KANT ***




Produced by Al Haines.





[Illustration: Immanuel Kant]




                           *THE PHILOSOPHY OF
                             IMMANUEL KANT*


                         BY A. D. LINDSAY, M.A.

              FELLOW AND TUTOR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD



                    LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK, LTD.
                 35 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C., & EDINBURGH
                     NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO.




                               *FOREWORD*


There is a story that Schopenhauer used to begin his lectures on Kant by
saying: "Let no one _tell_ you what is contained in the _Critique of
Pure Reason_."  The writer of this little book hopes that no one will
imagine that he has disregarded this warning.  There are no short-cuts
to the understanding of a great philosopher, and the only way to
appreciate the greatness of a philosophic system is to study the
philosopher’s own writings.  All that the writer of a book like this can
hope to do is to persuade others to undertake that study by interesting
them in the problems with which it deals, and by offering a few
suggestions which may help to an understanding of it.  I have said
nothing about the numerous other works which Kant wrote. For the three
_Critiques_ contain his system, and the understanding of that is
all-important.




                               *CONTENTS*

CHAP.

I. THE IDEA OF CRITICISM

II. KANT’S STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM.  SYNTHETIC A PRIORI JUDGMENTS

III. KANT’S IDEALISM.  TIME AND SPACE

IV. THE CATEGORIES AND THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE UNDERSTANDING

V. THE ANTINOMIES AND CRITICISM OF THE PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

VI. KANT’S MORAL THEORY

VII. THE "CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT"

BIBLIOGRAPHY




                        *THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT*



                              *CHAPTER I*

                        *THE IDEA OF CRITICISM*


"It is a difficult matter," says Heine, "to write the life history of
Immanuel Kant, for he had neither life nor history.  He lived a
mechanically ordered, abstract, old bachelor kind of existence in a
quiet, retired alley in Königsberg, an old town in the north-east corner
of Germany."  The times he lived in were stirring enough. He was born in
1724, and died in 1804.  He lived through the Seven Years’ War that
first made Germany a nation, he followed with sympathy the United States
War of Independence, he saw the French Revolution and the beginning of
the career of Napoleon.  Yet in all his long life he never moved out of
the province in which he was born, and nothing was allowed to interrupt
the steady course of his lecturing, studying, and writing. "Getting up,"
continues Heine, "drinking coffee, lecturing, eating, going for a walk,
everything had its fixed time; and the neighbours knew that it must be
exactly half-past four when Immanuel Kant, in his gray frock-coat, with
his Spanish cane in his hand, stepped from his door and walked towards
the little lime-tree avenue, which is called after him the Philosopher’s
Walk."  "Strange contrast," reflects Heine, "between the man’s outward
life and his destructive, world-smashing thoughts."  As the political
history of the eighteenth century came to an end when the French
Revolution spilled over the borders of France and drove Napoleon up and
down Europe, breaking up the old political systems and inaugurating
modern Europe, so its opposing currents of thought were gathered
together in the mind of a weak-chested, half-invalid little man in
Königsberg, and from their meeting a new era in philosophy began.

There are some philosophers to whom truth seems to come almost unsought,
as an immediate authoritative vision.  Kant was not one of these.  His
greatest work, the _Critique of Pure Reason_, was conceived when he was
forty-eight, and published in 1781, when he was fifty-seven.  It was the
outcome of half a lifetime’s patient study and thought.  Heine says of
him: "He was the perfect type of the small shopkeeper.  Nature had meant
him to weigh coffee and sugar, but fate willed that he should weigh
other things and put a God on his scales, and his weighing was exact."
The sneer is unjust, but there is something in the simile; for Kant’s
philosophy was a kind of taking stock, a survey of the great movement of
thought from the time when the Renaissance and the Reformation made
thought free, an attempt to estimate the achievements of the new
sciences, to deal with their conflicting claims and ideals and say what
it all came to.  In Kant modern science, which began with Descartes and
Galileo, first became conscious of itself.

This taking stock Kant called _Criticism_.  His great books are all
called Critiques--the _Critique of Pure Reason_, the _Critique of
Practical Reason_, the _Critique of Judgment_.  He called his philosophy
the Critical Philosophy or Critical Idealism.  Essential to an
understanding of Kant is an understanding of what he meant by criticism,
and why he opposes it to dogmatism and scepticism; for the necessity and
possibility of such a criticism was his great philosophical discovery.
We have called Kant’s work a survey of the achievements of the thought
of his times, but it was very much more than that, and has a much more
universal significance than could belong to any history of the thought
of one epoch.  For these achievements of thought, though great, were
conflicting and partial. They contrasted with failure and barrenness in
other directions, and they seemed to be due to different methods.  This
success of thought in one direction and its failure in another, and this
uncertainty about the true method of science, were problems which at
once presented themselves to an impartial observer, and Kant held that
they could be answered only by taking stock of actual attainments, and
by criticism of the powers and range of human thought in general.

The problem that presented itself to him will be understood if we look
for a moment at the history of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. One thing that Kant noted in it was the steady and sure
progress of physics.  "With the experiments of Galileo and Torricelli,"
he says in the preface to the second edition of the first _Critique_, "a
new light flashed on all students of nature."  The continued success of
physics meant the successful application of mathematics to the concrete
world, and along with it a remarkable development of mathematics itself.
This sudden success inspired men to feel that they had discovered a way
of explaining the universe; they contrasted the fertility of their new
methods with the barrenness of scholastic speculation in morals and
theology; they felt confident that all that was wanted to the attainment
of certain knowledge in all spheres of human interest was the extension
of these methods.  If men would only set to work the right way, they
were sure that all difficulties would be overcome; and, by reflection
upon their own success, they hoped to explain what the right way was.

Unfortunately this was not easy, for the advance from pure mathematics
to physics, from a study of the nature of pure mathematical conceptions
to an inquiry into the laws of falling bodies, implied a change whose
nature was not clear to the men who had themselves made the advance.  A
conflict arose between those who thought more of the fact that
knowledge, to be certain, must be capable of mathematical expression,
and those who thought more of the basis of experiment and observation on
which the new sciences depended, who remembered that these sciences
began when Galileo, instead of thinking in the abstract how bodies ought
to fall, dropped bodies of different weights from the top of the leaning
tower of Pisa and observed what actually happened.  Descartes was the
great representative of the first school.  He began by insisting on the
difference between mathematical truth which could be, as he said,
clearly and distinctly conceived, and ordinary opinion about things
which was full of guesswork and imagination.  Scientific knowledge was
possible, he thought, only by apprehending the real or primary qualities
of things which were mathematical, in contradistinction to their
secondary qualities--their colour, smell, &c.--which were less real.
Thence he came to think that the real world was mathematical in nature,
like a huge, intricate geometrical figure.  The elements of mere fact,
in our present knowledge, its dependence on observation and experiment,
he thought of as temporary defects which the progress of science would
remove. What we ordinarily call perception, indeed, in the sense of
awareness of things in time and space, was described by Descartes’
successors as confused thinking.  Our knowledge of the world would, it
was hoped, become a vast mathematical system, all the detail and
complexity of which would be rigorously deducible from a few central
truths.

This general way of thinking was called Rationalism. Kant ordinarily
calls it Dogmatism.  It was attacked by other scientists for its view of
the nature of space and time.  No one who reflects at all can fail to
distinguish a difference between the way in which we see the truth of a
geometrical proposition--that, _e.g._, the three angles of a triangle
are equal to two right angles--and the way in which we judge that such
and such a figure drawn on a board is a triangle, or make judgments
about the way in which things are actually arranged in space or succeed
in time.  Judgments of the latter kind involve words like "here" and
"there," "now" and "then," words which are all a kind of pointing.  It
seems impossible from considering the nature of a triangle to deduce why
any existing thing should be called triangular, and all statements about
the position of things in space and time seem to be derived not from a
consideration of the general nature of space and time, but from
observation.  Now the science which had made perhaps the most striking
progress in the time we are speaking of, physical astronomy, involved
any number of statements about the position of bodies in space.  The
Rationalist school admitted this, but held that that was due to the fact
that science was not sufficiently thought out.  In time, they hoped, all
statements about position in space would disappear. To think of things
in spatial order was to think confusedly.  Newton, on the other hand,
held that space could not be explained away, that astronomy implied an
absolute space in which things existed, that the spatial relations of
things could not be explained by the nature of the things themselves,
but only by a reference to absolute space in which they all were. This
meant that observation or perception was something of which you could
not hope and should not wish to get rid, and that an ideal of knowledge
in which all applied mathematics should have been transmuted into pure
mathematics was a vain one.  Astronomy implied both mere observation and
apprehension of necessary relations.  Here was a science which seemed to
employ both methods together.  Galileo, in fact could not have made his
discovery without observation but men had observed bodies falling for
ages without discovering the laws of motion.  Further, the laws of
motion, once discovered, made men in some degree independent of
observation, made them able to say of actual concrete things not only
what had happened, but what must happen.

Such difficulties as these arose from reflection on the aims and methods
of the mathematical sciences, but there was much genuinely scientific
inquiry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which showed no
signs of taking mathematical form; chemistry and biology, for example,
were still almost entirely empirical.  Furthermore, thinkers were not
concerned with science alone.  These centuries saw a great revival of
interest in speculation on human affairs, history, politics, morals and
theology.  England, which was the home of free discussion on questions
of politics and morals, and where, more than in most other countries,
there was free discussion on theology, became also the home of
empiricism.  The empirical movement, indeed, drew much of its impetus
from a reaction against Hobbes, the only great English thinker who
unhesitatingly applied the mechanical and deterministic assumptions of
the new sciences to morals and politics, and arrived by this
uncompromising method at results so obviously repellent that no man of
any sense could accept them, and so consistently presented that they
could not be refuted save by a refutation of the assumptions upon which
they were founded.  Such a refutation was, in fact, undertaken by Locke,
the first great representative of the empirical school.  He was
interested alike in the more obviously empirical sciences of chemistry
and biology, and in politics.  He was not a very consistent or
systematic thinker, but he had other gifts perhaps as valuable.  He was
a man of great common sense and breadth of view, and was able thereby to
take a conspectus of the general situation in the various spheres of
inquiry, to notice the obvious differences in our knowledge of
mathematics, of chemical and biological fact, and of theology, and to
see that these constituted a problem.  We find in him the first
statement of the necessity of philosophical criticism. It is contained
in his account of the origin of the _Essay concerning Human
Understanding_.  "Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this
_Essay_, I should tell thee that five or six friends, meeting at my
chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this" (they were
discussing the "principles of morality and revealed religion"), "found
themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every
side.  After we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer
a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my
thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that, before we set ourselves
upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own
abilities, and see what _objects_ our understandings were, or were not,
fitted to deal with."

We have here the same general starting point of inquiry as we shall
afterwards find in Kant.  There are certain, obstinate puzzles which we
meet with in discussion which can only be solved by going back and
inquiring into the nature of knowledge and the powers of our minds.
Unfortunately, as Kant points out, Locke went the wrong way about his
task.  He describes it as "a plain historical inquiry."  He thought that
he had only to look into his mind and see what was in it, as he might
open a door and look into a room.  The result is that he thinks of all
knowledge as consisting simply in looking at what is present to the
mind.  We can know, therefore, whatever can be present to the mind, and
the limitations of knowledge are discovered by asking what can be so
present to the mind.  The conclusions to which he comes as to different
spheres of human inquiry are roughly these: We can have knowledge of
mathematics because there we are concerned only with ideas present to
the mind, and with noting their agreement and disagreement.  We can have
no knowledge of such questions as the immortality of the soul, or the
nature of spirits, for they are beyond our observation.  As regards
existing things, we can have knowledge of them, in so far as they are
present to our minds, and no further.  The meaning of "present to the
mind" was never clearly analysed by Locke; but he meant, for example,
that we can observe that an object which is yellow, and which we call
gold, is also heavy, and can be dissolved by Aqua Regia, but we cannot
say why that is so, and we ought not, on Locke’s principles, to have any
ground for supposing that these qualities will go on co-existing.

The element of truth in Locke’s position is this. When we are examining
concrete things like pieces of gold or any chemical substance, we find
in them a number of varying qualities whose connection we cannot
understand.  We do not know why a metal of a certain specific gravity
should also be yellow; we can only note the fact.  Hence in chemistry
our method must be quite different from the method of mathematics. In
mathematics we start from the definition, and we can understand the
connection of the properties of a geometrical figure, and see that they
all follow necessarily from the definition.  But in sciences like
chemistry a definition does not take us any further; we can only find
out the properties of a substance by observation and experiment.  Locke
explains this difference by saying that in the former case we are only
concerned with agreement among our own ideas, in the second place we are
concerned somehow with things outside us. This explanation will not
stand.  It is not true that mathematics is simply analysis of an
arbitrary definition, as Locke seems to suggest.  It involves
construction, or, as Kant calls it, synthesis.  It is a process of
discovering new truths.  Secondly, our statements about concrete objects
are not statements of qualities we see co-existing at the moment.  They
are statements about all gold or all men; in other words, they are
universal, and Locke found it impossible to explain the universality of
such propositions--what we mean, _e.g._ when we talk about the nature of
gold or of man, not of this gold or this man that I see before me.
Lastly, this distinction of mathematics and the empirical sciences by a
distinction of spheres does not allow, as we saw, for a science like
astronomy, which builds on mathematics and yet applies to the concrete
world.

These difficulties were seen more clearly by Hume, at once the greatest
and the most thorough-going of empiricists.  He cut the knot in regard
to mathematics by asserting that geometry, just because it has clearly
an application to the existing world, had no more certainty than any
other empirical inquiry, while arithmetic and algebra, he agreed, were
certain, but confined their application to the sphere of our own ideas.
Both positions are almost obviously inconsistent with the facts.  In
considering the nature of our judgments about concrete existences he
raised a more profound problem.  All such judgments, as he said, imply
the principle of causation, or of what is called, in modern times, the
principle of the uniformity of nature.  That principle we take with us
in our investigation of the existing world.  Yet, as Hume saw, we do not
observe causes; we only observe succession and change.  We seem,
therefore, to put into the world we see a necessity and uniformity which
the observed facts do not warrant.  How is this to be explained?

Hume’s answer is ingenious.  The principle of causation cannot be
rationally justified, and the necessary connection we predicate of
changes in the outside world is not in the things; it is only a feeling
in ourselves, and is the result of custom.  After seeing the same
succession several times, we come somehow to feel differently about it,
and that feeling of difference we express by saying that we have before
us an instance not of simple succession, but of cause and effect.

This is not the place to discuss the difficulties of Hume’s position; it
is enough to notice how entirely passive it makes the mind, and how
alien such an explanation is from the spirit of inquiry and discovery.
If cause is simply the effect of custom on the mind, then the facts
either produce that effect or they do not.  In neither case is there
anything to find out. But the scientist, in investigating causes,
however strongly he may hold that he has to observe the facts, knows
also that he has a problem to solve, that he has to discover the right
way to go about it, must adopt some principle in dealing with the facts.
Pure passivity will help him little.

Hume’s account of causation, then, is really a denial of even empirical
science, and yet it helped to make clear an important truth; for,
although we do not get the _principle_ of causation from experience, we
have to go to experience to discover causal laws.  We do not discover
causation by analysing a cause and seeing that it is such that, from its
nature, it must produce a certain effect.  All knowledge of causation
goes back to observed succession, though all cases of observed and even
repeated succession are not cases of causation. Hume, therefore, was
right in saying that where there could be no observed succession there
could be no knowledge of causation.

Both the rationalistic and the empirical explanations of science had
failed, the one because it could find no room for observation of facts,
the other because it could find no room for principles governing that
observation; and we shall see that Kant started with a consciousness of
this double failure.  He saw that Hume’s criticism of causation raised
problems for which the rationalist had no answer, and yet that the
position reached by Hume was incompatible with the existence of science.

The same failure of both rationalism and empiricism had become evident
in another sphere--that of morals and religion.  The relation of
philosophy to science is always twofold.  Philosophy is partly concerned
with analysing and reflecting on the methods of the different sciences,
partly with seeking to adjust the rival and conflicting claims of the
two great departments of man’s life--science and religion.

It might seem, at first sight, as though in morals and religion
rationalism were the only possible method to be approved by philosophy,
for, inasmuch as morals are concerned with what ought to be, not with
what is, they cannot depend on observation, but must be deduced from
some principle above experience; nor are objects of religion, God and
the soul, objects of observation. No man can "by searching find out
God."

It was natural, therefore, that both on the Continent and in England
morality and religion began by being rationalistic.  Descartes believed
that his mathematical method could be applied with success to
demonstrate the truths of religion, while Locke includes morality along
with mathematics among the a priori and certain sciences.  But the
history of eighteenth century controversy showed that, in spite of
rationalist methods, neither morality nor religion could attain that
certainty and general agreement which marked the mathematical sciences.
Spinoza, applying the same method as Descartes, but with more
consistency, arrived at a conception of God which most of his
contemporaries regarded as "horrid atheism," and the general result of
rational theology is well described by one of Kant’s correspondents when
he says that the more proofs of the existence of God he learnt, the more
his doubts increased.  In England the attempts made to found morality
upon rationalist principles produced systems too barren to withstand the
attack of empiricism fortified by the growing interest in history and
anthropology.  The Deist movement, an attempt to free religion from the
incrustations of faith and deduce it from pure reason, showed that a
religion founded on pure reason contained nothing worth believing.  In
Hume we have the final discrediting of reason in these spheres.  He
shows ingeniously that "the good Berkeley’s" argument for the existence
of God could be turned round to disprove the existence of the soul, and
he concluded that religion was a sphere with which reason had no
concern.  In the sphere of morals the distinction between what ought to
be and what is, the distinction on which rationalistic morals are based,
had been discredited by a reduction of all conduct to Utilitarianism, a
search for pleasure and a flight from pain mediated by sympathy.  The
consequences are described by Kant in his preface to the _Critique of
Pure Reason_: "At present, after everything has been tried, so they say,
and tried in vain, there reign in philosophy weariness and complete
indifferentism, the mother of chaos and night in all sciences," though
he hopefully continues, "but at the same time the source, or at least
the prelude, of their near reform and of a new light, after an
ill-applied study has rendered them dark, confused, and useless."

The earlier of the modern thinkers--Descartes among the rationalists,
and Bacon among the empiricists--are full of hope.  They have confidence
in the human spirit. But increased reflection seemed only to bring
distrust with it.  The history of rationalism in theology showed that,
in such matters, reason could prove absolutely opposing positions.  Most
men were ready to accept Hume’s dictum that any one who follows his
reason must be a fool and take refuge in an indifferentism which accepts
whatever happens to be there.

The remedy for this state of affairs, Kant finds, is the critical
method; for disbelief in reason is the reaction from overconfidence in
it.  Men had thought that reason could prove everything.  Because these
hopes had been frustrated, they now thought that it could prove nothing.
Philosophy, he was convinced, would oscillate between overweening
confidence and unwarranted distrust in itself until it had criticised
human reason and discovered what it could do and what it could not.
This is the task he set before himself.  As the failure of eighteenth
century philosophy, which had led to distrust of all philosophy, had
been twofold--failure to give an intelligible explanation of the
processes of scientific thought, and failure to find any standard by
which to mediate between the conflicting claims of science and
religion--the task of the critical philosophy is twofold.  It attempts
to explain and to justify the methods and assumptions of the sciences,
and to find some solution of the conflict between theories of the world
which seem to be based upon these methods and the assumptions and claims
of morality and religion.




                              *CHAPTER II*

              *KANT’S STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM.  SYNTHETIC
                          A PRIORI JUDGMENTS*


In the preface to the second edition of the _Critique of Pure Reason_
Kant finds the necessity of criticism in the contrast between certain
rational sciences and metaphysics.  Mathematics and physics, he
observes, are obviously certain sciences.  They are not empirical, they
make steady progress, the results they have reached are secure and
unanimously accepted, and have a certainty which no mere empirical
investigation could attain.  Metaphysics, on the other hand, though as
ancient an inquiry, seems incapable of any settled results.  Its history
is a record, not of steady progress, but of bewildering marches and
countermarches.  The confident conclusions of one philosopher are as
confidently denied by another, and the endless indecisive conflict
produces in the minds of most men the conviction that in philosophy one
doctrine is as good as another, and therefore none are worth very much.
In the sphere where reason might be expected to be most at home, reason
is impotent; yet the achievements of reason in those other spheres of
the a priori sciences should preserve us from any general scepticism of
the powers of reason.  The task of criticism will be to examine the part
played by reason in science, and to ask how far its failure in
metaphysics is due to mistakes in method, and how far to the different
nature of the objects of the a priori sciences and of metaphysics. Kant
points out that it was some time before either mathematics or physics
followed the secure path of a science.  The contrast between the
haphazard and empirical observations of the Babylonians or Egyptians and
the science of the Greeks was due to the discovery of a new method.  The
discovery by Galileo and Torricelli of modern physics came about by a
similar revolution in method.  The _Critique_, therefore, is to be a
treatise on method.  It will examine the method of reason in the
sciences, and ask what conclusions can be drawn as to the proper method
of metaphysics.

In the _Prolegomena_, a work in which he summarises the results of the
first _Critique_, Kant describes the _Critique_ as an answer to three
questions: How is mathematics possible?  How is pure science of nature
or physics possible? and, How is metaphysics possible? Something of the
nature of his answer to the third, and for him the most important,
question, may be gathered from the fact that he explains that the third
question should not be put in the form, How is metaphysics as a science
possible?  That question can only be answered by saying that it is not
possible.  But it is still allowable and necessary to ask, How is
metaphysics possible as a natural disposition of the mind? For the main
result of his inquiries into the place of reason in the sciences is to
show that reason is successful in the sciences only because of the
presence of certain conditions which are wanting in metaphysics. At
first sight we might think it natural that the objects of metaphysics
which Kant enumerates as God, Freedom, and Immortality should be
understood by reason, and find it more difficult to explain how reason
should apply to the world of ordinary experience.  The knowledge of
everyday things is thought of as empirical, a matter of observation;
while we are inclined to think that, if there is rational knowledge, it
is knowledge of something else, of the mere agreement or disagreement of
ideas (as Hume thought), or of the essences of things, known
independently and apart from perception, as Plato thought.  Kant argues
that the combination of a priori reasoning and empirical observation,
which earlier thinkers had found so puzzling in the exact sciences,
exhibits the only possible use of reason, that reason, divorced from and
with no reference to the world of experience, is barren, and that
consequently metaphysics, if that be taken to mean a rational knowledge
of objects which are outside of our experience, does not exist.  We are
left with metaphysics as a natural disposition; for Kant holds that the
questions which metaphysics seeks to answer arise from the nature of
reason and its relation to experience, though their answer is to be
sought not in knowledge but in action.

This last point must be elucidated later.  In the meantime we must see
how this inquiry into the nature of reason crystalises itself into a
seemingly abstract and trivial question: How are synthetic a priori
judgments possible?  It is baffling at first to find an inquiry of the
scope we have indicated suddenly take such a narrow form, but a little
consideration will show the importance of the question.  Knowledge may
be regarded as either analysis or synthesis, as a puzzling out or
unravelling of what we somehow know already, or as a putting together of
what had previously been known or observed separately.  The rationalist
school, whom we described in the last chapter, were inclined to regard
all knowledge as analytical.  They thought of progress in knowledge as
an advance from obscure to clear apprehension, and as a thinking out or
making clear of something which had always been known somehow.
Mathematics, the typical form of knowledge for the rationalists, had
been thought of as the analysis of what was implied or given in the
definitions.  The conception of analytic a priori knowledge was thus
familiar and simple.  On the other hand, the empiricists had thought of
knowledge as primarily synthesis--or, as they called it, association--a
connecting together of ideas in their nature separate.  Knowledge of a
thing was thought of as the observing together of several ideas.
Judgments about objects were regarded as judgments about the
co-existence of separate ideas, ideas which were not thought of as being
bound by any logical necessity. We do not understand why a substance
with the specific gravity of gold should be yellow; we only observe the
co-existence of certain qualities.  The judgment, then, gold is yellow,
is synthetic; it is an assertion of the co-existence of separate
qualities.  It is also empirical; it does not express a reasoned insight
into the necessary connection of gold and yellow.  It seems rather a
record of observation.  Synthetic knowledge, then, was thought of as in
its nature empirical and a posteriori.  Hume, who thought of all
knowledge of the world in experience as synthetic, denied to such
knowledge any necessity or certainty.

Hume, however, had noticed that the principle of causation, the judgment
that every event has a cause, is both a priori and synthetic.  It is
not, he held, derived from experience; rather it is a principle which
guides our investigation of experience.  It is not got from analysis of
the notion of causation, nor is it simply concerned with the agreement
or disagreement of our ideas.  It asserts the necessary connection of
two perfectly separate existing things.  Hume himself, as we saw, tried
to explain away these uncomfortable facts.  He was too wedded to his
belief that all knowledge was derived from passively received
impressions to face them rightly.  Kant, coming to the problem with
different prepossessions, with the belief that most knowledge was
analytic, was impressed with Hume’s proof that the principle of
causation could not be derived from analysis.  The very basis of all
science of nature, then, contradicted the belief that knowledge was
analytical.  Kant was also, with Hume, convinced that the principle of
causation was not derived from experience, for he saw that experience
assumed it.  At the same time, he was not prepared, like Hume, to
explain it away.  Further, he saw that the problem raised by the
principle of causation was a wide one. For other judgments, he held, are
both synthetic and a priori, among them mathematical judgments.  As we
shall see afterwards, Kant proved the impossibility of arriving at
knowledge of God or the soul by mere analysis of concepts.  The
judgments of metaphysics, about God or the soul, are also synthetic.
But the validity of the judgments of metaphysics is under dispute. If we
examine the synthetic a priori judgments of mathematics and of science
whose validity is certain, we may then discover whether such judgments
in metaphysics can or can not have similar certainty.  We may thus see
that the problem of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments is a
restatement in logical terms of the problem of the relation between the
a priori sciences and metaphysics.

Something more must be said of the importance of synthetic a priori
judgments in Kant’s account of knowledge.  Their existence, we have
seen, exposes the shortcomings of both rationalism, which allowed only
for analytic a priori judgments, and empiricism, which allowed only of
synthetic a posteriori judgments.  Both these theories tended to regard
knowledge as an analysis or description of what was present to the mind,
and differed really only in their view of what was present. For, though
the empiricist thought of empirical knowledge as synthesis, the
synthesis was not ascribed to the mind, but to associating ideas; the
mind only observed, and knowledge was merely the apprehension of objects
by the senses.  We see what is before our eyes, and notice the
differences and similarities in what is before us.  The rationalist
conceived of thought as simply apprehending the nature of the real,
freed from the illusions of sense perception.  The mathematician has
before his thought the nature of a triangle, and sees intellectually
what that nature implies.  We may try to mediate between the two by
saying that while all knowing is observing, some is observing of objects
of thought and some of objects of sense, the one being called
understanding, the other perception.  In most scientific judgments,
however, we are not simply observing objects either of thought or of
sense.  Scientific judgments are more than descriptions of what is
present to the mind or to the senses; they are essentially
anticipations.  They go beyond what is immediately given.  This is shown
by the fact that it is the characteristic of a scientific proposition
that it can be verified.  If we understand it rightly, we see that it
implies that, under such-and-such conditions, such-and-such things will
be experienced.  Hence the importance of experiment to science.  A
scientific proposition is, of course, grounded on observation of
perceived fact and understanding of universal connection, but it is an
assertion of something beyond that.

If, then, all scientific judgments are synthetic, and if both
rationalism and empiricism failed to account for the manner in which
such judgments go beyond what is immediately given to the mind, ought we
not to say that the real problem for Kant is to show not merely how
synthetic a priori judgments are possible, but how any synthetic
judgments are possible?  This seems at first sight plausible, but the
suggestion must be rejected; for, when Kant asks how a judgment is
possible, he is not asking how we come to make it, but how we know that
it is valid.  Now, if we consider any empirical judgment about the facts
of nature, we must recognise that Locke and Hume were right in denying
certainty to such judgments.  In all general statements about concrete
facts we to a certain extent go beyond our evidence.  Empirical
scientific statements are not theoretically certain.  They may, of
course, be certain enough for all practical purposes. They are
reasonable expectations of what will happen, but reasonable expectation
is a very different thing from the certainty of mathematical insight.

Now Kant maintained that, while such empirical judgments are not
certain, they all imply the certainty of a number of general principles
on which they depend. These general principles are the synthetic a
priori judgments with which he is especially concerned.  When we apply
the principles of trigonometry to an engineering problem, we know that
our measurements are only approximate, and that the result also will
only be approximate; but the possibility of arriving at such approximate
results depends on the absolute truth of the trigonometrical principles,
and on the assumption that they express not simply the agreement or
disagreement of ideas, but hold of the real.  When we apply the rules of
arithmetic to counting objects, there may be a certain arbitrariness in
deciding on our unit.  There is no such arbitrariness in the rule.  All
scientific judgments of causation are only approximately certain, but
they all imply the certainty of the principle of causation, and are
based on the assumption that such a principle is of universal
application.  This and the other principles assumed in our empirical
judgments are, then, the synthetic judgments with which Kant is
concerned.  Now, it is of the nature of our empirical knowledge that it
is fragmentary and not uniform, that we are concerned with an indefinite
number of things whose connections we do not wholly understand, and
which we cannot therefore anticipate.  Yet we assume that all these
objects will obey the rules of arithmetic and geometry, and will all be
subject in their changes to the principle of causation.  On such
assumptions all the sciences of applied mathematics depend.  How are
they justifiable?  That is Kant’s question.

Kant, when he considers mathematics, is concerned with the assumptions
of applied mathematics, of those sciences which, though mathematical,
make statements about existing objects, and in which the old distinction
between understanding and perception which was based on the difference
in the objects of these two faculties breaks down.  The sciences which
Kant is investigating imply that principles which are clearly not
derived from mere observation are yet the basis on which we order and
arrange what we observe.  Now, if we held that the objects of
mathematics were independent entities quite separate from the things we
perceive, it would be impossible to explain how we might assume that the
things we perceive would be subject to the rules of mathematics.  If, on
the other hand, we held that in mathematics we were simply concerned
with the various objects of the senses, it would be impossible to
explain how mathematics can have a generality and necessity which no
statements can have which rest on observation of the various things we
see.  The existence of applied mathematics implies firstly that
understanding and perception are distinct, and that neither of them can
be reduced to the other, for that would mean that we should have to give
up either the element of observation and experiment or the element of
necessity and a priority, and secondly, that understanding and
perception are combined, and must be combined for any advance in
science.

Now, Kant finds his answer to the problem he has raised by concentrating
his attention on the fact that, while understanding and perception are
distinct, they are both present in all knowledge.  His argument is that
we are necessarily in a difficulty if we think of understanding and
perception as having each its separate objects, and then try to explain
their combination. If we begin with their combination, we may see that
the reference of principles of thought to objects of sense is not an
accident, but that these principles of thought or of understanding, as
Kant calls them, are only concerned with objects of sense, and have no
other meaning.  If we object, But how can principles of thought be
universal if they are concerned with the many and varying objects of
sense?  Kant’s answer is that they are not concerned directly with these
objects, but with the conditions under which these objects can be
understood.  They are therefore not statements about objects, but
statements of the conditions of possible experience. If we find out that
all perceiving and thinking imply certain conditions, then we can affirm
the validity of principles based upon these conditions, so long as we do
not try to apply the principles beyond our perceiving.

We may put the point in another way by asking by what right the mind can
prescribe to or anticipate experience.  Kant’s answer is just in so far
as we can determine the conditions under which alone objects can be
known.  If that can be done, we can say, These principles will hold of
objects in so far as they are known.  In the preface to the second
edition of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ Kant reverts to the discoveries
of Galileo and Torricelli, and points out that their success was due to
their asking of nature the right question, and the right question was
that which reason could understand. "When Galileo let balls of a
particular weight, which he had determined himself, roll down an
inclined plane, or Torricelli made the air carry a weight, which he had
previously determined to be equal to that of a definite volume of water,
a new light flashed on all students of nature.  They comprehended that
reason has insight into that only which she herself produces on her own
plan, and that she must move forward with the principles of her
judgments, according to fixed law, and compel nature to answer her
questions, but not let herself be led by nature, as it were in
leading-strings. Otherwise accidental observations, made on no
previously fixed plan, will never converge towards a necessary law,
which is the only thing that reason seeks or requires. Reason, holding
in one hand its principles, according to which alone concordant
phenomena can be admitted as laws of nature, and in the other the
experiment which it has devised according to those principles, must
approach nature in order to be taught by it, but not in the character of
a pupil who agrees to everything the master likes, but as an appointed
judge, who compels the witnesses to answer the questions which he
himself proposes."

Kant, here, is concerned with reason in its application to experience,
and he makes it clear that there is much in all such inquiries which
cannot be anticipated a priori.  "Reason must approach nature in order
to be taught by it."  The answer to the questions and experiments cannot
be known beforehand.  The empirical element in science cannot be
explained away. Reason dictates not the answer but the question, and so
far the form of the answer.  Reason, then, it is suggested, is concerned
with the principles or conditions, according to which we can understand
things. It is not a method of observing or analysing objects; rather it
states the methods and principles according to which objects must be
observed if they are to be understood.  The principles are not
statements about the nature of objects, but principles of the
possibility of experience.  This new attitude to reason Kant describes
as the Copernican change in philosophy.  It constitutes Kant’s idealism.
Its nature and importance we must examine in the next chapter.




                             *CHAPTER III*

                   *KANT’S IDEALISM.  TIME AND SPACE*


The great discovery which Kant considered he had made as to the nature
of reason was that reason was not a method of observing objects as they
really exist, but was concerned directly only with our ways of
understanding objects.  This discovery is the essence of Kant’s
idealism, and its main purport is expressed in the distinction Kant so
often makes between things in themselves and phenomena.  This
distinction is used as the key to the solution of all his difficulties.
But the doctrine it implies is very easy to misunderstand, partly
because idealism is generally used in a very different sense from that
in which Kant uses it, partly because Kant’s statement of the
distinction between things in themselves and phenomena depended on a
view of knowledge which he was very much concerned to refute, but with
which we are not now familiar.  If we are to understand Kant’s
philosophy, we must know what he means by idealism, and wherein his
idealism differs from that of his predecessors.

The word idealism is, naturally, contrasted with realism.  It suggests
an assertion that something is not real, but only an idea.  If we know
it to be combined with a distinction between things in themselves, and
phenomena, or appearances, it seems to suggest that the objects of
knowledge are somehow illusions, or only appearances in the mind, as
contrasted with real things. Something like this had been held by Kant’s
predecessors. For the fundamental principle of the idealism on which
most of Kant’s predecessors had been agreed, and which is sometimes
called Cartesian, and sometimes subjective idealism, is that the mind
somehow knows itself and its own actions and states, with more
directness and certainty than it knows external objects.  The doctrine
is commonly based upon a confused view of sense perception.

Sense perception is obviously possible only through processes in the
sensory organs, and objects were thought of as producing impressions
through the sensory organs in the brain, and the mind as then becoming
aware of them in the brain.  Hence, when Locke says that the mind only
knows its own ideas, he tends to mean (though the facts are sometimes
too much for him and he is nobly inconsistent) that the mind only knows
objects inside the brain.  The main objection to this doctrine, apart
from the fact that it is based on a confusion, is that it makes it quite
inexplicable how the notion of an outside world ever arises.  For if we
know, and must eternally know, only ideas inside our head, why should we
ever imagine that there an outside world exists.  Yet if nothing
_outside_ us were observed--if we knew of no process which went on
between outside objects and the brain, the doctrine would have no basis
on which to rest.  There cannot be any meaning in saying something is
"only an idea," if we do not know what is real in the sense of its
having an existence independent of our minds.

Locke supposed that, although we knew only ideas, we could somehow refer
from our ideas to an outside world.  For he thought that truth was
concerned with the agreement of our ideas with reality.  This form of
the doctrine, the commonest, is sometimes called Representationism.  For
it thinks of the mind as concerned with representations, or pictures, or
images which it may compare with the real objects.  Its futility is
obvious enough.  We can only compare a picture with the thing it
represents, if we can know both.  If we can only know ideas, we can
never know that they are only ideas, and can never compare them with
anything else.

This difficulty was seen by Berkeley, the most consistent of subjective
idealists, and led him to deny the existence of outside objects, and
hold that existence or reality meant being perceived and nothing more.
But if we take Berkeley’s position, it becomes very difficult to say
what we mean by judgments being true.  If things only exist as we think
of them, or perceive them, or rather if they are only our thinking of or
perceiving them, the question of the truth or falsity of our statements
about them cannot arise.

This idealism Kant is careful to refute, and he points out that there is
no evidence for its fundamental proposition that we know our mind more
directly than we know objects.  We are only conscious of ourselves in
knowing something not ourselves.  We do not invent the notion of
externality or outsideness in space from an experience in which it
originally has no part. Externality is implied in our most simple
experience.  We begin with consciousness of outside things, and only
become conscious of our own mental states or processes later.  But it is
important to observe that, the truth or falsity of subjective idealism
has no bearing whatsoever on the question with which Kant was concerned.
If I ask how I can lay down rules about what I have not yet experienced,
I am not in the least helped by being told that I only experience what
is in my mind. For the question will equally arise, How do I know what
is going to be in my mind?  The question idealism ordinarily discusses,
as to whether the objects of our awareness are in our mind or outside,
are in their nature mental and dependent on the mind or not, is entirely
and absolutely irrelevant to Kant’s purposes.

But it is a fact, and one that has got to be explained that in judgment
we go beyond what is present to our minds, and that, in so anticipating
what we shall experience, we assume that certain principles hold of all
that has been or may be present. With that difficulty idealism, as
ordinarily understood, has nothing to do. Representationism tried to
give some account of this going beyond what is present to our minds by
suggesting that truth is a reference from ideas to reality; but, as we
saw, if we know only ideas, such a reference is impossible.  The
doctrines opposed to representationism, that only ideas exist, or that
we directly know real objects, allow the existence of nothing contrasted
with what we are apprehending to which a reference in judgment can be
made.  No one who is satisfied with any of these positions can have seen
Kant’s problem.

If Kant then, is not a subjective idealist what does he mean by saying,
as he constantly does, that we only know phenomena, and why should that
limitation of knowledge help him in any of his difficulties?  He means,
in the first place, that all knowledge depends upon perception.  The
first paragraph of the first part of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ makes
that clear. "Whatever the process and the means may be by which
knowledge reaches its objects, there is one that reaches them directly
and forms the ultimate material of all thought, viz. perception.  This
is possible only when the object is given, and the object can be given
only (to human beings, at least) through a certain affection of the
mind."

Now, although we perceive an objective reality, sense perception
obviously gives a very imperfect knowledge of objects.  We see only some
sides and aspects of things, and not others.  What we see depends on
changes in our position.  Further, we know that what we see is only a
small part of the nature of anything. We think of reality as an
interconnected system, but we only perceive a very small part of it, and
what we perceive depends upon the particular time and the particular
part of space in which we live.  In our experience we are never really
content simply with what we perceive; we perceive much too little for
that. We are always inferring from what we see to something beyond it.
What is that something beyond, which, as we have seen, is implied in all
judgment?  We might hold that it was the things as they really are as
distinguished from things as they appear, or phenomena, and that, when
we turned from perception to thought, we turned from illusion to
reality.  Kant denied this. He held that, if you examine a scientific
judgment about anything you perceive, such as that yellow thing is gold,
you will find that, if you know what the judgment means, you will be
able to say: Then, under such-and-such conditions--if you weigh it, for
example--you will have such-and-such a perception.  The appeal is not
from what you perceive to what you think, but from what you perceive now
to what you will perceive under such-and-such conditions.  Such a
reference indeed, implies thought and what is ordinarily called a
concept; but our knowledge of concepts used in science always means
that, if we know what is meant _e.g._ by calling anything gold, we know
how it will behave under such-and-such conditions.  The concept, in
Kant’s words, is a function of unity in our representations.  The task
of thought, then, is not to turn the mind away from what we perceive,
but to help us to transcend some of the limitations of our perceptions,
or, to speak more accurately, to set somewhat further back the limits of
our perception; for thought never entirely transcends these limits.  Our
knowledge is always conditioned by the fact that we are finite minds
living in a particular place and at a particular time; but thought can
extend the range of our perception in space and in time.

The limitations of our perception have, for Kant, a double aspect, which
determines his division of the first part of the _Critique_ into two
parts--the _Æsthetic_ and the _Analytic_.  In the first place, our
direct knowledge of space at any one time is always knowledge only of a
part of space; our direct knowledge of time, whether in present
consciousness or in memory of our own experience, is knowledge of only a
part of time; and the things in the space we directly perceive, or in
the time we experience, are what they are by their relation to space
outside the space we see, and time beyond the time we experience, and
that limited space and time we treat, therefore, as parts of one
all-embracing space and one all-embracing time, and in the conception of
an indefinitely extended space and time we can think of the space in
which all things exist, and the time in which all things occur, of which
we only see and experience a small part.  The science of astronomy
obviously talks of space and time far beyond anything we could ever
perceive, but we go beyond such direct perception in such simple
expressions as "forty miles from here" or "three days hence."  And, when
Kant says that space and time are only phenomenal, he does not mean that
they are mental, but that we only know them through perception, and that
we get at absolute space and time not by going from what we perceive to
what we think, but by thinking of what we perceive indefinitely
extended.  All definite statements about space must come back in the end
to "so far from _here_," all about time to "so long from _now_," and the
fact that all our knowledge of space and time is got by adding to or
extending in thought the space and time we directly perceive does,
according to Kant, solve some obstinate puzzles about the nature of
space and time.

In the second place, if we consider our knowledge of objects, we realise
that, as we said, at any one moment we only perceive them in part or
from one position. What we directly perceive of them is fragmentary and
discontinuous, one aspect seen now, and another aspect seen at another
time.  But we do not think of the things as existing in that
discontinuous way; we think of them as having a nature of their own.
That does not contradict, but is something very much more than, what we
perceive, and our knowledge of any object is got by piecing together the
aspects we directly perceive; but that piecing together, or synthesis,
is not haphazard.  It is governed by rules--rules partly derived from
the nature of the particular thing we are concerned with, and partly
more general rules, which come from the relation of this work of piecing
together to the framework of space and time by help of which it is done.

Kant’s conception of knowledge, then, is something like this.  Each of
us is in direct contact with reality, but we perceive directly only a
small part of it, and, as our consciousness moves on in time, and as we
change our position in space, we are directly conscious of different
small portions of reality.  A part of the whole is illumined by direct
perception, but the whole stretches beyond that indefinitely in space
and time.  In the part we directly perceive there is a temporal order
and a spatial order.  Things are given to us arranged in space and
ordered in time, and these arrangements or orders in the space and time
that is directly given to us in perception have certain rules, and we
think of these principles of arrangement as extending indefinitely
beyond the space and time given to us in perception. When we make
judgments about reality beyond our perception, we think of things as so
arranged in the space and time beyond our perception as we should see
them arranged were the range of our perception sufficiently wide.
Further, it is most important to remember that we do not remain in one
place and at one time and make guesses of what may happen in the
darkness beyond.  Though our perception at any one moment is limited, we
can connect what we see at one time with what we see at another.  We
can, by means of language and writing, use the perception of others to
fill out our experience, until gradually our scientific judgments, our
knowledge of what we should perceive under all sorts of possible
experience, seems to bulk much more largely than could our individual
perceptions. But we are still, Kant would say, getting at our knowledge
of what is beyond by piecing together what we and other people have
perceived, and the whole is always much more than that.

What, then, is meant by the contention that we can know things in
themselves which Kant is earnest to refute?  It might mean that we do in
perception attain to a complete knowledge, but that would be obviously
untrue.  As Kant understood the claim, it meant rather something like
this: In thought we are obviously not limited by our perception.  We are
always assuming certain principles, such as the laws of space or the
principle of causation, to hold of all reality, both what we do and what
we do not directly perceive.  May we not say, then, that these
principles hold of all reality, and argue from that fact to what the
nature of the whole must be?  If everything that we know is caused,
_e.g._, may we not apply the principle of causation to all reality and
say that it must have a cause?

When we come to consider the _Dialectic_, the second main division of
the first _Critique_, we shall notice Kant’s detailed analysis of these
arguments, and how he points out that you can in this way get
contradictory results. In the meantime it must be observed that in these
arguments we start from principles applied to what we perceive and
expressing connections between the different things we perceive, and
then apply them beyond everything we do or could perceive.  That means
that we imagine that we can take these principles out of relation not
only to this or that detail of perception, but out of relation to any
perception at all, and thus apprehend reality by thought independently
of perception.

Kant’s answer is that thought cannot directly apprehend the nature of
the whole, and these universal principles, such as the principle of
causation, are only principles by which we connect one perception with
another to amend the discontinuous and fragmentary nature of our
perception; they are rules for the synthesis of what we perceive.  By so
synthesising our perceptions we come to a less imperfect knowledge of
the whole, but apart from perceptions the principles have no meaning at
all.

Kant’s idealism, _i.e._ his insistence that we know only phenomena, not
things in themselves, is relevant to his problem, because it implies the
denial of the view that thought has objects apprehended independently of
perception, and because it insists that we can only know directly what
we perceive, or things as they appear to us, that in our process from
perception to knowledge we start with what is present to our perception
and end with what is or with what might be present to our perception,
and that this process is possible by reason of our continued
consciousness in time.  The process, Kant holds, is governed by certain
principles.  These depend upon the part played by space and time in all
our perception, and the manner in which we employ space and time in
piecing together our discontinuous perceptions.

Now, obviously it is quite possible to hold this position without having
thought out what is implied in being present to the mind in perception.
This is what Kant did.  He describes perception in different and
inconsistent ways.  The reason for this inconsistency is that Kant is
not concerned with the nature of perception, but with the relation of
what is immediately perceived to what is not but may be immediately
perceived, and he therefore never worked out any consistent account of
perception.  He sometimes talks of perception reaching objects directly,
and refutes the view that we perceive only what is in our mind.  (This,
indeed, is implied in his distinction of space and time as forms of
_external_ and _internal_ sense respectively.)  But usually he takes the
ordinary idealist view that we do not perceive things, but affections
produced in us by things.  Owing to this inconsistency Kant constantly
seems to be stating very much more than he has any right to.  This is
especially true in all that he says about knowledge being confined to
phenomena and not extending to things in themselves.  When he talks of
our knowing only phenomena, he sometimes seems to mean that we know
objects, things in themselves, only in part, in so far as they appear to
us.  That would make the distinction between the phenomenon and the
thing in itself a distinction between the same thing imperfectly and
perfectly understood.  He sometimes, and this is his more usual view,
seems to mean that we are aware of appearances, entities separate and
distinguishable from the objects which produce them in our minds.  But
if we work out in any of Kant’s arguments the point of his appeal to the
fact that knowledge is only of phenomena, we shall find that in every
case the difference between a subjective idealist and a realist view of
perception, of what "being present to the mind" means, is irrelevant,
and that his argument holds on either theory.

We must now turn to Kant’s account of space and time which is given in
the _Æsthetic_, the first part of the _Critique_.  He begins by showing
the impossibility of the two views of the nature of space and time which
then held the field, the views of Newton and Leibniz. Newton had thought
of space and time as realities, things in themselves existing along with
other things. But obviously we cannot think of space as a separate thing
existing by itself; for space without things would have no determination
or possibility of determination, and would be to us just nothing,
whereas, as it is, it is something to us.  The same holds of time.  The
Newtonian doctrine, Kant says, "forces us to assume two eternal,
infinite, and self-subsisting non-realities, which are there, without
any reality in them, only that they may comprehend all reality."  Just
because things are in space and time, space and time are not themselves
things.  But if this makes us say that space and time are only relations
between or qualities of things, we find ourselves in difficulties as
obvious.  We do not come to apprehend space and time by comparing things
and seeing that they have a common quality of being "spatial" or
"temporal," as we come to apprehend redness, _e.g._, by seeing red
things.  The perception of space and time is implied in each and every
perception of things.  We cannot, therefore, derive them from our study
of things; we must begin with them.  Further, Kant notices, as against
Leibniz, that space and time are not ordinary concepts because they have
no instances.  Different men are instances of man, but different spaces
or times are only parts or determinations of the one space and the one
time.  As against the view, then, that would make space and time only
relations, derived from our comparison of things which are not temporal
or spatial, Kant insists that space and time are a priori.  We cannot
see things without seeing them outside one another--_i.e._ in space--or
experience succession or change without experiencing it in time.  Space
and time, then, have a certain independence of things in space and time.
The qualitative differences of things in space or events in time do not
affect the nature of space and time, and we can and do study and discuss
spatial and temporal relations quite independently of such differences.

Space and time, then, can be abstracted from things in space and time.
Yet, on the other hand, we cannot think that space and time exist
independently of things.  They do not exist in abstraction; for, though
the specific differences of things in space and time are irrelevant to
the nature of space and time, if there were no things, or if there were
no differences, there could be no space and time as we know them. "The
empirical perception," says Kant, "is not compounded of phenomena and
space, of the sensation and the empty perception."  Space and time,
therefore, Kant says, are not things in themselves.

What, then, are they?  Kant’s answer is that they are forms of our
perception.  Space is the form of external perception, and time is the
form of internal perception, and Kant holds that by this answer we can
understand both how our knowledge of space and time may be a priori, how
spatial and temporal distinctions may be abstracted from the differences
of things, and how we may avoid the difficulties consequent on regarding
time and space as independent things.

What, then, does Kant mean by _form_?  He seems to mean two things,
which he does not clearly distinguish. The first meaning is best
described in his own words: "In the phenomenon I call what corresponds
to the sensation the matter of the phenomenon, and that which causes
that the manifold of the phenomenon is perceived as arranged in specific
relations I call the form of the phenomenon."  We are here face to face
with the ultimate difference of form and matter, or order and that which
is ordered.  When Kant calls time and space the form of our perception
he is simply calling attention to the fact that in all that we perceive
we find this distinction.  It is something found, given, not made by us.
By the word "form" Kant does not mean anything specially subjective as
contrasted with matter or content, for he carefully distinguishes
between space and time, and such qualities as colour, which get their
nature in part, he thinks, from the specific nature of the sense organ.
Compared with such qualities space and time are objective.  The phrase
"forms of our perception," then, does not really explain anything about
space and time; it only emphasises the fact that the distinction between
space and time and objects in them is found in what we perceive, and
that there is no meaning in discussing either side of the distinction as
though it were quite independent of what we perceive.

But form has also another meaning which justifies Kant in calling space
and time _only_ forms of our perception, and hence subjective.  For,
while these forms are _found_ in what we perceive, the distinctive part
which they play in our knowledge is due to the fact that we use space
and time as a framework by which to connect our scattered experiences.
We come to think of the space and time we perceive as parts of an
absolute space and an absolute time.  We perceive parts of space and
time, but absolute space and absolute time we do not perceive.  They are
the form we perceive imagined indefinitely extended.  We order the
particular parts of space and time which we do perceive in reference to
absolute space and time.  Yet absolute space and time are only known
through the finite parts of space and time which we actually experience.
Hence absolute space and time are not perceived realities or perceived
orders, but ways in which we organise and arrange what we perceive.
Now, the qualities of space and time which are hard to think of as the
qualities of a thing that exists, _i.e._ their infinite divisibility and
infinite extension, are qualities of absolute space and time.  When we
say that space is infinitely divisible, we do not mean that any existing
thing is made up of an infinite number of parts.  The divisibility of
space and the divisibility of matter are quite different.  An inch as a
spatial determination is infinitely divisible, but the divisibility of
the actual stuff which any inch may measure is a matter of empirical
investigation, and ought to admit of a definite answer.  That means
that, while we use determinations of space which we consider infinitely
divisible and infinitely extensible to measure things in space, we do
not consider that these determinations, fractions, or multiples of
inches or centimetres, have anything to do with the constitution of the
thing they measure.  It was not put together in fractions of inches.
Thus we must distinguish between space as the form of what we perceive,
the next-each-otherness of things, and the use we make of that form to
construct by means of measurement order in all different perception.
The first is obviously the form only of what we perceive, and gives rise
to no transcendental questions.  But the second, infinite space, though
it seems to transcend our perception, has still only meaning in
reference to perception, is only a way of ordering our perceptions.  The
same holds good of time.

We can see now what Kant means by saying that time and space are
empirically real and transcendentally ideal.  Kant does not maintain
that space and time are illusions.  They are a constant element of what
is given us in perception.  It is only when we try and go beyond our
perceptions, and take space and time as things existing independently of
what we perceive, thus trying to transcend the limits of possible
perception, that we fall into illusion.  Space and time have meaning
only as elements in what we perceive, or in connecting what we perceive
now with what we may perceive.




                              *CHAPTER IV*

       *THE CATEGORIES AND THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE UNDERSTANDING*


Kant makes the distinction between perception and understanding depend
upon the distinction between the receptivity and the spontaneity of the
mind.  In the _Æsthetic_ he has been concerned with time and space as
elements in what seems to be given to the mind.  Before we begin to ask
the questions of science, before we analyse, describe, or classify,
before we have to think, we perceive.  Time and space are not got at by
thinking or generalisation.  For before we can say anything about any
part of our experience, it is _given_ us in a certain spatial and
temporal order.  If we open our eyes at any moment, we are, without any
conscious effort of thought on our part, confronted with an elaborate
content.  It seems simple to distinguish this receptive attitude of the
mind in perception from its activity in thinking.

The distinction is not really so simple as it appears. For we all know
that what we perceive depends, at least to some extent, on the mind’s
activity.  We are familiar with the reflection that men see what they
want to see or what they are looking for.  This is clearly shown in the
case of hearing by the difference in what we hear when we are listening
to a language we understand and when we are listening to an unfamiliar
language, or in the common experience when, after failing to hear what
someone has said, we think what it must have been, and then seem to
recall the sound, not as we heard it, but as we should have heard it if
we had heard it rightly.  Anyone who reflects on the process of fast
reading will realise that we do not perceive or notice all the letters
on a page; we fill in from our imagination, as we discover when we read
words that are not on the page.  It is a very hard thing, giving up all
interpretation and inference, to describe faithfully just what is there
to see.

Passive perception, then, does not exist, and our thought affects our
perception.  Yet, at the same time, the distinction between thought and
perception, although not simple, is real.  For although our previous
thought affects our perception and we see things already classified, see
books, and tables, and chairs, not merely coloured surfaces, yet we can
distinguish between simple immediate perception and the process of
thought which begins when we ask, What is that? _i.e._ when we begin to
make judgments.

The characteristic of thought, according to Kant, is synthesis, or
putting together, and all synthesis is the work of the mind.  When we
begin to describe and classify the contents of our perception, we pick
out separate qualities from the continuous whole we perceive, and group
them together.  This grouping is, of course, determined by the
likenesses and differences which we perceive everywhere, but we do not,
in judging, confine ourselves to noticing likeness and difference.  For
any content of our perception has some point of resemblance, and some of
difference with any other.  We are concerned with likenesses that go
with or are the signs of other likenesses.  On the basis of perceived
likeness we erect the notion of things and qualities of a certain kind.
In doing this we go beyond what we see, and unite and arrange the
contents of our perception through concepts.  That is what we are doing
when we say that is a so-and-so.  For example, if I say that rock is
like a dog, I am simply expressing a likeness I perceive.  I do not
imply that the rock is therefore alive or will bark; I am not going
beyond how the rock looks; but if I say that object is a dog, I assert
that all that is implied in being a dog will hold of that object, _i.e._
that it will have a certain appearance and behaviour, which is known.  I
can anticipate, therefore, how it will behave, look, and sound under
certain circumstances. All these phenomena, the appearance, the barking,
and running, though I may perceive them at different times and places,
are grouped together in the judgment, "That is a dog."  This is what
Kant means by saying, "Concepts depend on functions.  By function I mean
the unity of the act of arranging different representations under one
common representation."  Concepts, therefore, always refer to
perception, and it is by means of concepts that we are enabled to
introduce such order into what we perceive, that we can anticipate from
what we perceive what we shall perceive. "Perceptions without concepts
are blind."  Without concepts what we perceive would not lead us in any
way beyond what is immediately given.  "Thoughts without contents are
empty."  Concepts are nothing, and have no meaning apart from the
contents of perception which they unify.

Most of these concepts are what is called empirical. We get at them by
observing likenesses and differences in what we perceive, and observing
which are significant and important, and which are what we call
accidental. Science, in its discovery of laws, is only carrying further
this process which is implied in all simple judgments. By observing
likenesses and differences, their uniformities and variations, and
discovering those which are a key to the rest, we improve our concepts,
and thereby have more knowledge of what we call natural laws, and can
more and more anticipate experience.  With these empirical concepts and
their development Kant is not concerned.  But there are certain concepts
of which Hume had observed that they are not obtained in the ordinary
way from an examination of the contents of experience.  The two with
which he chiefly concerned himself were substance and cause.  These
concepts seems to play an especially important part in the ordering and
arranging of the concepts of experience.  For the work of science, in
moving from a simple observation of likenesses and differences to a
knowledge of empirical laws, depends upon certain assumptions or
principles, like the principle of causation or the principle of the
conservation of energy.  These principles imply concepts not derived,
like the others, from generalisation from experience; they are the
synthetic a priori judgments which, as we have seen, constituted a
special problem for Kant.

Kant is first concerned to ask where these a priori concepts come from,
and how many of them there are. This inquiry he calls the metaphysical
deduction of the categories.  Having answered that question, he then
goes on to ask by what right we assume these principles in our dealing
with experience.  This, the most important and difficult section of the
_Critique_, he calls the transcendental deduction of the categories.

Most concepts, as we saw, are empirical.  We take certain likenesses and
differences we observe as the mark of a real unity in the things.  The
different natures of different things we do not fully know, but we
distinguish them by the different uniformities we observe, and in order
to explain our experience we assume the unity underlying these perceived
likenesses.  Iron, dog, fire, are names for the natures of things which
we see manifested in our experience.  The concept, then, is got from
what we perceive, though it stands for something more than we perceive.
How, then, can there be any concepts which are not got from the
empirical differences of things we perceive?  Let us take such a concept
as substance, and see whether we can discover where it comes from.
Locke had been puzzled by discovering that he could not, in any object,
find anything which was its substantiality.  Calling anything a
substance is not like saying that it is hard, or green, or heavy; we are
not concerned with specific differences in things, but we are not
therefore saying what is meaningless. There is something, namely
substance, which we can distinguish from the hardness, or colour, or
weight that we perceive.  That something we do not perceive; we assume
it whenever we talk of a thing being hard, and green, and heavy.  A
thing’s substantiality is just the unity of its perceivable qualities.
But such a unity is implied in the concept of any object.  Substance,
then, is a name for one of the general principles implied in our
assuming that what we perceive are real objects.

Kant generalises the result of this inquiry into particular concepts of
this kind.  He holds that a priori concepts or categories (_i.e._ the
concepts which we do not get from empirical differences of things) stand
for principles implied in thinking of things as objects or in judging.
If we want, therefore, to find out the number of the categories, we must
ask how many different kinds of unity are implied in judgment, or what
are the conditions of judging any object.  Kant does not here help, but
rather misleads us in this inquiry.  For he unfortunately thought that
the different kinds of judgment could be discovered without further ado
by taking the list given in formal logic.  He therefore first makes a
list of categories, based on the logical forms of judgment, and then
tries to show the connection between these categories and the principles
which were, as he had discovered, assumed in the mathematical sciences.

The actual movement of his thought is, I think, different.  He asks if
there are any general conditions implied in all judgment.  His answer is
that all judgments, all statements, that is, which claim to be true,
imply determination of time and space.  From that determination certain
principles can be deduced.  If time and space are implied in all
judging, then these principles will equally be implied, and will hold of
all things which can be objects for us.

It will be easier to understand Kant’s arguments if we invert the order
of the _Critique_ and begin with examining the nature of the principles
of the understanding or of one of them.

The categories which are of importance in Kant’s argument are quantity,
quality, substance, causation, and reciprocity, and necessity,
possibility, and actuality. The last three are less important than the
others, and we shall not deal with them.

To the first five of these categories correspond the following
principles:

(1) Quantity.  "All phenomena are, with reference to their perception,
extensive quantities."

(2) Quality.  "In all phenomena the real, which is the object of a
sensation, has intensive quantity, that is, a degree."

The last three are classed under a general heading of _Analogies of
Experience_, whose principle is: "Experience is possible only through
the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions."  They are

(3) _The principle of the permanence of substance_.  "In all changes of
phenomena the substance is permanent, and its quantum is neither
increased nor diminished in nature."

(4) _Principle of the succession of time, according to the Law of
Causality_.  "All changes take place according to the law of connection
between cause and effect."

(5) _Principle of co-existence, according to the law of reciprocity or
community_.  "All substances, so far as they can be perceived as
co-existent in space, are always affecting each other reciprocally."

These principles, Kant points out, are assumed in the sciences of
applied mathematics.  The application of geometry to the world we
experience assumes that all phenomena are extensive quantities; physics
assumes that quantitative expression can be given to the qualities of
objects other than their size, their weight, _e.g._, and all scientific
determination of change assumes the three principles which Kant calls
analogies of experience: the permanence or conservation of amount in
changes, the necessary connection of things in time, and the reciprocal
interdependence of things which exist at the same time.  These
principles are not proved by science; their validity is assumed in all
scientific investigation. On what, then, does it rest?

We shall follow Kant’s argument more easily if we take his account of
one of these principles--the principle of causation.  For what is said
of that will hold, with necessary changes, of the others, and, as we
have noticed, it was Hume’s criticism of causation which first led Kant
to formulate the critical problem.  Hume had pointed out that we had
never such insight into causal connection as to be able, from mere
inspection of a cause, to foretell the effect without any reference to
experience.  He declared, on the contrary, that there was no difference
between observed succession and causation so far as concerned the
objects observed.  In each case we see first one thing and then another.
The difference, then, between mere succession and causal connection can
only be in us, in the way we come to feel about certain successions we
observe.  In technical language, the necessity of causation is
subjective.

How does Kant answer this position?  He begins, as is usual with him, by
taking the problem a little further back.  Causation is a connection we
predicate between what we see at one time, and what we see at another.
Now if we take into account only the fact that we see one thing at one
time and another thing at another, there is no difference between what
we see when we successively see two things which we judge to co-exist,
and when we see two things one of which we judge to have succeeded the
other in time.  Hume, therefore, proved too much.  His argument would
show that we have no grounds for distinguishing between apprehension of
succession and succession in apprehending, but such a distinction is the
basis of our apprehension and understanding of change or movement.  If,
then, we examine how we distinguish between apprehension of succession
and succession in apprehending, we may see on what the principle of
causation is based.

An instance will help to make this point clear. Suppose that I am
sitting in a room, and look first at the door and then turn round and
look at the window. There are two successive acts of apprehending; the
content of the first is the door, of the second, the window, but the
succession, I say, is in my apprehending.  The door and the window have
co-existed all the time. Suppose, again, that I look out of the window
and see a cab in front of the house opposite, come back into the room,
and then look out again and see the cab in front of a house further
down.  Here, again, are two successive acts of apprehending, the content
of the first houses with cab in front of one house, of the second houses
with cab in front of another.  This time I say the houses have gone on
co-existing, but the cab has moved.  The difference in what I see this
time is due not to me, but to the cab.  The succession is in the thing
apprehended.  If we just think of the contents apprehended, we have
first A, then B, and say A and B co-exist in the first instance, and
have CD and CE, and say D and E have been successive in the other.  Why
in the second case do we not say when we look out of the window the
second time: Here is another row of houses, which, though they look
exactly the same as the ones I saw last time, have got the cab in a
different place?  That is the land of thing one does say in a dream.
Why would it be inadmissible in waking life?

Let us first ask how we ever come to make the distinction between change
in the content of our perception, which is due to change in us, and
change in the things we perceive.  Look out of a window into a busy
street.  As we look certain things remain the same, the houses opposite,
the lamp-posts, and so on, but other things change.  The permanence of
part of the contents guarantees us that the change we perceive is not
due to us: if it were, these would change also.  Therefore it must be in
certain of the things.  Change is perceived against a background that is
permanent and does not change.  But any such particular perception is,
of course, very limited.  We do not see all the world at once, and we
only come to know a larger extent of reality by means of memory, which
enables us to put together what we see at one time with what we see at
another. We have got to try and understand how it is that we make this
distinction, which is clear to us in small isolated bits of experience,
hold of all experience.  Now if reality did not change, and we were
conscious of our own movements, we could go from one point to another of
reality and back again, and could be aware that the changes in our
perception were all due, not to change in reality, but to us--were our
history.  We should know that the different things we saw were
co-existing all the time, and we should, in describing them, try to
describe them, as in a map, as we should perceive them if we saw them
all at once.  The succession would be subjective, the co-existence
objective.  If we perceived nothing but change, we should be incapable
of distinguishing between our changes and the change outside us, for all
succession in our experiencing would be experience of what was
successive, and there could be no distinction between psychology and
science.  Our experience of reality is not like either of these
suppositions, but like both of them combined.  Some succession of our
experiencing is experience of the co-existing, some experience of
succession.

Reality stretches out beyond us in space, some of it changing and some
of it permanent; we cannot tell simply from the difference in what we
perceive whether the difference comes from change in us or change in the
thing.  We can tell that only on the assumption that we are having
fragmentary views of a whole that is continuous.  The only continuity we
know is the continuity of our own experience made possible by memory,
and we try to interpret that experience in the light of the larger
continuity of the world which our experience breaks up.  As we go from
one place to another, notice now this thing, now that, we can test
interpretations made on this assumption.  Wrong interpretations are
those which make our experience inconsistent.  If we thought that what
happened at one time had no relation with what happened at another, that
anything might happen any time, our experience and our own life would be
the merest jumble.  Our experience attains consistency only as we learn
more and more to disentangle the differences in experience which come
from our changes, from the changes and the variety which are part of the
whole connected system of reality, of which we see now one fragment,
then another.  The distinction between succession in our apprehending
and apprehension of succession, which is the basis of all experience of
change, implies the recognition of change as not arbitrary but part of a
connected system of reality.  As Kant puts it in his formulation of the
principle of the analogies of experience, "Experience is only possible
by means of the representation of a necessary connection of
perceptions."

But if our perception of reality is fragmentary, how can we think of
reality as other than fragmentary, how can we fill up the gaps?  Only by
thinking of the whole as a connected system in space and time.  For it
is the nature of space and time that they can be thought of
independently of the specific nature of the things in space and time,
and that the space and time we perceive in any one experience must be
thought of as parts of an all-embracing space and an all-embracing time.
We cannot follow the whole history of a change from A to B, we can only
say that, if our experience is to have any consistency, we must think
that the fact that we first saw A and then saw B implies in this case
that the change from A to B is part of the continuous system of change
in time, that it is determined in time.  But to think of an event as
determined in time is not to think of it as determined by time, for time
in itself could not produce one thing more than another.  It is to think
of it as determined by the nature of what precedes it in time.  We
therefore conclude that like causes have like effects; for, if anything
could cause anything, we should never know that change in what we
observed was due to change in us--in the position of our bodies,
_e.g._--and the experience of objective change would be impossible.

The principle does not tell us of itself what causes what.  That can
only be discovered by empirical investigation.  That is necessary
because we do not, as we seem to have assumed above, simply see one
thing becoming another.  We see parts of all kinds of changes. Hence
succession may be objective but not causal. Science has, by observation
and experiment, to disentangle and isolate different changes, but it
could not do this without assuming the principle of causality.

Causation, then, and the other assumptions of the physical sciences, are
shown by Kant to be "grounds of the possibility of experience."  We
cannot deny them without denying elementary distinctions in our
experience, without which life would be a chaos, and which are assumed
and justified every moment.  While Kant thus demonstrates the validity
of such principles, he is also insistent on the limitations of their
application.  They are principles which give consistency to experience,
but must not be applied save in reference to what we experience.  They
apply, in his words, "only to phenomena."  The purport of this
limitation can, again, be most easily seen by examining the principle of
causality.  By means of that principle we connect one event with
another, but the reality is not two different but connected events, but
a continuous process.  The continuous process escapes us, because our
perception of it is fragmentary and discontinuous. Inasmuch as a
judgment of causal connection asserts that the events we separately
notice are connected, it is true, but it is false if taken to imply that
reality consists of a series of discontinuous events or stages which are
yet connected.  Such an assumption would mean, in Kant’s words, that
causation is applied not to phenomena (things as they appear to us), but
to things in themselves (things considered apart from the manner in
which they appear to us).  If we realise its falsehood, we can, he
thinks, evade the contradictions which he examines in the _Dialectic_.




                              *CHAPTER V*

             *THE ANTINOMIES AND CRITICISM OF THE PROOFS OF
                         THE EXISTENCE OF GOD*


So far we have been considering the positive side of Kant’s argument,
his attempt to confirm the validity of the principles of science.  We
must now notice the negative side, his attempt to limit the application
of these principles, and his denial of the possibility of knowledge in
certain spheres.

We saw that Kant in his _Prolegomena_ summed up the argument of the
three chief divisions of the _Critique_ as an answer to the questions:
How is mathematics possible?  How is pure science of nature possible?
and, How is metaphysics possible?  He qualified the last question by
adding "as a natural disposition of the mind."  The argument of the
_Dialectic_ is that metaphysics, in the sense of inquiry into objects
which transcend the bounds of experience, is not possible as a science,
but that metaphysical questions arise naturally from the nature of human
reason.  They cannot be answered.  All we can do is to see why we cannot
answer them.

Kant thought of knowledge as a process of extending the bounds of
perception, of piecing together the fragmentary glimpses we get of the
world, stretching them out in spatial and temporal determinations that
go beyond what we have actually experienced, connecting and linking up
the events which we perceive discontinuously.  As science extends, the
range of our knowledge widens, but the process of extension never
reaches its completion.  There are always more facts to be discovered
and explained.  Science, therefore, can never rest content with its
achievements, but must always demand that the investigation of
conditions should be pushed further back and on.  From this sense of the
incompleteness of all actual knowledge, and of all there is that might
be but is not known, arises what Kant calls an ideal of reason, a demand
that, in all investigation into the conditioned, we should go on till we
come to the totality of conditions.  This ideal he holds to be
serviceable and necessary.  It has, however, a natural tendency to pass
from an ideal to an idea, and in so doing it gives rise to the
contradictions with which the _Dialectic_ is concerned.  If all our
investigation is governed by the thought that it must go on until it
reaches completion, we naturally speculate on the fulfilment of that
ideal, and try to form an idea of that totality of conditions, of how we
should think the world if we knew it in its completeness.  Herein we
hypostatize the ideal or make it an idea, and we fall into
contradiction; for we cannot really know the whole without knowing all
its parts.  If we give up the slow and never-completed process of
knowing one part after another, and try to jump to the idea of the
whole, we reach quite contrary results, as we apply to the conception of
the whole one or other of two assumptions implied in our investigation
of the parts.

Kant sharply distinguishes between the principles of the pure
understanding and the ideas of reason.  The former are implied in all
our knowledge, and the fact that experience is not chaotic confirms them
at every moment.  The second are ideals which guide knowledge, but are
never realised.  He calls them ideas of reason, because it is the
special task of reason to lay down rules for the proper and complete
working of the understanding.  This task, he thinks, is exemplified in
the logical nature of the syllogism which brings into unity the
judgments of the understanding.  As he used the forms of judgment as a
guiding thread to discover a complete list of categories of the
understanding, so he uses the forms of syllogism to discover a complete
list of the ideas of reason.  In both cases Kant’s reference to logical
forms is far-fetched.  Actually the list in the _Dialectic_ seems to be
influenced by a number of considerations not always consistent.

There are three main divisions of the _Dialectic_.  (The first Kant
calls the paralogisms of rational psychology.)  All knowing and
experience imply the unity of the self which knows.  In actual
experience that unity is qualified by the nature of what it unites, but
we may try to think of it apart from and independent of this. This leads
to an attempt to know the self by asking what must be its nature if it
has the unity implied in knowing, and to argue that the soul is a
substance and simple, not affected by the changes in the matter which it
knows and therefore immortal.

The second division arises from the fact that in knowledge we are
concerned with series--a series of addings together and a series of
divisions, as of parts of space and time; a series of things arising one
from the other, as in causation; and a series of things in dependence
one upon the other.  The _ideas_ of reason come from the thought of
these series completed, and produce what Kant calls antinomies.  For if
we start with the thought that what we are trying to apprehend must be a
whole, we get one series of results; if with the thought that we can
only apprehend the whole by going from condition to condition
indefinitely, we get another.  Kant distinguishes four antinomies, each
with thesis and antithesis.  The thesis of the first is, "The world has
a beginning in time, and is limited also in regard to space"; the
antithesis, "The world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is
infinite, in respect both to time and space."  The thesis of the second
is, "Every compound substance in the world consists of simple parts, and
nothing exists anywhere but the simple or what is composed of it"; the
antithesis is the contrary of this.  The thesis of the third is,
"Causality, according to the laws of nature, is not the only causality
from which all the phenomena of the world can be deduced.  In order to
account for these phenomena it is necessary also to admit another
causality, that of freedom"; the antithesis, "There is no freedom, but
everything in the world takes place entirely according to the laws of
nature."  The thesis of the fourth is, "There exists an absolutely
necessary Being belonging to the world, either as a part or as a cause
of it"; the antithesis is a denial of this.

The problems of the third division of the _Dialectic_ arises from an
attempt to think of a whole which shall include both the known world and
the mind that knows. This attempt, which Kant calls the ideal of pure
reason, leads to proofs of the existence of God.

As the _Dialectic_ proceeds, it becomes clear that Kant has another list
to hand.  He enumerates, as the three great objects of metaphysical
inquiry, God, Freedom, and immortality, and in his discussion of the
ideas of reason he treats them principally as attempts to give definite
and dogmatic answers to the problems suggested by these three topics.

Immortality is the subject of what Kant calls the paralogisms of
rational psychology.  He argues that all attempts to prove the
immortality of the soul by a priori arguments involve an argument of
this kind: they begin by noting that death is always dissolution of some
kind, that, therefore, what is not made up of parts and cannot be
dissolved, cannot die.  Then they urge that the soul is not made up of
parts, and therefore cannot die.  The fallacy in this argument is that
it treats the unity of the self as though it were an object of
knowledge.  We can show that knowledge is only possible if the self has
a unity other than that of a spatial whole, but we cannot therefore
argue that it must be exactly like a spatial whole, in the sense that
death in it can only be brought about by dissolution, but unlike a
spatial whole in that in it there is nothing to be dissolved.  The real
nature of the unity of the self, Kant argues, cannot be known.  All we
can do is to reject a priori arguments either for or against its
immortality.

Freedom is treated in the third antinomy of pure reason, and to that
Kant devotes most attention, but others of the antinomies are concerned
with the difficulties arising from the application of spatial and
temporal determinations to reality as a whole, and to the category of
necessity.  Kant makes a distinction between the first two and the
second two antinomies.  It is the first two that express the inadequacy
of temporal or spatial determination to reality as a whole.  All such
determination implies measurement, and measurement is always a relation
of part to part.  The antitheses of both antinomies express the
inadequacy of any number to the expression of the nature of the whole,
the thesis the inadequacy of regarding reality as an aggregate or
addition of any kind.  Each is strong in what it denies, and Kant’s
solution is that both thesis and antithesis are false, because you
cannot apply spatial or temporal determination to the world as a whole.

In contrast the solution of the other antinomies is that both thesis and
antithesis are true, and that is possible because they are concerned
with different things.  The third antinomy arises from the difficulty of
applying the category of causation to the world as a whole.  The
assumption underlying the thesis is not, as is sometimes asserted,
merely that the notion of infinity in itself implies a contradiction,
but that a determinate result must have a determinate cause.  If we
think of what actually exists now as having been caused by what has
preceded it, we must think of that which has had a determinate result
being itself determinate. It is the familiar argument for a first cause.
In causation we seem to be relating one event to another event, and are
really only putting the question of origination further back.  Yet, if
we say that therefore we must suppose an absolute origination of change,
a beginning of the series, we have to answer the question, How is it
possible to think of the originating number of the series?  For to think
that something can arise from nothing is to contradict the principle of
causation.

Kant’s solution to this difficulty is important, for it had great
influence upon his ethical theory.  The category of causation applies
only to phenomena.  If we think of things as phenomena we must recognise
that they are subject to the principle of causation; if we think of them
as things in themselves, the category of causation does not apply to
them, and their action may be free.  The same action may therefore on
its phenomenal side be determined, and on its nominal side, as the
action of a thing in itself, be free. This may seem to be solving one
contradiction by propounding another, till we remember that in causation
we do not explain the relation of cause to effect.  The relation we
discover is between one instance of cause and effect and another.  Like
causes have like effects. The principle applies, then, in so far as
things are like one another.  It applies to changes which are aggregates
or complexes of simpler changes which are like other changes.  If and in
so far as there are things which are more than aggregates of their
elements, and are therefore unique, there are things to whose changes no
laws of cause and effect are adequate.  The point may be illustrated by
the way we think about character. If we think of a man’s character as
his characteristics, his being this or that _kind_ of person, we must
think of his action as so far determined, but that does not prevent us
from thinking of his individuality as something more than any sum or
combination of characteristics, as something essentially alive, which
escapes all attempts to bind it by rules.  It is the difference in
Kant’s words between man regarded "from the point of view of
anthropology," and man regarded as a responsible moral being.  We shall
see in the next chapter that this distinction is the basis of Kant’s
moral theory. Here it must be noted that he does not claim that his
solution of the third antinomy proves the fact of freedom.  That, he
held, no merely intellectual argument could prove.  It only defends the
possibility of freedom.

The third division of the _Dialectic_ is an examination of the proofs of
the existence of God.  When we study Kant’s account of them, we find we
are concerned not, as elsewhere in the _Dialectic_, with a conflict
springing from the nature of reason itself, but with the relation of
thought and conduct.  Kant distinguishes three proofs of the existence
of God--the ontological, the cosmological, and the
physico-theological--but he maintains that the last two really rest upon
and imply the first.  The first, the ontological proof, is the argument
that the very conception of a perfect being implies existence.  It is
the only proof of moral importance, inasmuch as it attempts to argue a
priori that a being of perfect morality must exist.  Kant’s answer to it
is that, to argue that we could not conceive a perfect being unless we
conceived that being’s existence, is to suppose that to conceive of a
thing, and to conceive of the same thing existing, is to conceive of
different things. Existence, he says, adds nothing to the concept of an
object. Kant’s objection to the ontological proof has been criticised.
But the proof either assumes that God is a being independent of and
separate from the rest of reality, and then, as Kant says, we may
conceive God as existing, but our conception not being necessitated,
carries no necessity with it.  (If I conceive a hundred dollars to be in
my pocket, he says, I conceive them to be there; but that does not mean
the dollars are there.)  Or if we say that reality must be thought of as
existing, the answer is, Yes, but must reality necessarily be thought of
as morally perfect?  It is this last assumption which alone makes the
ontological proof worth proving; for arguments about the existence or
non-existence of God are mere quarrels about words, except in so far as
they are concerned with moral issues.  But moral issues cannot be solved
by a consideration of purely intellectual assumptions.  The nature of
the other two proofs of God’s existence makes this clear. The second,
the cosmological, is the argument that if anything exists, something
must necessarily exist. Kant’s answer is that this is sound so far as it
goes, but it does not prove that what necessarily exists is a morally
perfect being.  The third, the physico-theological argument, is the
familiar argument from design.  Kant treats this argument with much
greater respect than the other two, but insists that we must see how far
it will carry us.  If we are going to infer the nature of God from the
nature of the world as we see it, we must do so honestly.  But though we
see design in the world, we do not see perfection, and on the basis of
this argument we cannot ignore the imperfection and want of harmony
which is as patent as the harmony and design.

Kant’s analysis of these proofs seems negative.  Its real purport is to
insist that religion cannot be dissociated from moral experience, that
the knowledge of God, which is the concern of religion, is not got by
intellectual speculation, but in the moral life.  When he said that he
had limited reason to make room for faith, he did not mean that men
could not prove the existence of God, but might believe in it if they
pleased.  He meant that God is implied and known above all in moral
action.  His criticism of these classical proofs is thus the beginning
of that revivified philosophy of religion whose chief representatives
have been Schleiermacher and Ritschl.




                              *CHAPTER VI*

                         *KANT’S MORAL THEORY*


Kant’s moral theory is an integral part of his philosophical system.  If
the _Critique of Pure Reason_ argues the impotence of reason in the
sphere of speculation, the _Critique of Practical Reason_ affirms its
sovereignty in the sphere of practice.  The second _Critique_ is thus
the complement of the first.  Kant’s treatment of moral problems being
largely the consequence of the conclusions of the first _Critique_, his
moral theory is thus mainly metaphysical.  The title of one of his works
on moral theory, _Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals_,
bears this out.  There were, no doubt, other influences which had their
effect on his conception of morality.  He tells us himself that he was
inspired by the teaching of Rousseau on the dignity and worth of man.
He was undoubtedly repelled into a reaction against the sentimental
school of Shaftesbury, which in its German adherents insisted on the
agreeable and gentlemanly nature of virtue with an almost sickly
sentiment. This reaction accounts for the extreme emphasis laid by Kant
on the divorce between duty and any kind of inclination.  But his
doctrine as a whole can only be understood in the light of the
conclusions of the first _Critique_.

Kant’s conception of freedom or autonomy of the will is the key to his
moral theory.  "On the hypothesis of freedom of the will," he says,
"morality together with its principle follows from it by mere analysis
of the conception."  We saw in the last chapter that Kant regarded human
action, when looked at from an anthropological point of view, as
phenomenal, and therefore subject to the law of cause and effect.  If we
think of man as a creature of inclination, with likes and dislikes, we
seem, in considering men’s differences from one another in this respect,
to be dealing with matters of fact over which men have no control.  We
are born and grow up with different natures, with the result that one
man likes one thing, another another; one man’s temptations do not tempt
another, what one man finds easy another finds difficult.  We seem here
to be in a world where causation rules.  If men act differently, it is
because their external environment, acting upon their different natures,
calls out different responses.  So far, then, says Kant, as men act
according to inclination, do things because they like doing them, or
avoid them because they dislike them, their actions are what he calls
heteronomous, governed by laws over which they have no control.  We
assume, whenever we are trying to explain human actions, that they are
the result of the interaction of character and environment, and are not
to be praised or blamed but understood.  _Tout comprendre est tout
pardonner_.

But when we consider our moral judgments we seem to be in a different
world, for there are some actions which we think we or others ought to
have done or ought not to have done, and this obligation has nothing to
do with our likes and dislikes.  If we look back upon a past action of
our own, we may see why we did it, understand how the temptation to it
appealed with peculiar strength to something in our nature, yet
nevertheless we may say that we ought not to have done it, and with that
judgment goes the conviction that we need not have done it.  The
conception of "what ought to be" is on a different plane from the
conception of "what is," and assumes a different kind of causality.  It
assumes that, when we are done with our analysis of character, of a
man’s likes and dislikes and the effect of circumstances upon them, we
can still assume that it is in his power to do what he ought and to
abstain from doing what he ought not.  We praise the first and blame the
second, whether in ourselves or others, just because we assume, over and
above inclination and disinclination, a possibility of acting or not
acting as duty demands.

Thus Kant analyses the assumption of moral judgment. But it is still no
more than an assumption, and he has to ask how it can be reconciled with
the seemingly contradictory principle of causation.  The analysis of the
third antinomy in the first _Critique_, as we saw, prepared the way by
maintaining that the same action might be phenomenally determined, and
free as the action of a thing in itself, were there another form of
causality--free causality or self-determination.  For the existence of
such another form of causality the first _Critique_ offered no evidence.
Kant’s concern is to show that morality assumes it; for the claim of
duty is that a man should not act as a creature of inclination, of likes
and dislikes.  Duty claims to cut across all such empirical
considerations.  The motive to do what duty demands must come from
elsewhere.  It may then be found to be a claim that man should act not
as a part of the physical world, but as a moral being.  For man, as well
as an observer and understander of other men, is also a moral agent.  As
such he stands in quite different relations to other men.  He treats
them and himself as moral agents, responsible for their actions. As a
member of the world of moral relations he acknowledges a system of
rights and duties, he holds himself responsible to other men as they are
responsible to him, and all this has nothing to do with what a man wants
or does not want to do, with how easy or how difficult he may find it to
perform what duty demands.  In this he is assuming in himself and other
men a power of determining the will in accordance with the moral law.
That, just because it takes no account of likes and dislikes, cannot be
derived from these or from considerations of circumstances or
environment.  It must be deducible from the nature of man as a moral
being.  In obeying the moral law, then, man will be obeying a law that
comes from himself.  His will will be self-legislative.  This power of
acting in accordance with a law that comes from the nature of man as a
rational, responsible being, and not as a member of the world of causes
and effects, is moral freedom; it is the assumption of all moral
judgment and action.  It cannot, Kant holds, be _explained_.  For all
explanation is the work of the understanding, and that can explain only
phenomena.  It is enough that the first _Critique_ has shown that
phenomenal causality is not inconsistent with the possibility of another
causality.  In the moral sphere we act and judge as if we were free.
The moral law and duty make claims upon us on the same assumption.
Moral freedom, then, is the ground of the possibility of moral
experience.

Kant’s account of duty is determined by the sharp separation which he
makes of man as moral agent and man regarded "from the point of view of
anthropology."  The commands of duty must be derived solely from the
nature of man as a moral agent.  If they were the consequence of man’s
empirical nature or his surroundings, they would have no claim to
override his promptings of inclination or pleasure.  He describes these
commands as categorical, and the principle of morality as a categorical
imperative.  The meaning of this phrase lies in its opposition to
hypothetical.  Many commands and principles are, Kant says,
hypothetical.  They assume that men desire certain ends, happiness or
health or success, and the actions they advise are advised as means to
such ends.  The law of morality is quite different from such prudential
maxims.  It does not say, "If you want to be happy or to save your soul,
then act thus and thus."  Its commands are absolute, for they appeal to
man simply as a rational being. They must therefore be derived solely
from a consideration of man’s rationality.  It is difficult at first
sight to see how any commands can be deduced from a consideration so
abstract.  How, we might say, can man’s rationality be known and
recognised except in the content of what he does and thinks?

Kant seeks to derive his imperative from the contrast between acting as
a moral agent and following inclination.  Man regards himself as a moral
agent, morally responsible for his conduct, and he regards others as
morally responsible, whatever his or their particular nature or
character may be.  That means that he must act as he thinks any one else
would be bound to act, and from this Kant deduces his formulation of the
categorical imperative: "_Act only according to that maxim which you can
at the same time will to be a universal law_."  Another formula
indicates more clearly the relation of duty to a society of moral agents
responsible to one another: "_Act so that you treat humanity, in your
person and in the person of every one else, always as an end as well as
a means, never merely as a means_."  It is only by following such
imperatives that we can rise above the promptings of circumstance, for
only thus is the will self-legislative.  In obeying such an imperative
our will is self-determined, for it is following a principle that is
derived from man’s nature as independent and transcendent of the world
of phenomena.  Hence in moral action we are in contact with the reality
of things more truly than in any understanding of phenomena.  The moral
law has a dignity which no natural inclinations or likings can have, and
the good-will, the will which follows such a law, has a similar worth
and dignity.  "There is nothing in the world--nay, even beyond the
world--nothing conceivable, which can be regarded as good without
qualification, saving alone a good will."

Such in outline is Kant’s account of morality.  A discussion of some of
the difficulties which a consideration of it suggests may help to make
its purport more clear.  Kant holds that the principles of right action
can be deduced directly from the imperative he has formulated, and need
take therefore no account of historical circumstance.  Now, it is easy
to show that, when we do an action which we know to be wrong, we are
making an exception in our own favour.  We cannot universalise the maxim
of our own conduct.  When we do what we know to be wrong, we recognise
what is right.  We say, "This is how any one ought to act in these
circumstances, but I am not going to do it."  We must learn to look upon
ourselves as we should look upon and judge any other moral agent.  If,
when taxed with wrongdoing, we reply, "I wanted to do it," or "That is
the kind of person I am," or "That is the way I am made," we are
abandoning the moral position, and the answer is, "Whether you wanted it
or not, you ought not to have done it," or, "Well, you ought to become
different."  But this does not help us when, looking at actions from a
moral standpoint, it is difficult to say what ought to be done.  Kant
tries to show that wrong action, if universalised, is always
contradictory. He takes the instance of telling a lie.  If that were
universal no one would believe any one else, and there would be no point
in telling a lie.  Lying is essentially parasitical.  But this does not
help us in the familiar problem in casuistry, whether it is allowable to
tell a lie to save life.  For here we have a conflict between two
maxims, both of which can be universalised.  We cannot regard such a
situation as simply involving a question of telling the truth or of
saving life.  We must consider the circumstances of the case.  This is
even more evident if we apply Kant’s rule to the question of whether
celibacy is ever justified.  If celibacy were universal, there would
soon be nobody to be celibate, but it does not therefore follow that
some people under certain circumstances ought not to be celibate. The
question cannot be answered without reference to circumstances.  The
moral of this is that the categorical imperative does not enable us to
act without individual moral judgment in individual cases.  Further, in
one of the instances which Kant gives he admits that there are certain
ways of action which might be universalised, but which he nevertheless
holds to be wrong.  He instances the duty of being industrious.  A
society could quite well be imagined in which every one was lazy, but he
says, "It cannot be willed."  The ultimate appeal here is to what the
moral reason wills.  That means that we must admit that the moral reason
or moral judgment has a content not derivable simply from the conception
of the moral law; that there are certain kinds of life, certain kinds of
action, which we judge to be good, and others which we judge to be bad.
But, if this is so, we must give up the sharp separation Kant makes
between the moral law and nature, and allow that things in nature can
have a moral value. It may still be true that they only have moral value
through their relation to a good will, and have no moral significance
apart from such a relation.

The difficulties created by Kant’s sharp separation of the moral and the
phenomenal worlds are equally apparent in his discussion of motives.  He
conceives the individual as phenomenal, to be determined solely by
pleasure and pain.  The power of the moral law is manifest, therefore,
when its commands run counter to inclination, and the motive of respect
for the moral law conquers inclination.  It is true to say that a man’s
likes and dislikes in themselves are not to the point when we are asking
what he ought to do, but Kant sometimes speaks as though there could be
no moral value in an action which did not go against inclination.  This
is perilously near that morbid theory of conscience which assumes that
the fact that an action would be very disagreeable to the agent is
itself proof that the proposal to perform it is the voice of conscience.
Here again we have to say that the fact that inclinations viewed merely
as inclinations have no moral value, does not show that, relatively to
the good will, one may not be better than another.  There is nothing to
be proud of in the fact that we dislike doing our duty.

This sharp separation between the world of morality and science was
somewhat tempered in Kant’s third _Critique_, which we shall examine in
the next chapter.




                             *CHAPTER VII*

         *THE "CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT"--ÆSTHETICS AND TELEOLOGY*


The _Critique of Judgment_ is at once the most interesting and the most
difficult of Kant’s three _Critiques_.  It seems to cover a much wider
ground than either of the two earlier _Critiques_.  It concerns itself
with the relation of empirical investigation to the a priori principles
of understanding discussed in the first _Critique_, with an attempt to
bridge the gulf between the world of freedom and the world of nature as
described in the second _Critique_, with a discussion of the principles
of æsthetics and of the conflict between the rival claims of the
principles of mechanism and teleology, a conflict which, since the
discoveries of Darwin and the increasing interest taken in biology, is
becoming every day more important.  On all these points Kant has much of
importance to say.  Modern theories of æsthetic are mainly based on an
acceptance of the distinctions which he first laid down clearly.  Much
modern philosophy of a type which is little in sympathy with the
doctrines of the first _Critique_--Pragmatism, for example--is an
elaboration of his account of the regulative principles which guide
empirical investigation, while speculation on the rival methods of
biology has hardly advanced beyond the solution suggested by Kant. Yet
the very suggestiveness of this book makes it hard to understand.  It is
difficult to see the connection which Kant supposed to exist between
these very various problems.  The form of the book, like the form of the
first _Critique_, is marked by subdivisions suggested by formal logic,
which seem to have little or no connection with the subjects discussed
under them, so that the whole is a curious combination of formal system
and discursive content.  Kant himself regarded this _Critique_ as the
triumphant vindication of his whole system, in that it brought together
and reconciled subjects which he had previously distinguished too
sharply.  Many later writers have thought rather that in it the
inconsistencies which they believe to exist in Kant’s thought come to a
head.

We have not space here to vindicate the _Critique of Judgment_ as "the
crowning phase of the critical philosophy," as a recent writer has
called it, or to examine singly Kant’s treatment of the various subjects
of interest with which it is concerned.  It is important, however, to
follow the connection which Kant supposed to exist between these
different subjects.  If we can understand that, we shall gain
considerable insight into Kant’s system as a whole.

Kant names the book the _Critique of Judgment_, or, more exactly, the
_Critique of the Faculty of Judgment_. Judgment is distinguished from
understanding, whose principles are more peculiarly the subject of the
first _Critique_.  The understanding, according to Kant, is the faculty
of rules.  Judgment is shown in the application of rules to individual
instances.  It is the element of individuality and spontaneity in all
thinking, for which no rules can be discovered.  Judgment cannot be
taught, different men possess it in different degrees; it is akin to
genius.  When, then, Kant turns to examine the faculty of judgment, he
is asking whether the mind, in dealing with individuals in all their
variety and difference, and in attempting to understand them, is guided
by any general rules or principles.  The import of this question becomes
clear in his relation of it to the familiar question of causation.  The
principle of causation, as we have seen, is, according to Kant, an a
priori principle of the understanding, and is assumed in all experience;
but it does not of itself enable us to determine in any particular case
what causes what.  That is the task of empirical investigation, and
needs, as we know, the imagination and insight of the individual
investigator; in Kantian language, it is the work of the faculty of
judgment.  Besides the a priori principle of causation, therefore, we
have an indefinite number of empirical causal laws.  Kant asks whether
the scientist in investigating such laws, and more particularly in
considering their relation to one another, is guided by any principles.
He finds that the scientist assumes that this indefinite variety is
capable of being reduced to some kind of unity, assumes that there is
continuity in nature, that knowledge will not remain an aggregate of
disconnected rules.  Chemistry, for example, has discovered that the
overwhelming variety of natural changes can be reduced to the action and
interaction of a small number of elements.  The chemist proposes to go
on and see whether the different elements may not themselves be seen to
be forms of one substance.

These assumptions are, according to Kant, quite different from the
principles of the understanding.  For the latter are grounds of the
possibility of experience. We cannot deny them without making experience
unmeaning.  This cannot be said of the former.  It obviously cannot be
essential to experience that the multiplicity of the laws of nature
should be reducible to unity, for such unity has never been discovered.
Experience has been quite possible without it.  This distinction between
two kinds of principles Kant expresses by calling those with which we
are now concerned regulative.  The purpose they serve is the regulation
and improvement of knowledge.  They do not, like the principles of the
understanding, prescribe to nature.  We assume in them that nature is,
in Kant’s words, purposive to the understanding--that is, we first think
out what order of nature would be intelligible, and then look to see
whether we cannot discover in nature such an order.  This assumption
does not prove that there is any such order, but in science we act as if
it were there to be found out.

This suggestion of Kant’s has been elaborated in many modern writers on
philosophy, who have pointed out how much scientific method is governed
by the notion of the most easily intelligible theory, and they have
argued that science assumes, for the convenience of method, principles
which it never completely proves. These principles are called sometimes
methodological assumptions, sometimes postulates.  The difference
between such modern writers and Kant is that the former think that all a
priori principles are of this nature, and that the principle of
causation, for example, is itself only a postulate.

The faculty of judgment, then, according to Kant, assumes for regulative
purposes that nature is purposive to our understanding.  What does this
last phrase mean?  We are often concerned to know the relation of things
to our purposes.  It has been pointed out that very many of our
empirical concepts represent rather our practical interest in things
than our desire to understand them as they are.  Kant’s phrase implies
that, apart from any such relation to particular purposes, there is a
more general purpose of mere intelligibility, which some objects
obviously serve more than others.

Here we pass to the consideration of art, for in our judgments of beauty
Kant holds that we similarly disregard the relation of the beautiful
object to any particular purpose, and seem to be concerned with general
purposiveness.  The judgment of beauty is, for Kant, the supreme act of
the faculty of judgment.  It is reflection on an individual for its own
sake, without attempting to fit it to our desires or see it as an
instance of our concepts or rules.  Kant therefore proceeds to examine
our judgments of beauty, which show how reflection on individual objects
may display general rules, and then proceeds, in the last part of the
_Critique_, to discuss the part played by the concept of purposiveness
in our understanding of nature.

It would seem at first sight that Kant is not interested in art for its
own sake, but for the light which it throws upon the nature of our
intellectual faculties.  Nevertheless he is careful to insist on the
distinction between artistic and scientific judgments.  The judgment of
beauty, he insists, is free, is not determined by a concept.  We are not
concerned, in such judgments, with asking what an object is.  In so far
as, in our appreciation of beauty, we bring in such considerations we
are wrong.  He therefore rules out any theory that beauty is concerned
with faithful representation.  Beauty consists in the form of an object,
and in nothing else.  The judgment of beauty, besides being free, is
also disinterested.  The relation of the beautiful object to our
purposes is irrelevant to its beauty.  The judgment of beauty cannot,
therefore, be determined by rules of any kind.  It is always individual
and immediate, and the immediate feeling of beauty counts for more than
any rules or canons of taste.  Kant therefore vindicates art as
independent of either science or morality.  Yet, once we realise its
independence, the nature of art throws light upon both science and
morality; for the judgment of beauty, although free and not determined
by concepts, claims universal validity.  We might put Kant’s point in
another way by saying that art is significant, and yet is not
significant of anything _in particular_.  Its meaning cannot be reduced
to scientific statement nor abstracted from its form, and yet art has
meaning.  Kant finds the explanation of the fact that the judgment of
beauty is free, and yet claims universal validity, in the suggestion
that a beautiful object is one the contemplation of which arouses and
enlivens the two faculties of the intelligence, the imagination and the
understanding, in their proper proportion or harmony.  All knowledge
needs imagination, the power of seeing resemblances and differences in
objects, and understanding which by concepts gives unity and rules to
the imagination.  In science the imagination is subordinate to the
understanding, for the aim of science is definiteness and precision.  In
art the imagination is free, and yet art is not the mere seeing of
resemblances and differences; it also has its unity.  It aims at the
best proportion of variety and unity.  This is independent of the
varying natures of individual persons, and therefore the judgment of
beauty can claim to be universally valid.

Beautiful objects, then, are "purposive to the understanding," inasmuch
as their form stimulates in the most harmonious degree the two faculties
of intelligence, and in art we find proof that there is a principle of
general intelligibility, which may guide the work of the scientist.  The
purpose of the scientist is quite different from that of the artist, but
if he is to reduce his facts to order and intelligibility he must be
guided by a principle which is seen in its pure form in the artist.

In the second place, an understanding of the nature of art has
significance for moral theory, because the judgment of beauty is
disinterested, and shows that pleasure may be independent of desire.  In
æsthetic pleasure we are not merely determined by our inclinations, for
art is of all human activities free and creative. We enjoy art not
because it serves any of our individual desires and purposes, it is
enjoyed by something in us that is universal.  Art, then, contradicts
the position which Kant assumes in the second _Critique_, that we cannot
follow pleasure without being slaves of our phenomenal nature.  It is a
disinterested enjoyment, and is witness to the possibility of
disinterested pleasure in the good.  Further, Kant held that in one kind
of æsthetic enjoyment, appreciation of the sublime, the contrast between
our weakness and the vast extent and overwhelming powers of nature,
calls forth in us a conviction accompanied by pleasure of the yet
greater might of the moral law within us.  Art therefore may become the
symbol of morality, and the third _Critique_ does much to soften the
rigour of the teaching of the second.

In the last part of the _Critique of Judgment_ Kant applies his doctrine
of regulative principles to the understanding of nature.  The faculty of
judgment, as we saw, is concerned with the attempt to give unity to the
detail of the natural world.  In this work it has two regulative
principles, mechanism and teleology. Reality cannot be formed according
to both these principles; for mechanism assumes that reality can be
regarded as a pattern or complex of recurring or interchangeable parts
whose changes are necessitated, teleology that the world cannot be
explained without supposing purpose to be an operating agency in change.
Mechanism seeks to explain things as the necessary result of their
original condition, teleology in the light of their highest development.
The two principles have therefore been held to be inconsistent.  The
scientist, jealous for the validity of his discovery of mechanism,
combats the very notion of purposive agency.  The theologian thinks that
to admit mechanism anywhere is to give up his whole position.

Kant’s solution of this antinomy is that both mechanism and teleology
are only regulative principles.  They tell us nothing of the ultimate
nature of reality, except that we can explain much of it by regarding it
as if it were a machine, and much by regarding it as if it were the
field of purposive agency.  Reality must be consistent with both these
facts, but more we cannot say. The moral is that we should continue to
treat them as regulative principles, and push each principle of
explanation as far as it will go.

Kant is here, as usual, the enemy alike of scientific and of theological
dogmatism.  He will not allow any limit to be set to the work of
scientific investigation, and yet will not allow a principle of
scientific method to be converted from an explanation of perceived facts
into a theory of the universe.

Besides mediating between the conflicting claims of mechanism and
teleology, Kant also modifies the notion of teleology.  When we think of
reality as purposive, we do not necessarily think of it as having a
definite purpose, as being subordinate, for example, to the well-being
of man.  The principle of purposiveness arises properly, he holds, from
the contemplation of living things, from the perception of the
difference between an organism and a machine.  An organism is purposive
in the sense in which a work of art is.  In applying the principle we
are trying to understand reality as though the relation of all the
different things in it were like the relation of the parts of an
organism or a picture. But this principle, like the principle of
mechanism, does not carry us further than the facts we have examined,
for an organism or a work of art can only be understood by study of the
individual relations of all its parts.  We can never know the universe
as an organism, for we can never know all its parts.  We can understand
and put together more and more of them, but we never come to the end.

The third _Critique_, then, enforces the lesson of the first, that
knowledge is the work of individual finite minds, trying to understand
elements in a whole that transcends the limits of their experience,
pushing back the spatial and temporal limits which confine each
individual, but never removing them altogether.  The critical philosophy
teaches the impossibility of absolute knowledge, but it does so not by
suggesting general scepticism of all knowledge, but by enforcing the
validity of scientific knowledge within its own limits.




                             *BIBLIOGRAPHY*


                             *TRANSLATIONS*


There are two accessible translations of the _Critique of Pure
Reason_--Meiklejohn (Bell & Co.) and Max Müller (Macmillan).

Kant’s ethical writings have been translated by Abbott (Longmans).

There is a translation of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ by Bernard
(Macmillan), and of the first part of it, the _Critique of Æsthetic
Judgment_, by Meredith (Clarendon Press).  This last book has
introductory essays and notes.

The student beginning the study of Kant will find _Watson’s Selections
from Kant_ (MacLehose & Sons) useful if he cannot read the _Critiques_
in full.



                             *COMMENTARIES*


The most useful small books on Kant are Adamson, _The Philosophy of
Kant_ (Blackwood), and Watson, _The Philosophy of Kant Explained_
(MacLehose).  The best and most thorough work on Kant in English is
Caird, _The Critical Philosophy of Kant_, 2 vols.  (MacLehose).



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