TRANSITION TO KANT.
The idealistic and the realistic stage of development to which we have
now been attending, each ended with a one-sided result. Instead of
actually and internally reconciling the opposition between thought and
being, they both issued in denying the one or the other of these
factors. Realism, on its side, had made matter absolute; and idealism,
on its side, had endowed the empirical Ego with the same
attribute—extremes in which philosophy was threatened with total
destruction. It had, in fact, in Germany as in France, become merged in
the most superficial popular philosophy. Then _Kant_ arose, and brought
again into one channel the two streams which, when separate from each
other, threatened to lose themselves amid the sands. Kant is the great
renovator of philosophy, who brought back to their point of divergence
the one-sided efforts which had preceded him, and embraced them in their
unity and totality. He stands in some special and fitting relation
either antagonistic or harmonious to all others—to Locke no less than to
Hume, to the Scottish philosophers no less than to the English and
French moralists, to the philosophy of Leibnitz and of Wolff, as well as
to the materialism of the French and the utilitarianism of the German
clearing up period. His relation to the development of a partial
idealism and a one-sided realism is thus stated: Empiricism had made the
Ego purely passive and subordinate to the sensible external
world—idealism had made it purely active, and given it a sovereignty
over the sensible world; Kant attempted to strike a balance between
these two claims, by affirming that the Ego as practical is free and
autonomic, an unconditioned lawgiver for itself, while as theoretical it
is receptive and conditioned by the phenomenal world; but at the same
time the theoretical Ego contains the two sides within itself, for if,
on the one side, empiricism may be justified upon the ground that the
material and only field of all our knowledge is furnished by experience,
so on the other side, rationalism may be justified on the ground that
there is an apriori factor and basis to our knowledge, for in experience
itself we make use of conceptions which are not furnished by experience,
but are contained apriori in our understanding.
In order, now, that we may bring the very elaborate framework of the
Kantian philosophy into a clearer outline, let us briefly glance at its
fundamental conceptions, and notice its chief principles and results.
Kant subjected the activity of the human mind in knowing, and the origin
of our experience, to his critical investigation. Hence his philosophy
is called critical philosophy, or criticism, because it aims to be
essentially an examination of our faculty of knowledge; it is also
called transcendental philosophy, since Kant calls the reflection of the
reason upon its relation to the objective world, a transcendental
reflection (transcendental must not be confounded with transcendent),
or, in other words, a transcendental knowledge is one “which does not
relate so much to objects of knowledge, as to our way of knowing them,
so far as this is apriori possible.” The examination of the faculty of
knowledge, which Kant attempts in his “_Critick of Pure Reason_,” shows
the following results. All knowledge is a product of two factors, the
knowing subject and the external world. Of these two factors, the latter
furnishes our knowledge with experience, as the matter, and the former
with the conceptions of the understanding, as the form, through which a
connected knowledge, or a synthesis of our perceptions in a whole of
experience first becomes possible. If there were no external world, then
would there be no phenomena; if there were no understanding, then these
phenomena, or perceptions, which are infinitely manifold, would never be
brought into the unity of a notion, and thus no experience were
possible. Thus, while intuitions without conceptions are blind, and
conceptions without intuitions are empty, knowledge is a union of the
two, since it requires that the form of conception should be filled with
the matter of experience, and that the matter of experience should be
apprehended in the net of the understanding’s conceptions. Nevertheless,
we do not know things as they are in themselves. _First_, because the
categories, or the forms of our understanding prevent. By bringing that
which is given as the material of knowledge into our own conceptions as
the form, there is manifestly a change in respect of the objects, which
become thought of not as they are, but only as we apprehend them; they
appear to us only as they are transmuted into categories. But besides
this subjective addition, there is yet another. _Secondly_, we do not
know things as they are in themselves, because even the intuitions which
we bring within the form of the understanding’s conceptions, are not
pure and uncolored, but are already penetrated by a subjective medium,
namely, by the universal form of all objects of sense, space and time.
Space and time are also subjective additions, forms of sensuous
intuition, which are just as originally present in our minds as the
fundamental conceptions or categories of our understanding. That which
we would represent intuitively to ourselves we must place in space and
time, for without these no intuition is possible. From this it follows
that it is only phenomena which we know, and not things in themselves
separate from space and time.
A superficial apprehension of these Kantian principles might lead one to
suppose that Kant’s criticism did not essentially go beyond the
standpoint of Locke’s empiricism. But such a supposition disappears upon
a careful scrutiny. Kant was obliged to recognize with Hume that the
conceptions, cause and effect, substance and attribute, and the other
conceptions which the human understanding sees itself necessitated to
think in the phenomena, and in which every one of its thoughts must be
found, do not arise from any experience of the sense. For instance, when
we become affected through different senses, and perceive a white color,
a sweet taste, a rough surface, &c., and predicate all these of one
thing, as a piece of sugar, there come from without only the plurality
of sensations, while the conception of unity cannot come through
sensation, but is a category or conception borne over to the sensations
from the mind itself. But instead of denying, for this reason, the
reality of these conceptions of the understanding, Kant took a step in
advance, assigning a peculiar province to this activity of the
understanding, and showing that these forms of thought thus furnished to
the matter of experience are immanent laws of the human faculty of
knowledge, the peculiar laws of the understanding’s operations, which
may be obtained by a perfect analysis of our thinking activity. (Of
these laws or conceptions there are twelve, viz., unity, plurality,
totality; reality, negation, limitation; substantiality, causality,
reciprocal action; possibility, actuality, and necessity.)
From what has been said we can see the three chief principles of the
Kantian theory of knowledge:
1. WE KNOW ONLY PHENOMENA AND NOT THINGS IN THEMSELVES.—The experience
furnished us by the external world becomes so adjusted and altered in
its relations (for we apprehend it at first in the subjective framework
of space and time, and then in the equally subjective forms of our
understanding’s conceptions), that it no longer represents the thing
itself in its original condition, pure and unmixed.
2. NEVERTHELESS EXPERIENCE IS THE ONLY PROVINCE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE, AND
THERE IS NO SCIENCE OF THE UNCONDITIONED.—This follows of course, for
since every knowledge is the product of the matter of experience, and
the form of the understanding, and depends thus upon the co-working of
the sensory and the understanding, then no knowledge is possible of
objects for which one of these factors, experience, fails us; a
knowledge alone from the understanding’s conceptions of the
unconditioned is illusory since the sensory can show no unconditioned
object corresponding to the conception. Hence the questions which Kant
places at the head of his whole Critick; how are synthetical judgments
apriori possible? _i. e._ can we widen our knowledge apriori, by thought
alone, beyond the sensuous experience? is a knowledge of the
supersensible possible? must be answered with an unconditional negative.
3. Still, if the human knowledge makes no effort to stride beyond the
narrow limits of experience, _i. e._ to become transcendent, it involves
itself in the greatest contradictions. The three ideas of the reason,
the psychological, the cosmological, and the theological, viz. (_a_) the
idea of an absolute subject, _i. e._ of the soul, or of immortality,
(_b_) the idea of the world as a totality of all conditions and
phenomena, (_c_) the idea of a most perfect being—are so wholly without
application to the empirical actuality, are so truly regulative, and not
constitutive principles, which are only the pure products of the reason,
and are so entirely without a correspondent object in experience, that
whenever they are applied to experience, _i. e._ become conceived of as
actually existing objects, they lead to pure logical errors, to the most
obvious paralogisms and sophisms. These errors, which are partly false
conclusions and paralogisms, and partly unavoidable contradictions of
the reason with itself, Kant undertook to show in reference to all the
ideas of the reason. Take, _e. g._ the cosmological idea. Whenever the
reason posits any transcendental expressions in reference to the
universe, _i. e._ attempts to apply the forms of the finite to the
infinite, it is at once evident that the antithesis of those expressions
can be proved just as well as the thesis. The affirmation that the world
has a beginning in time, and limits in space, can be proved as well as,
and no better than its opposite, that the world has no beginning in
time, and no spacial limits. Whence it follows that all speculative
cosmology is an assumption by the reason. So also with the theological
idea; it rests on bare logical paralogisms, and false conclusions, as
Kant, with great acuteness, shows in reference to each of the proofs for
the being of a God, which previous dogmatic philosophies had attempted.
It is therefore impossible to prove and to conceive of the existence of
a God as a Supreme Being, or of the soul as a real subject, or of a
comprehending universe. The peculiar problems of metaphysics lie outside
the province of philosophical knowledge.
Such is the negative part of the Kantian philosophy; its positive
complement is found in the “_Critick of the Practical Reason_.” While
the mind as theoretical and cognitive is wholly conditioned, and ruled
by the objective and sensible world, and thus knowledge is only possible
through intuition, yet as practical does it go wholly beyond the given
(the sense impulse), and is determined only through the categorical
imperative, and the moral law, which is itself, and is therefore free
and autonomic; the ends which it pursues are those which itself, as
moral spirit, places before itself; objects are no more its masters and
lawgivers, to which it must yield if it would know the truth, but its
servants, which it may use for its own ends in actualizing its moral
law. While the theoretical mind is united to a world of sense and
phenomena, a world obedient to necessary laws, the practical mind, by
virtue of the freedom essential to it, by virtue of its direction
towards an absolute aim, belongs to a purely intelligible and
supersensible world. This is the practical idealism of Kant, from which
he derives the three practical postulates of the immortality of the
soul, moral freedom, and the being of a God, which, as theoretical
truths, had been before denied.
With this brief sketch for our guidance, let us now pass on to a more
extended exposition of the Kantian Philosophy.