fortunate. He saw, at a glance, that here was a test applied to the
Lockian philosophy, which showed, at the very least, its
_insufficiency_. If it were good even for so much as it
explained--which Burke is disposed to receive as a sufficient warrant
for the favourable reception of a new hypothesis--at any rate, it now
appeared that there was something which it could _not_ explain. But
next, Kant took a large step in advance _proprio morte_. Reflecting
upon the one idea adduced by Hume, as transcending the ordinary
source of ideas, he began to ask himself, whether it were likely that
this idea should stand alone? Were there not other ideas in the same
predicament; other ideas including the same element of necessity, and,
therefore, equally disowning the parentage assigned by Locke? Upon
investigation, he found that there were: he found that there were
eleven others in exactly the same circumstances. The entire twelve he
denominated categories; and the mode by which he ascertained their
number--that there were so many and no more--is of itself so
remarkable as to merit notice in the most superficial sketch. But, in
fact, this one explanation will put the reader in possession of Kant's
system, so far as he could understand it without an express and
toilsome study. With this explanation, therefore, of the famous
categories, I shall close my slight sketch of the system. Has the
reader ever considered the meaning of the term _Category_--a term so
ancient and so venerable from its connection with the most domineering
philosophy that has yet appeared amongst men? The doctrine of the
Categories (or, in its Roman appellation, of the _Predicaments_), is
one of the few wrecks from the Peripatetic philosophy which still
survives as a doctrine taught by public authority in the most ancient
academic institutions of Europe. It continues to form a section in the
code of public instruction; and perhaps under favour of a pure
accident. For though, strictly speaking, a _metaphysical_ speculation,
it has always been prefixed as a sort of preface to the _Organon_ (or
_logical_ treatises) of Aristotle, and has thus accidentally shared in
the immortality conceded to that most perfect of human works. Far
enough were the Categories from meriting such distinction. Kant was
well aware of this: he was aware that the Aristotelian Categories were
a useless piece of scholastic lumber: unsound in their first
conception; and, though illustrated through long centuries by the
schoolmen, and by still earlier Grecian philosophers, never in any one
known instance turned to a profitable account. Why, then, being aware
that even in idea they were false, besides being practically
unsuitable, did Kant adopt or borrow a name laden with this
superfetation of reproach--all that is false in theory superadded to
all that is useless in practice? He did so for a remarkable reason: he
felt, according to his own explanation, that Aristotle had been
_groping_ [the German word expressive of his blind procedure is
_herumtappen_]--groping in the dark, but under a semi-conscious
instinct of truth. Here is a most remarkable case or situation of the
human intellect, happening alike to individuals and to entire
generations--in the situation of yearning or craving, as it were, for
a great idea as yet unknown, but dimly and uneasily prefigured.
Sometimes the very brink, as it may be called, of such an idea is
approached; sometimes it is even imperfectly discovered; but with
marks in the very midst of its imperfections, which serve as
indications to a person coming better armed for ascertaining the
sub-conscious thought which had governed their tentative motions. As
it stands in Aristotle's scheme, the idea of a category is a mere
lifeless abstraction. Rising through a succession of species to
genera, and from these to still higher genera, you arrive finally at a
highest genus--a naked abstraction, beyond which no further regress is
possible. This highest genus, this _genus generalissimum_, is, in
peripatetic language, a category; and no purpose or use has ever been
assigned to any one of these categories, of which ten were enumerated
at first, beyond that of classification--_i. e._ a purpose of mere
convenience. Even for as trivial a purpose as this, it gave room for
suspecting a failure, when it was afterwards found that the original
ten categories did not exhaust the possibilities of the case; that
other supplementary categories (_post-prædicamenti_) became necessary.
And, perhaps, 'more last words' might even yet be added, supplementary
supplements, and so forth, by a hair-splitting intellect. Failures as
gross as these, revisals still open to revision, and amendments
calling for amendments, were at once a broad confession that here
there was no falling in with any great law of nature. The paths of
nature may sometimes be arrived at in a tentative way; but they are
broad and determinate; and, when found, vindicate themselves. Still,
in all this erroneous subtilisation, and these abortive efforts, Kant
perceived a grasping at some real idea--fugitive indeed and coy, which
had for the present absolutely escaped; but he caught glimpses of it
continually in the rear; he felt its necessity to any account of the
human understanding that could be satisfactory to one who had
meditated on Locke's theory as probed and searched by Leibnitz. And in
this uneasy state--half sceptical, half creative, rejecting and
substituting, pulling down and building up--what was in sum and
finally the course which he took for bringing his trials and essays to
a crisis? He states this himself, somewhere in the Introduction to his
_Critik der reinen Vernunft_; and the passage is a memorable one.
Fifteen years at the least have passed since I read it; and,
therefore, I cannot pretend to produce the words; but the substance I
shall give; and I appeal to the candour of all his readers, whether
they have been able to apprehend his meaning. I certainly did not for
years. But, now that I do, the passage places his procedure in a most
striking and edifying light. Astronomers, says Kant, had gone on for
ages, assuming that the earth was the central body of our system; and
insuperable were the difficulties which attended that assumption. At
length, it occurred to try what would result from inverting the
assumption. Let the earth, instead of offering a fixed centre for the
revolving motions of other heavenly bodies, be supposed itself to
revolve about some one of these, as the sun. That supposition was
tried, and gradually all the phenomena which, before, had been
incoherent, anomalous, or contradictory, began to express themselves
as parts of a most harmonious system. 'Something,' he goes on to say,
'analogous to this I have practised with regard to the subject of my
inquiry--the human understanding. All others had sought their central
principle of the intellectual phenomena out of the understanding, in
something external to the mind. I first turned my inquiries upon the
mind itself. I first applied my examination to the very analysis of
the understanding.' In words, not precisely these, but pretty nearly
equivalent to them, does Kant state, by contradistinction, the value
and the nature of his own procedure. He first, according to his own
representation, thought of applying his investigation to the mind
itself. Here was a passage which for years (I may say) continued to
stagger and confound me. What! he, Kant, in the latter end of the 18th
century, about the year 1787--he the first who had investigated the
mind! This was not arrogance so much as it was insanity. Had he
said--I, first, upon just principles, or with a fortunate result,
investigated the human understanding, he would have said no more than
every fresh theorist is bound to suppose, as his preliminary apology
for claiming the attention of a busy world. Indeed, if a writer, on
any part of knowledge, does _not_ hold himself superior to all his
predecessors, we are entitled to say--Then, why do you presume to
trouble us? It may _look_ like modesty, but _is_, in effect, downright
effrontery for you to think yourself no better than other critics; you
were at liberty to think so whilst no claimant of public notice--as
being so, it is most arrogant in you to be modest. This would be the
criticism applied justly to a man who, in Kant's situation, as the
author of a new system, should use a language of unseasonable modesty
or deprecation. To have spoken boldly of himself was a duty; we could
not tolerate his doing otherwise. But to speak of himself in the
exclusive terms I have described, does certainly seem, and for years
did seem to myself, little short of insanity. Of this I am sure that
no student of Kant, having the passage before him, can have known
heretofore what consistent, what rational interpretation to give it;
and, in candour, he ought to own himself my debtor for the light he
will now receive. Yet, so easy is it to imagine, after a meaning is
once pointed out, and the station given from which it shows itself
_as_ the meaning--so easy, under these circumstances, is it to
imagine that one has, or that one could have, found it for one's
self--that I have little expectation of reaping much gratitude for my
explanation. I say this, not as of much importance one way or the
other in a single case of the kind, but because a general
consideration of this nature has sometimes operated to make me more
indifferent or careless as to the publication of commentaries on
difficult systems, when I had found myself able to throw much light on
the difficulties. The very success with which I should have
accomplished the task--the perfect removal of the obstacles in the
student's path--were the very grounds of my assurance-that the service
would be little valued. For I have found what it was occasionally, in
conversation, to be too luminous--to have explained, for instance, too
clearly a dark place in Ricardo. In such a case, I have known a man of
the very greatest powers, mistake the intellectual effort he had put
forth to apprehend my elucidation, and to meet it half way, for his
own unassisted conquest over the difficulties; and, within an hour or
two after, I have had, perhaps, to stand, as an attack upon myself,
arguments entirely and recently furnished by myself. No case is more
possible: even to apprehend a complex explanation, a man cannot be
passive; he must exert considerable energy of mind; and, in the fresh
consciousness of this energy, it is the most natural mistake in the
world for him to feel the argument which he has, by considerable
effort, appropriated to be an argument which he has originated. Kant
is the most unhappy champion of his own doctrines, the most
infelicitous expounder of his own meaning, that has ever existed.
Neither has any other commentator succeeded in throwing a moonlight
radiance upon his philosophy. Yet certain I am, that, were I, or any
man, to disperse all his darkness, exactly in that proportion in which
we did so--exactly in the proportion in which we smoothed all
hindrances--exactly in that proportion would it cease to be known or
felt that there had ever been any hindrances to be smoothed. This,
however, is digression, to which I have been tempted by the
interesting nature of the grievance. In a jesting way, this grievance
is obliquely noticed in the celebrated couplet--
'Had you seen but these roads before they were made,
You'd lift up your hands and bless Marshal Wade.'
The pleasant bull here committed conceals a most melancholy truth, and
one of large extent. Innumerable are the services to truth, to
justice, or society, which never _can_ be adequately valued by those
who reap their benefits, simply because the transition from the early
and bad state to the final or improved state cannot be retraced or
kept alive before the eyes. The record perishes. The last point gained
is seen; but the starting-point, the points _from_ which it was
gained, is forgotten. And the traveller never _can_ know the true
amount of his obligations to Marshal Wade, because, though seeing the
roads which the Marshal has created, he can only guess at those which
he superseded. Now, returning to this impenetrable passage of Kant, I
will briefly inform the reader that he may read it into sense by
connecting it with a part of Kant's system, from which it is in his
own delivery entirely dislocated. Going forwards some thirty or forty
pages, he will find Kant's development of his own categories. And, by
placing in juxtaposition with that development this blind sentence, he
will find a reciprocal light arising. All philosophers, worthy of that
name, have found it necessary to allow of some great cardinal ideas
that transcended all the Lockian origination--ideas that were larger
in their compass than any possible notices of sense or any reflex
notices of the understanding; and those who have denied such ideas,
will be found invariably to have supported their denial by a _vitium
subreptionis_, and to have deduced their pretended genealogies of such
ideas by means of a _petitio principii_--silently and stealthily
putting _into_ some step of their _leger-de-main_ process everything
that they would pretend to have extracted _from_ it. But, previously
to Kant, it is certain that all philosophers had left the origin of
these higher or transcendent ideas unexplained. Whence came they? In
the systems to which, Locke replies, they had been called _innate_ or
_connate_. These were the Cartesian systems. Cudworth, again, who
maintained certain '_immutable ideas_' of morality, had said nothing
about their origin; and Plato had supposed them to be reminiscences
from some higher mode of existence. Kant first attempted to assign
them an origin within the mind itself, though not in any Lockian
fashion of reflection upon sensible impressions. And this is doubtless
what he means by saying that he first had investigated the mind--that
is, he first for such a purpose.
Where, then, is it, in what act or function of the mind, that Kant
finds the matrix of these transcendent ideas? Simply in the logical
forms of the understanding. Every power exerts its agency under some
_laws_--that is, in the language of Kant, by certain _forms_. We leap
by certain laws--viz. of equilibrium, of muscular motion, of
gravitation. We dance by certain laws. So also we reason by certain
laws. These laws, or _formal_ principles, under a particular
condition, become the categories.
Here, then, is a short derivation, in a very few words, of those ideas
transcending sense, which all philosophy, the earliest, has been
unable to dispense with, and yet none could account for. Thus, for
example, every act of reasoning must, in the first place, express
itself in distinct propositions; that is, in such as contain a subject
(or that concerning which you affirm or deny something), a predicate
(that which you affirm or deny), and a copula, which connects them.
These propositions must have what is technically called, in logic, a
certain _quantity_, or compass (viz. must be universal, particular, or
singular); and again they must have what is called _quality_ (that is,
must be affirmative, or negative, or infinite): and thus arises a
ground for certain corresponding ideas, which are Kant's categories of
quantity and quality.
But, to take an illustration more appropriately from the very idea
which first aroused Kant to the sense of a vast hiatus in the received
philosophies--the idea of _cause_, which had been thrown as an apple
of discord amongst the schools, by Hume. How did Kant deduce this?
Simply thus: it is a doctrine of universal logic, that there are three
varieties of syllogism--viz. 1st, Categoric, or directly declarative
[_A is B_]; 2nd, Hypothetic, or conditionally declarative [_If C is D,
then A is B_]; 3rd, Disjunctive, or declarative, by means of a choice
which exhausts the possible cases [_A is either B, or C, or D; but
not C or D; ergo B_]. Now, the idea of _causation_, or, in Kant's
language, the category of Cause and Effect, is deduced immediately,
and most naturally, as the reader will acknowledge on examination,
from the 2nd or hypothetic form of syllogism, when the relation of
dependency is the same as in the idea of causation, and the
_necessary_ connection a direct type of that which takes place between
a cause and its effect.
Thus, then, without going one step further, the reader will find
grounds enough for reflection and for reverence towards Kant in these
two great results: 1st, That an order of ideas has been established,
which all deep philosophy has demanded, even when it could not make
good its claim. This postulate is fulfilled. 2ndly, The postulate is
fulfilled without mysticism or Platonic reveries. Ideas, however
indispensable to human needs, and even to the connection of our
thoughts, which came to us from nobody knew whence, must for ever have
been suspicious; and, as in the memorable instance cited from Hume,
must have been liable for ever to a question of validity. But, deduced
as they now are from a matrix within our own minds, they cannot
reasonably fear any assaults of scepticism.
Here I shall stop. A reader new to these inquiries may think all this
a trifle. But he who reflects a little, will see that, even thus far,
and going no step beyond this point, the Kantian doctrine of the
Categories answers a standing question hanging aloof as a challenge to
human philosophy, fills up a _lacuna_ pointed out from the era of
Plato. It solves a problem which has startled and perplexed every age:
viz. this--that man is in possession, nay, in the hourly exercise, of
ideas larger than he can show any title to. And in another way, the
reader may measure the extent of this doctrine, by reflecting that,
even so far as now stated, it is precisely coextensive with the famous
scheme of Locke. For what is the capital thesis of that scheme? Simply
this--that all necessity for supposing immediate impressions made upon
our understandings by God, or other supernatural, or antenatal, or
connatal, agencies, is idle and romantic; for that, upon examining the
furniture of our minds, nothing will be found there which cannot
adequately be explained out of our daily experience; and, until we
find something that cannot be solved by this explanation, it is
childish to go in quest of higher causes. Thus says Locke: and his
whole work, upon its first plan, is no more than a continual pleading
of this single thesis, pursuing it through all the plausible
objections. Being, therefore, as large in its extent as Locke, the
reader must not complain of the transcendental scheme as too narrow,
even in that limited section of it here brought under his notice.
For the purpose of repelling it, he must do one of two things: either
he must show that these categories or transcendent notions are not
susceptible of the derivation and genesis here assigned to them--that
is, from the forms of the _logos_ or formal understanding; or, if
content to abide by that derivation, he must allege that there are
other categories besides those enumerated, and unprovided with any
similar parentage.
Thus much in reply to him who complains of the doctrine here stated;
as, 1st, Too narrow; or, 2nd, As insufficiently established. But, 3rd,
in reply to him who wishes to see it further pursued or applied, I
say that the possible applications are perhaps infinite. With respect
to those made by Kant himself, they are chiefly contained in his main
and elementary work, the _Critik der reinen Vernunft_; and they are of
a nature to make any man melancholy. Indeed, let a man consider merely
this one notion of _causation_; let him reflect on its origin; let him
remember that, agreeably to this origin, it follows that we have no
right to view anything _in rerum naturâ_ as objectively, or in itself
a cause; that when, upon the fullest philosophic proof, we call A the
cause of B, we do in fact only subsume A under the notion of a cause;
we invest it with that function under that relation, that the whole
proceeding is merely with respect to a _human_ understanding, and by
way of indispensable _nexus_ to the several parts of our experience;
finally, that there is the greatest reason to doubt, whether the idea
of _causation_ is at all applicable to any other world than this, or
any other than a human experience. Let a man meditate but a little on
this or other aspects of this transcendental philosophy, and he will
find the steadfast earth itself rocking as it were beneath his feet; a
world about him, which is in some sense a world of deception; and a
world before him, which seems to promise a world of confusion, or '_a
world not realised_.' All this he might deduce for himself without
further aid from Kant. However, the particular purposes to which Kant
applies his philosophy, from the difficulties which beset them, are
unfitted for anything below a regular treatise. Suffice it to say
here, that, difficult as these speculations are from one or two
embarrassing doctrines on the Transcendental Consciousness, and
depressing as they are from their general tendency, they are yet
painfully irritating to the curiosity, and especially so from a sort
of _experimentum crucis_, which they yield in the progress of their
development on behalf of the entire doctrine of Kant--a test which, up
to this hour, has offered defiance to any hostile hand. The test or
defiance which I speak of, takes the shape of certain _antinomies_ (so
they are termed), severe adamantine arguments, affirmative and
negative, on two or three celebrated problems, with no appeal to any
possible decision, but one, which involves the Kantian doctrines. A
_quæstio vexata_ is proposed--for instance, the _infinite divisibility
of matter_; each side of this question, _thesis_ and _antithesis_, is
argued; the logic is irresistible, the links are perfect, and for each
side alternately there is a verdict, thus terminating in the most
triumphant _reductio ad absurdum_--viz. that A, at one and the same
time and in the same sense, is and is not B, from which no escape is
available, but through a Kantian solution. On any other philosophy, it
is demonstrated that this opprobrium of the human understanding, this
scandal of logic, cannot be removed. This celebrated chapter of
_antinomies_ has been of great service to the mere polemics of the
transcendental philosophy: it is a glove or gage of defiance,
constantly lying on the ground, challenging the rights of victory and
supremacy so long as it is _not_ taken up by any antagonist, and
bringing matters to a short decision when it _is_.