ Chapter lx.

3oo

KANT

after he had written all his important works except the last of those to which Coleridge refers. Coleridge's whole bent of mind was very unlike that of Kant. There is no doubt an element in Kant's thought which might be described as romantic, but there is almost more unmistakably an empirical, scientific, cautious element, which Coleridge completely ignored. No one would suppose from reading Coleridge's account of Kant that Kant ever denied the possibility of metaphysics. Further, the consequence of using Kant as a stick with which to beat the utilitarian dogs was that all Kant's very real affiliations with Locke and Hume were disregarded. In this way, the scientists in England, instead of appreciating Kant, were very effectively warned off him. An amusing illustration of the perverted view of Kant produced by Coleridge's championship of him will be found in the attack on Coleridge by Peacock in Melincourt, which was published in 1818. In a note to the chapter in which this occurs, Peacock says : " The reader who is desirous of elucidating the mysteries of the words and phrases marked in italics in this chapter may consult the German works of Professor Kant, or Professor Born's Latin translation of them, or M. Villar's Philosophie de Kant, ou Principes Fondamentaux de la Philosophie Transcendental, or the first article of the second number of the Edinburgh Review, etc." Coleridge is introduced«as " the poeticopolitical, rhapsodicoprosaical, deisidaemoniacoparadoxographical, pseudolatreiological, transcendental meteorosophist, Moley Mystic, Esquire of Cimmerian Lodge. This gentleman's Christian name, according to his own account, was improperly spelt with an " e," and was, in truth, nothing more nor less than : ' That Moly Which Hermes erst to wise Ulysses gave,' and which was, in the mind of Homer, a pure anticipated cognition of the system of Kantian metaphysics, or grand

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 301 transcendental science of the luminous obscure ; for it had a dark root, which was mystery ; and a whiteflower,which was abstract truth: it was called Moly by the gods, who then Ttept it to themselves ; and was difficult to be dug up by mortal man, having, in fact, lain perdu in subterranean darkness till the immortal Kant dug for it under the stone of doubt, and produced it to the astonished world as the root of human science." 1 " Cimmerian Lodge " is, of course, unfair to Coleridge, but the caricature can be recognized. The mystic's Kant, however, has no recognizable relation to Kant at all. If there was one thing which Kant hated it was what he called Schwärmerei, and Coleridge was certainly a Schwärmer, if a very great one. Kant's whole temper of mind was really nearer that of the caricaturist than of the caricatured. But it was Coleridge's Kant that influenced John Stuart Mill and formed his opinion of German philosophy. Mill says in his Autobiography, writing of the year 1829, that the influence of European thought came to him " from the writings of Coleridge, which I had begun to read with interest even before the change in my opinions ; from, the Coleridgians with whom I was in personal intercourse; from what I had read of Goethe, from Carlyle's early articles in the Edinburgh and Frazer Reviews." He had first-hand acquaintance with the French philosophical writers of the eighteenth century, but only second-hand acquaintance with German philosophy, and he makes no distinction, or hardly any, between Kant and his successors. It was not till well on in the century that Kant began to be systematically studied in England. Comte, writing to Mill in 1843, remarks : " All that I hear of German philosophy from the best informed people rather discourages me from the project I had told you of that I would make a serious attempt to acquire some special knowledge of it in order to grasp its points of contact with my own philosophy " ; and he asks Mill to advise him on the matter. Mill replied that he thought 1

Op. Cit., Chapter xxxi., " Cimmerian Lodge."

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KANT

German philosophy had done some good, but was on the whole a reactionary force, and says: " I have no right to give you a very decided opinion on German philosophy, having never read Kant or Hegel or any other of the chiefs of that school, which I only know by its English and French interpreters. This philosophy has been useful to me. It has corrected what was too analytical in my mind, nourished as that was by Bentham and the French philosophers of the eighteenth century. Add to that its criticism of the negative school, and especially a real, though very incomplete, sense of historical laws and of the correlation of different states of men and of society." He dissuades Comte from wasting his time over German philosophy, though he applauds his intention of learning German, for that will enable him to read Goethe. It was not till the second half of the century that there was much scholarly study of Kant in England, and then it came as part of the influence of Hegel. The beginning of the English version of what is sometimes called absolute idealism was the publication in 1865 of Hutchison Stirling's The Secret of Hegel. He followed that up in 1881 by a Textbook on Kant. Green and Caird were Hegelians rather than Kantians, but both great students of Kant, Caird especially. Both looked in Kant for an answer to the reigning associationist philosophy of their time, and stressed in Kant those elements furthest removed from the empirical. Kant was, therefore, in English academic philosophy, seen, at first at least, through Hegel. His philosophy was presented by those who saw in Hegel the true development of Kantianism. Further, English idealism was greatly influenced by Berkeley, and has always tended to regard Kant's teaching as an elaboration of Berkeley, or at least as involving the same fundamental basis. This appears when it is suggested as it was by Green and Caird that if only Berkeley had said " Esse est intelligi," instead of " Esse est percipi," he would have anticipated Kant. Also, the English idealism of the nineteenth century was

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 303 in the first instance a criticism of English empiricism. That empiricism had derived from Hume a doctrine that the original data of knowledge were atomic sense data. The idealists tended to regard the Kantian doctrine of the synthetic activity of the mind as an answer to the problem presented by Hume's atomism; and to suppose, therefore, that Kant thought that the given element in knowledge is a mere chaos of unrelated sense data, and that everything else was contributed by the mind. It is easy to see how this interpretation lends itself to a view that Kant was in principle a subjective idealist like Berkeley. The consequence of this has been that it has almost been taken for granted that if we give up epistemological idealism we must suppose that the philosophy of Kant, as well as that of Berkeley, was built upon a fundamental error. That this interpretation of Kant is mistaken, and that to the main purport of what Kant has to say the dispute between epistemological idealism and realism is irrelevant, it has been the aim of this volume to show. This is not to say that the subjectivist interpretations of Kant have not some foundation. He stands for the doctrine that the active mind of man so partakes in his knowing, as well as in his other activities, that his knowing can never be described as pure passionless contemplation, but bears the marks of his activity upon it. The primacy of the practical reason is Kant's most essential doctrine. He will have nothing to do with reality except in terms of our action upon it. He gives up dogmatic metaphysics, not really because his principles enable him to say nothing about the nature of the real (they enable him to say a great deal about it), but because they do not enable him to answer the questions in which he is really interested. He identifies metaphysics with the knowledge of the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will, and the existence of God, three questions which are dictated by his practical or moral interests. He wants to know in order that he may act better, not to act in order that he may

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know better. For him the aim of life and, therefore, of philosophy, is action and not contemplation. This does not mean that Kant has ever found favour with the Pragmatists, or is ever likely to do so. For he believed intensely in the creative powers of reason in the separate spheres of science, of morality, and of art. He denied knowledge to make room for faith in his system as a whole, but also to make room for reason in these distinct spheres. His system as a whole is practical because his logic, his ethical theory, and his aesthetics are rationalistic. This is the explanation of the remarkable way in which parts of his system have been admired and followed by those who would reject his most essential doctrine. Mr. C. R. Morris has shown in a recent book how Kant's analysis of modern scientific method has inspired modern idealistic logic, especially as represented by F. H. Bradley. Professor Alexander, whose main philosophical position is largely based on an attempt to reverse Kant's " Copernican revolution," has called Kant the greatest mind in aesthetics, and talks of the magnificent conception of a kingdom of ends ; and Croce, whose metaphysical temper is far removed from that of Kant's, speaks with warm admiration of Kant's ethical theory. Many more witnesses might be quoted to the same effect. VWhile, therefore, Kant must always influence profoundly those who take seriously either science or morality or art, he is not the philosopher for those who regard knowledge or contemplation as the end of action. They will have little concern with the problems which cost Kant so ,much labour, and they will concern themselves with questions which he would not have thought worth answering. When men give up the practical world in despair, or at least think it no field for the exercise of reason, and regard philosophical contemplation as a refuge from the struggle with a disillusioning world, äs men have so often done, and will no doubt continue to do, they will have no use for Kant. Kant's problems came from his profound faith in men's activities, in the progress of science, and the reality of

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 305 moral freedom. He saw the two activities he most believed in apparently at war with one another, and his /tireless concern to preserve the independence and integrity of both constitutes and pervades his system. So long as men share his faith and his concern, his philosophy is bound to be of influence. --*

'

,. "1

INDEX A PRIORI, elements in experience, 28 ; distinction among a priori principles, 30. ; three characteristic types of a priori judgements, 58, 63 ; temporal suggestion unfortunate, 61 ; its distinctive mark, 58, 63 ; knowledge, 62 ; its later meaning, 63 ; concepts, 8 0 - 1 , 84, 121, 2 8 9 ; those concepts underlying empirical knowledge, 92 ; element in all judging, 84, 269 ; categories, 85 ; space and time given, 86, 101, 1 1 7 ; motion outside range of, 112 ; laws prescribed to experience, 113 ; principles universal and necessary, 115 ; law of alterations, 125 ; element in science and conduct emphasized b y Kant, 166-8 ; purpose of reason, 188 ; principles of aesthetic judgement, 219 ; pleasure connected with a priori principles, 228-9 ; their successful use in t h e sciences, 272 ; a priorism exaggerated in Opus Postumum, 289 Absolute, the, 137 Action, see Conduct Actuality, 122, 132 Adickes, 297 .(Esthetic, 80, 216. (And see A r t ; Beautiful; and Kant—Works —Critique of Judgement.) Alexander, Prof., cited, 304 Alteration, 74, 125, 226, 262 American Revolution, 9 Anthropology, 6, 166, 281, 296 Antinomies, 75, 76, 137, 140, 143 ff., 281 Appearance, 68, 151 Apperception, unity of, 96, 123, 138, 148 ; empirical, 100, 105 ; a time process over against a spatial intuition, 116 Aristotle, 187, 192, 266 Art, universal of, 235 ; as symbol of morality, 235 ; comparison

Art—continued of works of, 251 ; freedom its characteristic, 253 ; an activity of the reason, 287 ; synthesis effected in, 293 " As if," doctrine of, 160-1, 210 Atheism, 107 Atomism, 64-5, 120, 303 Attention, acts of, 97 Aufklärung, 9-10 Autonomy, see under Will

BAUMGARTEN,

7,

155,

159,

204,

216-17 ; t n e Metaphysica 1723 Beauties of nature, 238, 245-6 Beautiful, t h e : nature of, 234 ; definition of, 240 ; distinguished from the agreeable, 168, 238, 239-40, 242 ; from the true and the good, 235 ; from the sublime, 238, 250-1 ; judgements of, 216, 2 3 3 ; elicits harmony of cognitive powers, 245 ; symbol of the good, 254 ; universal, 288 Behaviourism, 120 Bentham, 302 Bergson, 131, 236, 256, 291 Berkeley, 14, 38, 52-5, 83, 118, 132, 293, 302, 303 ; K a n t ' s attitude to, 15 Biology, 236, 291 Bradley, F . H., 304 Bridges, Robert, 236

CAIRD,

302

Cassirer, 29, 69 Categories: Metaphysical Deduction of, 79-87, 286; their schematization, 85, 224 ; Kant's two views of their classification, 8 6 - 7 ; lists of, 87 ; Transcendental Deduction of, 87-8, 9 1 , 95. I O 3 . XI4> 2 " 8 ; implied in intuition, 9 3 ; their applica-

3o8

INDEX

Categories—continued bility, 94, 104, 122-3, J 37 ; a ' l synthesis subject to, 104 ; of modality, 122, 132 ; of relation, 122, 129 ; functions of unity, 156 ; all thinking done according to, 224-5 I means and end, 259 ; their limitations, 284 Causation: Baumgarten's account of, 20 ; Hume's problem of, 90, 106, 276 ; Kant's account of, 24, 91, 126-9 ; conception of, as a postulate, 115 ; not observable in experience, 122'; the intuition corresponding to concept of, 125 ; its concern with the particular, 128 ; never understood, 129 ; contradictory propositions regarding, 145, 151; freedom in relation to, 152-4 ; purposive, 154 ; different kinds °f< 2 35 ; regulative principles of, 260, 262 ; its implications, 262 Cause: efficient, 153 ; final, 256 Change, see Alteration Chemistry, 130-1 Church and State, 213-14 Coleridge, 294, 298-301 Collenbusch, Dr., quoted, 191 Comte, 296, 301-2 Concepts: nature of, 121, 123, 224, 244 ; relativity of concepts of understanding, 82, 250; dependent on spontaneity of thought, 84 ; a priori, 80-1, 84, 121, 2 8 9 ; not generated by reason, 143 Conduct: difference between moral and immoral, 193 ; assumption in moral, 197; its cooperative character, 208, 210 ; reason in, 282 ; Kant's supreme interest in, 303-4 Connectedness, see Relation Contradiction, principle of, 17-19, 22, 180 Contradictory propositions, pairs of, 144 ff. Copernicus, 50-1 Cosmogony, 23 Cosmology, 22, 158-60 Counting, 98-9, 105, 122 Criticism, philosophy described as, 41-2 Croce, 304 Crusius, 35

DARWIN,

259

Definitions, 26 Descartes, 14, 25, 38, 54, 131, 132, 262, 289 Determinism and freedom problem, 151-2, 290. (And see Freedom) Dilthey, Wilhelm, 291, 297 Dualism, 106, 199-200, 293 ; Pauline account of, 196 Duty, essential connexion between freedom and, 164 ; conflict between inclination and, 171, 190, 194-5, 207, 282 ; result of action in accordance with, 180 ; as a formal identity, 181 ; right of resistance to law conceived as, 186-7 ; ethical, contrasted with legal, 189-90. (And see Obligation) EMPIRICAL, the, in science,

270,

296 Empiricism, principle of, 147-8 ; its culmination in Hume, 14 ; English, 303 ; Kant's attitude to, 15-16, 23-4 ; his assumptions from empiricists, 66, 67 ; empirical realism, 68, 279, 290 ; empiricists' difficulties with experience, 29 ; their ectypal theory, 52 ; their account of judgements, 58, 6 0 ; their atomism, 63-5 Ends, Kant's kingdom of, 178, 208, 210, 213, 304 Enjoyment of our own activity, 113-14 Epiphenomenalism, 120 Eternity, 156 E t h i c s : Kant's view of, 164-5, 290 ; empirical and rational part of, distinguished, 166-7, 188 ; scope of, 189 ; law of freedom implied in, 290 ; not a natural science, 281, 290, 297 Euler, 69 Evil, 211 Experience: physics and, 2 6 ; metaphysics and, 26 ; a priori elements in, 28, 62, 106; empiricists' difficulties with, 29 ; a joint product, 50 ; beginning of knowledge, 53, 62 ; relation between present and possible, 55 ; in time, 55, 120 ; successive, 124 ; the matter of.

INDEX Experience—continued 132 ; form and matter of, distinguished, 63, 68 ; Hume's account of, 64 ; private and public, 76 ; objectivity necessarily in, 92, 104, 1 1 7 ; condition of the' possibility of, 104, 138 ; K a n t ' s prescription of a priori laws to, 113 ; how the pategories are applied to, 122, 137 ; causation not observable in, 122; analogies of, 129; different plans in, 131 ; its unity, how obtained, 133 ; questions unanswerable by, 135 ; limitations of, 2 6 9 ; science prescribing to, 272 ; systematizing of, 274 ; informed by reason, 287 FAITH : knowledge denied to makeroom for, 161, 197, 3 0 4 ; induced by the moral law, 204 ; " church faith," 205 ; shown in action, 209-10, 284 ; doctrine of justification by, 212 ; science equally with conduct dependent on, 285 Fichte, 267, 292-3 Form, 242-3, 246, 270, 284 Frederick the Great, 9, 299 Frederick William I I , 9, 11-12 F r e e d o m : concept of, 117 ; contradictory propositions regarding, 145 ; problem of causality in relation to, 131, 151-4 ; its conflict with necessity, 288, 290 ; its compatibility with categorical imperative incomprehensible, 199 ; one of three ideas proper t o metaphysics, 140 ; denied b y the empiricist, 148 ; Rousseau's deduction from, of law, 164 ; principle of reciprocal, 183-4, *88, l92 '• its dangers, 187 ; principle of inner, 190; identification of, with autonomy, 193-4 '• u s e s 0 1 . i n moral and in immoral Conduct, 193, 211 ; its relation to the moral law, 194-5 '• problem of, in relation to art, 235 ; world of, contrasted with world of nature, 255 ; law of, implied in ethics, 290. {And see under Will) French Revolution, 9

G E N I U S , 251

309 ff.

Geometry, 25-6, 47, 63, 88, 112, 116 God: idea of, 140 ; Kant's early views as to existence of, 25 ; his physico-theological proof, 1 5 7 ; contradictory propositions regarding, 145-7 '< Baumgarten's account of, 22, 1 5 5 ; existence of, unprovable by speculative reason, 155, 287 ; the real issue in all proofs of existence of, 159 / assumption of, 206 ; doctrine of grace of, 212-13 Goethe, 37, 237-8, 302 Goodness, 19, 164-5, 169-70 Government, 184 ff. Green, T. H., 302 ; cited, 186 H A P P I N E S S , 174

Hegel, 157,' 266-7, 2 7 ° . 2 9 2 '• quoted, 181 ; his development of Kantian thought, 294-6 Herz, Marcus, Kant's letters to, 31-6, 89, 215 Hobbes, 186, 209 H u m a n personality an end in itself, 175-6, 184, 199, 263 Hume, 38 ; his influence on Kant, 5, 14, 15, 27, 28, 3 0 0 ; his atomism, 15, 64, 84, 120, 303 ; his account of judgement, 60 ; the Treatise, 64-5 ; his confusion as to space and time, 77 ; his view of general terms, 83 ; his problem of causation, 52, 58, 90, 106, 126, 129, 276 ; K a n t ' s answer to, 127 ; his attitude to imagination, 95, 275 ; his confusion over series of impressions, 109-10 ; his account of reason, 173, 280 Husserl, 297 IDEALISM—of

Descartes, 52 ;

of

Berkeley, 52, 5 3 ; of Locke, 53,; Kant's refutation of, 51, 53 ff., 119, 124, 132; transcendental, 68, 148-50, 279, 290 ; subjective, 74 ; absolute, 302 ; epistemological, 303 I d e a s : doctrine of innate, 61-2 ; Platonic, 139 ; cosmological, 144 ; association of, distinguished from judgement, 95, 239, 244, 278 ; «sthetic, 252-3

3io

INDEX

Imagination: its p a r t in knowledge, 64, 244, 2 8 8 ; in perception of beauty, 91, 244, 288 ; distinction between j udging a nd, 84 ; work of, in intuitions, 95 ; transcendental synthesis of, 9 6 97. I O 3 . I 2 3 . x 33'. reproductive, 103 ; governed by rules or concepts, 108; included in inner sense, 112, 1 1 5 ; t h e productive, 112 ; its important part in thinking, 225-6 ; in scientific discoveries, 230, 2 7 5 ; apprehension of forms in, 233 ; conflict of, with reason, 248-9 ; its relation to the beautiful and the sublime distinguished, 250 ; in genius, 253 ; its relation to the understanding, 275, 288 ; organization of, 2 7 6 ; Kant's ambiguous account of, 288 Immortality, 140, 143, 303 Imperative: categorical, 173, 175176, 178,189; Kant's deduction of, 1 9 3 ; hypothetical, 172, 2 73. *93 I assertorial, 174 Individual, the, 263. (And see Human) Individuality, 256 Inference, 139 Infinity: representation of, impossible, 77 ; reason concerned with, 137 ; assumptions as to, 138; regressive series, 145, 148-9 ; a transcendental predicate, 156 ; its implications in judgements and actions, 198 Inner sense, Kant's doctrine of, 96 ff., 11 iff,.; his confusion between inner and outer experience, 73-4, 117, 120; our enjoyment of our own activity, 113-14 ; includes imagination, 115 ; controlled by understanding, 115 Intelligibility 29, 230-3, 243, 265-6, 268, 285, 295 Introspection, 130 Intuition: space and time as forms of, 30, 86, 109, 277 ; concepts complementary to, 49, 8 0 ; distinguished from reason, 61 ; always of a manifold, 65, 109 ; source of, 6 7 ; understanding distinguished from, 67, 72, 76, 77, 79. 91, 93. 94- 288, 294, 296 ; distinction between thinking

Intuition—continued and, a t every stage, 107 ff., 118 ; appearances given in, independently of functions of the understanding, 90 ; idealist view of, 74 ; relation between judgements and, 89 ; imagination's p a r t in, 95 ; clearness in, without a concept, 108 ; basis of K a n t ' s phenomenalism, 114 ; subjective conditions of, 11415 ; axioms of, 129 ; no meaning in substance except in reference to, 141 ; only a receptivity, 149; union of, with understanding, 268-9 JACOBI, 14,

292

J u d g e m e n t : nature of, 9 5 ; analysis and synthesis involved in, 55. °5 ; principles of, 82 ; a priori element in, 84, 2 2 4 ; relation between intuitions and, 8 9 ; association of ideas distinguished from, 95, 239, 244, 278 ; as the unit of thought, n o , 294 ; concept a rule in, 121, 1 2 3 ; possible to make, about ourselves, 130; the special work of t h e u n d e r standing, 139 ; implications of, 139-40 ; its part in regard t o moral laws, 168 ; aesthetic j u d g e m e n t : a priori principles of, 2 1 9 ; a middle term between understanding and reason, 221-2 ; its unteachability, 223 ; its nature, 233 ; in relation to the sublime, 235, 2 3 8 ; not cognitive, 239 ; its universality, 239 ff. ; disinterested, 240 ; individual, 240-1 ; use of imagination in, 244 ff.; its relation to the ideas of reason, 249-51 ; moral judgement : its relation to ethics, 189 ; practical reason operative in, 192 ; its nature, 194-5 .' reflective and determinant judgement, 224-5, 228, 234, 257, 263 ; inductive element in, 225 KANT, I m m a n u e l : his birth, family and upbringing, 1-2 ; at Königsberg University, 2-3 ; tutor in E . Prussia, 4 ; his

INDEX Kant—continued Doctorate at Königsberg, 4 ; his lectures, 4, 6-8, 25, 39, 41-2 ; " not philosophy, but how to philosophize," 8, 4 2 ; last course (1796), 13 ; assistant librarian (1765), 5 ; Professor of Logic and Metaphysics (1770), 5 ; publications (1781-1790), 5, 38 ; influences on, 14-15 ; social distractions, 6 ; opportunities of artistic appreciation, 237; his daily regime, 9 ; ill-health, 9, 13 ; his death (1804), 13 Estimates of, 5, 300 ; Vorländer's, 6 ; Herder's, 8 ; his social gifts, 6 ; a reader, 6, 9; a conversationalist, 9 ; his political theory, 9 ; his piecemeal methods, 61 ; his problem of reconciliation (philosophies of Leibniz and Newton), 15-16 ; efforts at reconciliation of science and morality, 17; his great contribution to understanding of moral questions, 200; his imagination, 238; romanticism, 238 ; vision of beauty, 238 ; his paradoxes, 253; his non-appreciation of history, 291; inconsistencies involved in. his philosophy, 2 9 0 - 2 ; development of his system, 289 ; his system unfinished, 2 6 6 ; his attitude to English scientists, 300; influence of his philosophy, 289 ff. Works of; Anthropology (1798), 107, 162 Conception of Negative Quantity in NaturalKnowledge. On the, 27 Conflict of the Faculties', The (1798), 12 Conflict of the Good Principle with the Evil, On the, 10

Critique of Judgement (1790), 5. 9 i . 93. 130. 131, 154, 168, 287, 289, 291 ; growth of the idea of, 215-18 ; two Introductions, 219, 226, 257 ; Critique of Esthetic Judgement, 236-55, 257; Appendix : The Critique

3"

Kant—continued of Teleological Judgement, 219, 231, 255 ff., 265, 296; its effort to reconcile dualism, 200, 288, 293 ; its place in the critical philosophy, 215, 218 Critique of Practical Reason (1787), 5,156,162,166 ff., 2I 7» 235 ; contradiction in, 200—3 Critique of Pure Reason (1781), 5 ; first mention of its plan, 32, 36 ; its composition, 37, 40, 88 ; its writing, 36, 40 ; its style and method, 374 3 ; its difficulties, 41, 43 ; its alternative arguments, 41-3 ; pre-Critical elements in, 67, 79 ; the Prefaces, 43, 57, 87, 137, 231, 250 ; Introduction, 5 7 - 6 6 ; its ambiguities, 61-6 ; the ^Esthetic, 6 6 79; its inconsistency with T r a n s c e n d e n t a l Deduction, 71-2 ; Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories, 79-87, 286 (and see Categories) : Transcendental Deduction, 87-8, 91, 95, 103, 114, 288; Prof. Kemp Smith's view examined, 108, i i o - n ; Analytic of Principles, 86, 121-35, 286; lists of judgements, 8 7 ; of principles, 8 7 ^ Second Analogy, 91=; thtf Dialectic, 104, 136 ff., 155 ff., 286-7 ; Appendix, 287; the Antinomies, 235, 286 ; doctrine of " as if," 160-1 ; its account of Reason, 190, 198; the Interest of Reason in these Conflicts, 260 ; second edition (17S7), 5. 26, 41, 43, 75, i n , 117, 119, 124» 128, 140, 145 ; reasons for changes in this edition, 87, 1 rg ; note on meaning of " aesthetic " quoted, 216

INDEX

312

Kant—continued Dreams of a Ghost-seer . . . (1766), 28 Early dissertations, 4; Berlin Prize Essay, 272 Enquiry into the Certainty of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals, (1764), 26 Everlasting Peace, 12 Failure of all Philosophical Attempts at a Theodicy, On the, 10 False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, The, 24, 27 Form and Principles of the Sensible and of the Intelligible World, Dissertation on the (1770), 28, 29, 78 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), 5. 162, 166 ff., 190-4, 287 General Natural History . . . (1755). 4- 23 Metaphysic of Morals (1797), 12-13, l 6 z » 287 ; first part, 183-8 ; second part, 188 ff. ; difference in their teaching, 191-2 Metaphysical First Principles of the Natural Sciences (1786), 5, 72, 87, 129, 130

Monadologia Physica, 23 Only Possible Proof of the Existence of God, The (1762), 24, 25 Opus Postumum, 56, 289290

Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic, 5 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793), 1 0 - i r , 162, 203 ff., 287 Supposed Right to tell a Lie, On the, 187 Thoughts on the True Conservation of Living Forces, ..23 Über Philosophie überhaupt, 229

Knowledge: two kinds of pure, 30 ; archetypal and ectypal, 34, 52 ; contrast between opinion

Knowledge—continued and, 46, 274-5 : compound, nature of, 49, 62, 66, 105, 132, 138, 145, 293 ; a priori, 50, 62 ; a priori concepts underlying empirical, 92 ; beginning in experience, 53, 62 ; perception distinguished from, 244 ; always in time, 55, 56, 64 ; time and space involved in, 113 ; synthesis involved in, 56, 105, 145 ; none without imagination, 64, 244, 288 ; all, pervaded b y activity of the mind, 77 ; of ourselves, 96, 111-13 ; an objective condition of, 99 ; possible only by acting, 113 ; contrast between acting and, 284 ; limited nature of, 135, 284, 291 ; part played in, b y reason, 136 ; denial of, to make room for faith, 161, 197, 304 ; aesthetic judgement contributes nothing to, 239 ; equated with science, 274 ; development in Kant's account of, 291 Knutzen, Martin, 3 Königsberg University, 2-3 LAMBERT, 31,

73

Laplace, 23 Law, external: its purpose, 183-4 '< K a n t ' s respect for, 9, 12, 185-6, 192 Law, moral and universal: distinguished from practical rules, 168 ; categorical imperative in conformity with, 175 ; selfimposed, 177-80, 193 ; a general law of freedom, 183, 290 ; external law an inadequate expression of, 186-7 ; nature of, 204 ; the will's concern with, 210, 282 ; produced by reason, 287 Law, natural, distinguished from positive law, 183 Laws, empirical, 226-8, 257 League of Nations, principle of, in K a n t ' s work, 12 Leibniz, 14, 52, 200, 201, 229 ; New Essays on the Human Understanding, 15, 29, 69 ; imperfectly known in eighteenth century, 15 ; his account of space and time, 69-70 ; issue between Newton and, 15, 30 ;

INDEX Leibniz—continued Kant's rediscovery of, 5 ; his influence on Kant, 29 ff. ; K a n t ' s answer to, 78, 107 Liberty, see Freedom Lisbon earthquake (1755), 5, 25 Locke, 14, 61, 83, 118, 293, 3 0 0 ; his fundamental position, 53 ; Kant's attitude to, 15 ; K a n t contrasted with, 54-6 Logic, Kant's stages in, 81, 224 Logic, " g e n e r a l " or formal: Kant's use of, 43, 139, 288 ; his divergences from, 87 ; its completeness, 46, 81, 84-6, 273 ; its concern, 46, 272 ; distinguished from transcendental logic, 81 ; insufficiency of its distinctions, 121 ; a priori concepts supplied by, 286 Logic, transcendental, involved in Kant's system, 79 ff., 294 ; its concern, 80-2, 85 ; distinguished from aesthetic, 8 0 ; from general logic, 85, 223 MALEBRANCHE, 35

Mathematics: distinguished from physics, 26 ; from metaphysics, 3°. 35. 69-71, 292 ; as a science, 46-7 ; the analytical and synthetic in, 57-8 ; its universality. 63 ; its concern, 272 ; its processes a guide to observation, 274 ; the mathematically sublime, 247-50 Means and end, 264 Mechanism, principle of, 260-5 : of nature, 200 Memory, 84 Metaphysics : its three ideas, 140 ; content of, for Kant, 303 ; his rebuttal of dogmatic, 136, 141143, 285, 292 Mill, J. S., 298, 301 Miracles, 19-21 Monads, 21 Moral action, see Conduct Moral choice, nature o £ 281-2 Moral law, see Law, moral Moral philosophy, clear of the empirical, 167-8 ; transition from, to the Metaphysic of Morals, 171 ; Kant's 'view of, 165 ; autonomy his supreme principle in, 188, 193 Moral pleasure, 190

313

Moral purpose, 34, 188 Morality: the transcendental implied in, 28-9 ; its conflict with science, 16, 141 ; efforts to reconcile, with science, 16-17 ; practical reason in, 45 ; independent of the speculative reason, 140-1, 164-5 ; rational knowledge of, distinguished from philosophical, 169; autonomy of the will the supreme principle of, 169, 178, 255 ; metaphysic of, 171 ; its relation to religion, 2 0 5 - 6 ; art as a symbol of, 235 Motion, 97, 112, 116, 125, 126, 128 Music, 237, 268, 270-1 N A T U R E : argument from design in, 25, 157-8, 269 ; all happenings in accordance with laws of, 145, 151 ; beauties of, 238, 2 4 5 - 6 ; concept of'final cause applied to, 256 ; unity of, in its empirical laws, 257 ; purposiveness of, 227-9, 233, 265 Necessity, 122, 132, 156. (And see Determinism, Freedom and Obligation) Newton, 3, 5, 259 ; his account of space and time, 69, 71 ; issue between Leibniz and, 15, 30 ; Kent's attitude to, 15, 16, 23-4; Kant's comparison of Rousseau with, 163 Noumena, 135 OBJECTIVITY,

principle of,

118,

157. 179 Obligation: distinguished from inclination, 168-9, 171. 194-5. 207 ; perfect and imperfect, 189, 190, 192 ; inexplicable by science, 281, 290. (And see Duty) Ontology, 17, 134; ontological proof of God's existence, 25, 157-9 Organism, 258-9, 264-5 Paintings, Kant's lack of appreciation of, 237 Paralogisms, 139 Passivity and spontaneity, distinction between, 76, 79 Peacock, 300 Perception, anticipations of, 129

314

INDEX

Perfection, transcendental, 19-20 Phenomena, relation between things in themselves and, 289-90 Phenomenalism, 119-20, 280, 296 Physics: distinguished from mathematics, 26 ; as a science, 46, 48 ; first principles of, 123, 129, 131, 291 ; Kant's identification of science with, 130, 236, 272 Plato, 35, 46, 83, 139, 266, 274 ; Kant's possible version of t h e cave simile, 282 Pleasure: connected with a priori m principles, 228-9; tne apprehension of forms, 2 3 3 ; nature of, 234, 239 ; its position in aesthetic judgements, 2 4 2 ; negative form of, 245-6 ; moral, 190 Poetry, 237, 238, 294 Positivism, 296 Possibility, 122, 132 Postulates, 129, 130 Pragmatism, 115, 130, 291 Principles: constitutive, 129, 133, 138, 291 ; regulative, 129, 133, 138, 228-9, 291 Process, reality and nature of, 295 Psychology, 22, 139, 141-2, 297 Purposiveness, 227-9, 233, 242, 246, 263, 265 QUALITY and quantity, categories of, 122

Questions, unanswerable, 135 RATIONAL : meanings of the term, 173 ; nature of, 253-4 ; identified with the real, 295 ; rational nature an end in itself, 175-6, 184. (And see Reason) Rationalism, 10, 14, 58, 67 Rationalization, 198 Reality: nature of, 132; confused with perfection, 158-9 ; of the intelligible world, 198-9 ; progress in understanding of, 285 ; subject and object included in, 293; identified with the rational, 295 Reason, Kant's differentiation in meaning of, 136-7, 139, 156, 188, 222, 286-9 Reason, practical: K a n t ' s meaning of, 166; its primacy over the theoretical, 107, 3 0 3 ; its

Reason—continued principles, 137-8 ; understanding distinguished from, 137, 156, 286, 287; its concerns, 137. 139, 143. 18°. J 9 6 ; its ideals, 139-40, 281, 285 ; faculty of the infinite, 139, 1 9 0 ; relation between the speculative reason and, 141 ff.; results of its application to synthesis, 144; two conceptions of its task, 155 ; self-legislation, 156 ; faith identified with, 161 ; purposes willed by, 172, 189 ; its activities, 192, 285 ; creative, 182 ; middle term between understanding and, 221-2 ; its relation to aesthetic judgement, 235-6. 249-51 ; conflict of imagination with, 2 4 8 - 9 ; its rigid rules, 254 ; as law and as purpose, 287 ; moral law produced by, 282, 2 8 7 ; experience informed by, 2 8 7 ; its unity, 139-40, 289 Reason, speculative, Baumgarten's principle of sufficient, 1 7 - 2 0 ; systematic, 43 ; its relation t o science, 45, 156 ; a priori exercise of, 61 ; distinguished from intuition, 61 ; relation between the practical reason and, 141 ff. ; assigned to the faculty of desire, 287 ; Hume's view of, 173 Reciprocity, 129, 130 Reinhold, Kant's letter? to, quoted, 217-18 Relation, 119, 122, 129, 134 Relativity, theory of, 70, 75 Religion: K a n t ' s attitude to, 2, 203 ff. ; his philosophy of, 220 ; Newtonian principles in conflict with, 16 ; independent of speculative reason, 140; distinguishing mark of false, 205, 212 ; conversion, 211-13 Right, doctrine of, 183-8 Rights, public, 184-6 Romantic movement *— in Germany, 5, 15, 292; in England,' 294, 298 Rousseau, 5, 17, 184, 237 ; his influence on Kant, 162-4 SCHELLING, 267, 292-3 Schematism of the Pure Concepts of t h e Understanding, 118,

INDEX Schematism—continued 121-3, 134 ; schematization of the categories, 85, 224 ; without a concept, 245 Schiller, 237-8 Schopenhauer, 118, 296 Sciences, historical, 131, 291 Sciences, physical, K a n t ' s interest in, 3, 2 9 0 ; his attitude to, 290, 294 ; principles and methods underlying, 16-17, 24> 8 6 ; their conflict with morality, 16-17, I 4 I '• metaphysics not yet " on the sure p a t h of," 27, 44-5. 57 ; a s model for metaphysics, 59, 272, 281 ; based on a priori principles, 4 6 ; distinctive character of, 46; methods of, 47-8, 291 ; the presupposition of, 58 ; nature of judgements of, 126 ; Kant's identification of, with physics, 130, 236, 272 ; reason in relation to, 156, 281 ; generalizations of genius in, 225, 2 3 0 ; importance in, of imagination, 2 75 J legitimate use in, of concept of purposiveness, 256 fi. ; investigations of, t o be unfettered, 260 ; their successful progress, 271 ; their" concerns, 272-3 ; their ideal, 274 ; motive in, 2 8 0 ; dependent on faith, 285 ; their empiricism, 296 Self: as subject of thinking, 141-2: distinction of autonomous, and heteronomous, 164, 2 0 7 ; the noumenal, 196 ; character of knowledge of, 297 Sensa, 64, 118 Sense, see Inner sense Sensibility, 67 Space, involved in geometrical thinking, 88-9 ; thinking not a process in, 95.; inner sense concerned with, 113 ; determined as permanent, 1 2 5 ; movement of a point in, 126, 128 ; intuition of wholeness in its determination, 146 Space and t i m e : a priori, b u t also sensible, 30-1, 8 6 ; given as wholes, 65, 67, 9 3 ; Kant's opposition to H u m e regarding, 65,120 ; to Leibniz and Newton, 69 ff. ; forms of intuition, 6 9 / 82, 86, 103 ; pervasive of ex-

315

Space and time—continued perience, 91, 117 ; consciousness of, involved in determining inner sense, 98 ; the key to the Transcendental Deduction, 103 ; intuition always a manifold in, 109; involved in knowledge, 113 ; misconception regarding Kant's account of, 124 ; consciousness of, fundamental and primary, 133 ; assumptions as to infinity of, 138, 149 ; infinitely extensible, 149, 277 ; anticipation of ordering in, 261 Spinoza, 14, 140 Subject and object distinguished, 99-100, 106, 109, 126, 278, 292 Subjectivity, Kant's doctrine of, 269 Sublime, the, 235, 238, 245 ff. Substance, 129, 130, 141, 142 Succession, concept of, 97-8, 114 Supernatural, the, 19-21 Supersensible, the, 249-50 Swedenborg, 28 Synthesis: Kant's stress on, 55 ff., 6 4 ; empiricists' account of, 63 ; a priori, 66 ; judging as, 84 ; nature of, in apperception, 96, i n ; figurative, 9 7 ; synthetic unity of consciousness, 99-100; need for principle governing, 102 ; subject to the categories, 104; operative before consciousness, n o ; transcendental, of the imagination, I2 3 , 133 ; results of application of reason to, 144 ; differentiation of the forms of, 286 TASTE, 234.

(And

see ^Esthetic

and Art) Teleology, 256 ff. Theology, 22, 140-1, 155, 156, 159 Thinker, 141 Thinking: distinguished from observation, 107, n o ; not identical with making, 114; Kant's problem with, 115-17; Postulates of Empirical, 129 ; existence not provable by, 132 ; imagination in, 2 2 5 - 6 ; contrasts necessarily arising in, 295 T i m e : thinking a process in, 55, 95 ; aspects of, 65 ; manner of knowing, 97-8,112 ; the specific

3i6

INDEX

Time—continued form of the inner sense, 112 ; in constant flux, 125 ; causation a necessary determination in, 151 ; necessity of events in, 200-1 ; moral world outside sphere of, 201. {And see Space and Time) Transcendental logic, see Logic Transcendental object, 150, 152 Transcendental philosophy, 223 Truth, nature of, 55 UNCONDITIONED, the,

137,

Understanding—continued judgement, 250-1 ; its working in knowledge, 250 ; discursive, 267-8 ; an intuitive, needed for knowledge of reality, 268-9, 293-4 '• 'ts relation to the imagination, 275, 288 U n i t y : empirical and transcendental, 138-9, 156; of nature, 227 ; principles necessary to, 228 Universality, 233, 239 ff. Utilitarians, 300

144

Understanding, definition of, 82, 137 ; appearances given in intuition independently of, 90 ; distinction between intuition and, 91, 93, 94, 96 ; spontaneity of, distinguished from given intuition, 93, 95, 288, 294, 296 ; determines inner sense, 9 6 98, 111-12, 1 1 5 ; characteristic mark of, 108 ; Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the, 121-3, 134; principles of t h e pure, 123, 133, 134, 228, 280-1, 286; origin of these principles, 156 ; limits to its achievements a priori, 134; reason differentiated from, 137, 286, 2 8 7 ; reason in command of, 156; judgement the special work of, 139 ; always in its own proper ground, 147 ; middle term between reason and, 221-2; enlivening of, by aesthetic judgement, 235 ; its part in aesthetic

VAIHINGER,

297

Virtue, 183, 188-90. Goodness) von Zedlitz, 6, 9 Vorländer, 237

(And

see

W I L L : its freedom, 120, 146, 178 ;

its autonomy the supreme principle of morality, 169, 178, 255 ; itself universal legislator, 176-7, !93 ) goodness concerned with, 169-70 ; no duty for a holy, 171, 190; distinguished from desire, 172 ; reason involved in every decision of, 172; heteronomous, 164, 177, 182, 207 ; willing of the futile not possible, 208 ; rational willing, 208, 255 ; evil can be only in, 211 ; in bondage to evil principle, 211-12 Wolff, 13, 17, 25, 41, 200 Wöllner, 9 Wordsworth, 298