THE ATTEMPT AT A CRITICAL SOLUTION: KANT.
The _Criticism of Pure Reason_ has been described by its author as a
generalisation of Hume's problem. Hume, he thought, had treated his
question on the 'relations of ideas' in their bearing upon 'matters of
fact' mainly with reference to the isolated case of cause and effect.
Kant extended the inquiry so as to comprise all those connective and
unifying ideas which form the subject-matter of metaphysics. In his own
technical language--which has lost its meaning for the present day--he
asked, 'Are Synthetic judgments _a priori_ possible?'--a question which
in another place he has translated into the form, 'Is the metaphysical
faith of men sound, and is a metaphysical science possible?' By a
metaphysics he meant in the first instance the belief in a more than
empirical reality, and secondly the science which should give real
knowledge of God, Freedom and Immortality,--a science whose objects
would be God, the World, and the Soul. From a comparatively early date
(1762-4) Kant had been inclined to suspect and distrust the claims
of metaphysics to replace faith, and to give knowledge of spiritual
reality; and he had tried to vindicate for the moral and religious life
an independence of the conclusions and methods of the metaphysical
theology and psychology of the day. But it was not till some years
later--in 1770--that he formulated any very definite views as to the
essential conditions of scientific knowledge: and it was not till 1781
that his theory on the subject was put together in a provisionally
complete shape.
What then are the criteria of a science? When is our thought knowledge,
and of objective reality? In the first place, there must be a given
something--a sens_-datum_--an 'impression' as Hume might have said. If
there be no impression, therefore, there can be no scientific idea,
no real knowledge. There must be the primary touch--the feeling--the
affection--the _je ne sais quoi_ of contact with reality. Secondly,
what is given can only be received if taken up by the recipient, and
in such measure as he is able to appropriate it. The given is received
in a certain mode. In the present case, the sensation is apprehended
and perceived under the forms of space and time. Perception, in other
words, whatever may be its special quality or its sensuous material,
is always an act of dating and localisation. The distinction between
the mere lump of feeling or sensibility and the perception is that
the latter implies a field of extended and mutually excluding parts
of space, and a series of points of time, both field and series being
continuous, and, so far as inexhaustibility goes, infinite. Thirdly,
even in the reception of the given there is a piece of action and
spontaneity. If the more passive recipiency be called Sense, this
active element in the adaptation may be termed Intellect. Intellect is
a power or process of choice, selection, comparison, distinguishing and
dividing, analysis and synthesis, affirmation and negation, numeration,
of judgment and doubt, of connexion and disjunction, differentiation
and integration. Its general aspect is by Kant sometimes described
as Judgment--the act of thought which correlates by distinguishing;
sometimes as Apperception, and the unity of apperception. It is, i.
e., an active unity and a synthetic energy; it unifies, and always
unifies. It links perception to perception, correlating one with
another--interpreting one by another; estimating the knowledge-value of
one by the rest. It thus 'apperceives.' It is a faculty of association
and consociation of ideas. But the association is inward and 'ideal'
union: the one idea interpenetrates and fuses with the other, even
while it remains distinct.
Kant's work may be described--in its first stage--as an analysis and a
criticism of experience. The term Experience is an ambiguous one. It
sometimes means what has been called the 'raw material' of experience:
the crude, indigested mass of poured-in _matter_-of-knowledge. If
there be such a shapeless lump anywhere,--which has to be considered
presently--it, at any rate, is not on Kant's view properly entitled to
the name of Experience. The Given must be felt and apprehended: and--to
put the point paradoxically--to be felt it must be more than felt,--it
must be perceived. It must, in other words, be projected--set in space
and time: let out of the mere dull inner subjectivity of feeling into
the clear and distinct outer subjectivity of perception. But, again,
to be perceived, it must be apperceived: to be set in time and space,
it must first of all be in the hands of the unifying consciousness,
which is the lord of time and space. For in so far as space and time
mean a place and an order--in so far as they mean more than an empty
inconceivable receptacle for bulks of sensation, in the same degree
do they presuppose an intellectual, synthetic genius, which is in all
its perceptions one and the same,--the fundamental, original unity of
consciousness. And this analysis of experience is transcendental.'
Beginning with the assumed datum--the object of or in experience--it
shows that this object which is supposed to be _there_--to exist by
itself and wait for perception--is created by and in the very act which
apprehends it. Climbing up and rising above its habitual absorption
_in_ the _thing_, consciousness (that of the philosophic observer and
analyst) sees the thing in the act of making, and watches its growth.
We have seen that Kant made free use of the metaphor of giving and
receiving. But it is hardly possible to use such metaphors and retain
independence of judgment. The associations customarily attached to the
figurative language carry one away easily, and often for a long way, on
the familiar paths of imagination. The analogy is used even where--if
all were looked into--its terms become meaningless. No reader of Locke
can have failed, e. g., to notice how he is misled by his own images of
the dark room and the empty cabinet:--images, useful and perhaps even
necessary, but requiring constant restraint in him who would ply them
wisely and to his reader's good. From what has been said above it will
be clear that the acquisition of experience, the growth of knowledge,
is a unique species of gift and acceptance. The consciousness which
Kant describes may be the consciousness of John Doe or Richard Roe:
but as Kant describes it, the limitations of their personality,
i.e. of their individual body and soul, have been neglected. It is
consciousness in general which is Kant's theme, just as it is granite
in general--and not the block in yonder field,--which is the theme
of the geologist. Once get that clear, and you will also see clearly
that consciousness is at once giver and recipient--neither or both:
at once receptivity and spontaneity. But--you may reply--does not the
material object _act_ (chemically, optically, mechanically, &c.) on
the sense-organ on the periphery of my body, does not the nerve-string
_convey_ the impression to the brain; and is not perception the
_effect_ of that process, in which the material object is the initial
_cause_?
In this exposition--which is not unknown in vulgar philosophy--there
is a monstrous, almost inextricable, complication of fact with
inference, of truth with error. So long as there is an uncertainty--and
metaphysicians themselves, we may be reminded, are not agreed upon the
matter--as to what we are to understand by cause, effect, and act,
what an impression is, and how brain and intelligence mutually stand
to each other, it is hardly possible to pronounce judgment upon this
mode of statement. Yet perhaps we may go so far as to say that while
the terms quoted bear an intelligible meaning when applied within the
physiological process they are vain when used of relations of mind to
body. There is a sense in which we may speak of the action of mind
on body, and of body on mind: but what we mean would perhaps be more
unmistakably expressed by saying that the higher intellectual and
volitional energies are never in our experience entirely independent
of the influences of the lower sensitive and emotional nature. In
the metaphysical sense which the terms are here made to bear, they
mislead. Action and re-action can only take place in the separateness
of space, where one is here and another there: (though, be it added,
they cannot take place even on these terms, unless the here and the
there be somehow unified in a medium which embraces both). _Mens_, said
Spinoza, is the _idea corporis_[1]: he would hardly have said _Corpus
habet ideam_. What he meant would scarcely have been well described by
calling it a _parallelism_ or mutual independence, yet with harmony or
identity, of body and mind. Apart from body, no doubt, mind is for him
a nullity: for body is what gives it reality. But, on the other hand,
Mind is the enveloping and including 'Attribute' of the two: idealism
overlaps realism.
This was the fundamental proposition which Kant contended for; what he
spoke of as his own Copernican discovery: though, in reality, for the
_student_ of the history of philosophy it was only the re-statement,
in some respects the clearer statement, of the idealism which even
Hume, not to mention Spinoza and Leibniz, had maintained. The world
of experience--the empirical, objective, and real world--is a world
of ideas, of representations which have place only in mind, of
appearances. Space and time are subjective: the forms of thought are
subjective: and yet they constitute phenomenal or empirical or real
objectivity. Such language is--it would seem inevitably--misunderstood:
and in his second edition, Kant--besides many other minor modifications
of statement,--had to defend himself by inserting a 'confutation of
idealism,' i.e. of the theory which holds that the existence of objects
outside us in space is doubtful, if not even impossible. But no end
of argument will ever confute the view that Kant's doctrine is such
idealism: until people can be got to rise to a new view of what is
subjectivity--what is an idea--and what is existence outside us.
By 'subjective' the world is in the way of understanding what is due
to personal prepossession, void of general acceptability, a product of
individual feeling, peculiar and inexplicable tastes. By subjective
Kant means what belongs to _the_ subject or knowing mind as such and
in its generality: what is constitutive of intelligence in general,
what sense and intellect are _semper et ubique_. Into the question
how the human being came to have such an intellectual endowment--the
question which Nativist psychology is supposed to settle in one way;
and Evolutionism in another--Kant does not enter; he merely says
where there is knowledge, there is a knower,--a knowing subject _so_
constituted. It comes after all to the tautology that the reality we
know is a known reality: that knowledge is a growth in the knower,
and not an accidental product due to things otherwise unknown. The
predicate (or category) _'is'_ is contained, implicit, in the predicate
'_is known,_' or what '_is_' puts implicitly, '_is known_' puts
explicitly and truly.
By 'appearance' the world understands a sham, or at least somewhat
short of reality. By appearance Kant understands a reality which has
appeared: or, as that is going too far, a something which is real
so far as it goes (a _prima facie_ fact), but only a candidate for
admission into the circle of reals. And such reality depends on nothing
more than its thorough-going coherence with other appearances, its
explaining the rest, and being in turn explained by them,--its absolute
adaptation to its environment. And this environment all lies in the
common field of consciousness, and in the one correlating and unifying
apperceptivity of the ego,--that Ego which is the inseparable comrade,
vehicle, and judge, of all our perceptions. It is the appearance--but
as yet not the appearance _of_ something,--but rather an appearance
_to_ or _for_ something.
By an 'idea' the world in general understands what it is sometimes
ready to call a _mere_ idea. And by a mere idea is meant something
which is _not_ reality, but a peculiarity of an individual mind, or
group of minds-a fancy, without objective truth:--something, we may
even add, which for many people is located in their own head or brain,
cut off by blank bone-walls from the open air of real being. By idea
(representation, _Vorstellung_) Kant meant that an object is always
and essentially the object of a mind: always relative to a subject
consciousness, and implying it, just as a subject consciousness always
implies an object.
And by 'existence outside us' the world probably means--for it is
imprudent to define and refine too much in this hazy medium of words
where we all drowse--existence of things on an independent footing
beyond the limits of our personal, i. e. bodily and sentient, self.
As regards _our own_ trunk and limbs, most of us, except in some most
strange insanity, are not likely ever to be in doubt, and are indeed
more likely, after Schopenhauer's model, to take the knowledge of these
_personalia_ as the one thing immediately and intuitively certain. We
talk freely enough, it is true, about existence outside our own minds;
but it is only a drastic method of stating the difference between a
fancy and a fact. And probably we labour under a half-unconscious
hallucination that our minds are localised in some material 'seat,'
somewhere in our bodily limits, and more especially in the central
nerve-organs.
But, as has been said elsewhere[2], the point of view under which Mind
is regarded by Kant is that of Consciousness, and especially perceptive
consciousness. He describes, as we have put it above, the steps or
conditions under which the single sense-observation is elevated into
the rank of an experience claiming universality and necessity. But
the whole machinery of consciousness--the form of sensibility and the
category of intellect--is originally set in motion by an impetus
from without: or at least the manipulating machinery requires a raw
material on which to operate. Consciousness, or the observer who
takes this point of view, feels that it is being played upon by an
unknown performer--or that it is attempting to apprehend something,
which, because the act of apprehension is also to some extent (and to
what extent, who can say?) a transmutation, it must for ever fail to
apprehend truly. It is haunted by the phantom of a real,--a thing in
its own right, which can only appear in forms of sense and intellect,
never in its own essential being. It is only a short step further--and
Kant, if one may judge him by several isolated passages, has more than
once crossed the interval,--to treat, after the manner of uneducated
consciousness and of popular science, the thing in its independent
being as the cause which produces the sensation, or as the original
which the mental idea reproduces under the distortions or modifications
rendered necessary by the sensuous-intellectual medium. For, if under
the terms of one analogy the perception is an _effect_ of the thing,
under those of another it is an _image_ or copy of external reality.
If this be Kantian philosophy--and it can quote chapter and verse in
its favour--Kantian philosophy is one version of the great dogma of
the relativity of knowledge. That unhappy phrase seems to have many
meanings, but none of absolutely catholic acceptation. It may mean that
knowledge of things states their relations--the way they behave in
reference to this or that, in these or those circumstances; and that
of an utterly unrelated and _absolutely_ isolated thing, our knowledge
is and must be _nil._ Of a thing-in-itself we can know nothing; for
there is nothing to know. It may mean that knowledge is relative to the
recipient or the knower,--that it is not a product which can stand
by itself, but needs a vehicle and an object in close relation. In
this way, too, knowledge is relative to age and circumstances: grows
from period to period, and may even decay. And thirdly, the relativity
of knowledge may be taken to mean that we (and all human beings) can
never know the reality; because we can only know the phenomenon, i.
e. the modified, transmuted, reflected thing which has reconstituted
an image of itself after passing the interfering medium. For, first
of all, we must strip it--this 'image' so-called (the vulgar call
it the 'thing')--of the secondary qualities (sound, colour, taste,
resistance) which it has in the consciousness of a being dependent on
his sense-organs: and then, we must get rid also of those quantitative
attributes (figure, number, size) which it has in the consciousness
of a spatially and temporally perceptive being;--and then;--but the
prospect is too horrible to continue further and face the Gorgon's head
in the outer darkness, where man denudes appearance in the hope to meet
reality.
The fact is, there are too many strands in the web which Kant is
weaving, for him or perhaps for any man to keep them all well in hand
and lose none of the symmetry of the pattern he designs. To be just, we
must, in dealing with him as with any other philosopher, try to keep
in view the unity of that design instead of insisting too minutely and
too definitely upon its occasional defects. It is easy to work the pun
that a 'critical' philosophy must itself expect to be criticised; it is
more important to remember that by a criticism Kant meant an attempt to
steer a course between the always enticing extremes of dogmatism and
scepticism,--an attempt to be fair, i. e. just to both sides, and yet
neither to sink into the systematised placidity of the former, nor to
rove in a mere guerilla warfare with the latter. And it is the mere
privateer who in the popular sense of the word is the mere critic.
Of Kant we must remember that he has the defects of his qualities.
He prides himself on his distinctions of sense and intellect, of
imagination and understanding, of understanding and reason; and with
justice: but his distinctions are sometimes so decisive that it is
hard work both for him and for his reader to reconstitute their
unity. He is fond of utilising old classifications to embody his new
doctrine: and occasionally the result is like what we have been taught
to expect from pouring new wine into old bottles. He draws hard and
fast lines, and then has to create, as it seems, supplementary links
of connexion, which, if they operate, can only do so because they are
the very unity he began by ignoring. One gets perfectly lost in the
multitude of syntheses, in the labyrinth of categories, schemata, and
principles, of paralogisms, antinomies, and ideals of pure reason. One
part of this formalism _may_ be set down to the pedantry and pipeclay
of the age of the Great Frederick--pedantry, from which, as we console
ourselves, our modern souls are freed. But it arises rather from the
necessity of pursuing the battle between truth and error through every
complicated passage in that great fortress which ages of scholasticism
had--on various plans--gradually constructed. Kant is always a little
of the martinet and the schoolmaster; but it is because he knows that
true liberty cannot be secured without forms and must capture the old
before it can plant the new. The forms as they stand in his grouping
may often appear stiff and lifeless: but a more careful study, more
sympathetically intent, will find that there is latent life and
undisplayed connexion in the terms. Unfortunately the classified
cut-and-dried specimens are more welcome to the collector, and can
more easily be put in evidence in the examination-room.
Thus the original question, Are synthetic judgments _a priori_
possible? is answered--somewhat piecemeal--in a way that leads the
reader to suppose it is a question of psychology. He hears so much of
sense, imagination, intellect, in the discussion, that he fancies it is
an account of a process carried on by the faculties of an individual
mind. And of course nobody need suppose these processes are ever
carried on otherwise than by individual thinkers, human beings with
proper names. But scientific investigation is concerned only with
the essential and universal. For it, really, sense, imagination, &c.
are not so many faculties in a thinking agent: they are grades and
aspects of consciousness,-- 'powers' in a process of gradual mental
complication (involution). Kant is really dealing with a 'normal'
thought with its distinguishable constituent aspects. Only--he fails
to 'make this explicit and clear. The individualism--the un-historical
prepossession--of his age is upon his phraseology, if not upon his
thought: and one hardly realises that he is really engaged on human
thought and knowledge as a substantial subject of itself apart from its
individual vehicles,--on that thought, which lives and grows in social
institutions and products,--in language, science, literature, and moral
usage,--the common stock which one age bequeathes to the next, but
which the later-comer can only inherit if he works for and creates it
afresh. If it be a psychology, therefore, it is a psychology which does
not assume a soul with qualities, but which expounds the steps in the
constitution of a normal intelligence.
One may note, without insisting on them too much, the defects of his
treatment of the forms of thought. It may be said that, in the _first_
place, the table of the categories was incomplete. It had been
borrowed, as Kant himself tells us, from the old logical subdivision
of judgments, derived more or less directly from Aristotle and the
Schoolmen. Now many of the relations occurring in ordinary thought
could not be reduced to any of the twelve forms, without doing violence
to them. But Kant expressly disclaims exhaustiveness in detail. He
could, if he would: but that is for another season. In the _second_
place, the classification did not expressly put forward any principle
or reason, and gave ground for no development. That there should be
four fundamental categories, each with three divisions, making twelve
in all, seems as inexplicable as that there should be four Athenian
tribes in early times and twelve Phratriai. The twelve patriarchs of
thought stand as if in equal authority, with little or no bearing upon
one another. We have here, in short, what seems an artificial and not
a natural classification of the types of thought. But Kant himself has
given some explanation of the triad, and a sympathetic interpretation
has shown how the four main groups are steps in the solution of one
problem[3] In the _third_ place, the question as taken up seems largely
psychological, or subjective, concerning the constitution of the human
mind as a percipient and cognitive faculty. But this is necessary,
perhaps, to the restricted nature of Kant's problem. He is dealing with
the elements that form our objective or scientific consciousness of
the physical world. The deeper question of the place and work of mind
in life in general, in law and morality and religion, does not at this
stage come before him. That problem in fact only gradually emerges
with the Criticism of the Moral Faculty and the Aesthetic Judgment.
Logic--as the doctrine of the _Logos_ which is the principle of all
things, even of its own Other--had to wait for its preparation till it
could be matured.
In Hegel, the question assumes a wider scope, and receives a more
thorough-going answer. In the _first_ place the question about the
Categories is transferred from what we have called the epistemological
or psychological, to what Hegel terms the logical, sphere. It is
transferred from the Reason subjectively considered as a mere
receptive and synthetic human consciousness to the Reason which is in
the world and in history,--a Reason, which our Reason, as it were,
touches, and so becomes possessed of knowledge. In the _second_ place,
the Categories become a vast multitude. The intellectual telescope
discovers new stars behind the constellations named in ancient lore.
There is no longer, if there ever was, any mystic virtue supposed to
inhere in the number twelve: while the triadic arrangement is made
radical and everywhere recurs. The modern chemist of thought vastly
amplifies the number of its elementary types and factors, and proves
that many of the old Categories are neither simple nor indecomposable.
_Thirdly_, there is a systematic development or process which links
the Categories together, and shows how the most simple, abstract, and
inadequate, inevitably lead up to the most complex and adequate. Each
term or member in the organism of thought has its place conditioned by
all the others: each of them is the germ, or the ripe fruit of another.
[Footnote 1: Spinoza, _Eth._ ii. 7-13.]
[Footnote 2: _Encyclopaedia_, §§ 415, 420. Consciousness is only as it
were the surface of the ocean of mind; and reflects only the lights and
shadows in the sky above it.]
[Footnote 3: It is not the least of the merits of the exposition in
Caird's _Critical Philosophy_ of Immanuel Kant, vol. i. to have brought
out this.]