Chapter 4

[1]Kant'sKritik d. r. Vernunft: Methodenl. Architektonik d. r. Vern.

[2]Schelling's Werke, v. 116.

[3]Ibid. v. 276.

[4]Ibid. iii. 267.

[5]Kant,Kritik d. r. Vern.,Deduction of the Categories, Sect. III.

[6]Encyclopaedie, § 250.

[7]Encycl.Sect. 244 (Logic,p. 379).

[8]Encyclop.§§ 266, 269; cf. the lecture-note as given inWerkevii i. p. 97. A large number of paradoxical analogies from Hegel'sNaturphilosophiehas been collected by Riehl in hisPhilosophisher Criticismus, ii. 2, 120.

[9]See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. 419.

We have seen that an innate tendency leads the human mind to connect and set in relation,—to connect, it may be erroneously, or without proper scrutiny, or under the influence of passions or prejudices,—but at any rate to connect. Criticism occasionally has impatiently banned this tendency as a mere fountain of errors. The human mind, says Francis Bacon, always assumes a greater uniformity in things than it finds; it expects symmetry, is bold in neglecting exceptional cases, and would fain go beyond all limits in its everlasting cry, Why and To what end. It varies in individuals between a passion for discovering similarities and an intent acuteness to every shade of unlikeness. But notwithstanding these warnings of the hen, the ugly duckling Reasonwillgo beyond what is given: it knows no insuperable limitation. It may be guilty of what Bacon calls 'anticipation'—an induction on evidence insufficient—or it may subdue itself to the duty of 'interpretation' of nature by proper methods: in either case, it is an act of association, synthesis, unification. For Nousisarchè, and knows that it is: it will not yield to clamour or mere rebuke: it, too, cannot be commanded, unless by first obeying it: and Bacon, having duly objurgated the 'mind left to itself,' is obliged to let it go to gather the grapes before they are quiteripe, and to indulge it with a 'prerogative' of instances. As Mr. Herbert Spencer and many others are never weary of telling us: 'We think in relations. This is truly the form of all thought: and if there are any other forms they must be derived from this[1].' Man used to be defined as a thinking or rational animal: which means that man is a connecting and relation-giving animal; and from this, Aristotle's definition, making him out to be a 'political' animal, is only a corollary, most applicable in the region of Ethics. Here is the ultimate point, from which the natural consciousness, and the energies of science, art, and religion equally start upon their special missions.

In ordinary life we attach but little importance to this machinery of cognition. We incline to let the fact of synthesis drop out of sight, as if it required no further study or notice, and we regard the things connected as exclusively worth attending to. The interest centres on the object—on the matter: the formal element—the connective tissue—isonlyan instrument of no importance, except in view of the end it helps us to. We use general and half-explained terms, such as development, evolution, continuity, as bridges from one thing to another, without giving any regard to the means of locomotion on their own account. Some one thing is the product of something else: we let the term 'product' slip out of the proposition as unimportant: and then read the statement so as to explain the one thing by turning it into the other. Things, according to thisopinion, are all-important: the rest is mere words. These relations between things are not open to further investigation or definition: they are eachsui generis,or peculiar: and even if the logician in his analysis of inference finds it advisable to deal with them, he will be content, if he can classify them in some approximate way, as a basis for his subdivision of propositions. This is certainly one way of getting rid of Metaphysics—for the time.

But there are epochs in life, and epochs in universal history, when the mind withdraws from its immersion in active life, and reflects upon its own behaviour as on the proceedings of some strange creature, of which it is a mere spectator. At such seasons when we stop to reflect upon the partial scene, and close our eyes to the totality, doubts begin to arise, whether our procedure is justified when we unify and combine the isolated phenomena. Have we any right to throw our own subjectivity, the laws of our imagination and thought, into the natural world? Would it not be more proper to refrain altogether from the use of such conceptions?

Philosophy, said one of the ancients[2], begins in wonder, and ends in wonder. It begins from the surprise that something couldbewhat it purports to be: it ends in the marvel of our havingthoughtanything else possible. Such a phrase well becomes the naive age in which the soul goes freely forth, wandering from one novelty to another, curious to find out all that can be known,—like the young wanderer on the sea-shore whom fresh pebbles and new shells tempt endlessly to fill his basket. But as the ages roll on, and the accumulations of the past grow heavier in the receptacle, the need of a re-examination of the stores becomes imperative. The bright colours have faded—and generallythey fade soon: there has been much picked up in the inexperience of youthful enthusiasm which maturer reflection hardly can think worth carrying further.

The duty of doubt and of re-examination of what tradition has bequeathed has been enforced by philosophy in all ages. For it is the cardinal principle of philosophy to be free—to possess its soul—never to be a mere machine or mere channel of tradition. But, in some ages, this assertion of its freedom has had for the soul a pre-eminently negative aspect. It has meant only freedomfrom—and not also freedominandthrough—its environing, or rather constituting, substance. Such an epoch was seen in the ancient world when theNew Academy, with its sceptical abstention from all objective assertions, had to protest against the dogmatism of the Stoic and Epicurean schoolmen. In modern times the initial shudder before plunging in has been a recurrent crisis. Each thinker—as he personally resolved to thread his way through the wilderness of current opinion to the realm of certified truth—has had to remind himself (and his contemporaries) that in knowledge at least no possessions are secured property unless they have been earned by the sweat of their owner's brow. This is the common theme of Bacon's aphorisms in the beginning of theNovum Organum, of Descartes'Discourse of Method, and of Spinoza's unfinished essay on theEmendation of the Intellect.There is indeed a discrepancy in these utterances as to the measure in which they severally think it needful to insist as preliminary on a kind of moral and religious consecration of life to the service of truth. But a more compelling division arises. The maxim may be understood to say, 'Divest thy mind of its ill-gotten gains, its evil habits, prejudices, and system, and in childlike simplicity prepare thine eyeand ear to receive in pure vessels the stores of truth which are ready to stream in from the world.' Or it may rather be held to say, 'Remember that thou art a conscious, waking mind, and that every idea thou hast is thine by thine own assent: insist upon thy right of free intelligence, and give no place to any belief which thou hast not raised into full light of consciousness, and found to be completely consistent with the whole power and content of thy clearest thought.' And, we may add, if the maxim be obeyed too exclusively in either way, it will be obeyed amiss.

With Locke the question comes into even greater prominence. On what conditions can I have knowledge? How can I be certified that my ideas—the subjective images inmymind—have a reference to something objective and real? Locke's answer is, not unnaturally perhaps, somewhat prolix, and wanting in fundamental precision of principles. After dismissing the view that, even before experience, there are certain common ideas spontaneously and by original endowment present in all human beings, he goes on to show how we can sufficiently account for the ideas we actually find by supposing in us an almost unlimited power of joining and disjoining, of comparing, relating, and unifying the various elementary 'ideas' which make their way into the empty chambers of our mind by the senses. As to the source, the channel, and the nature of these sense-ideas, Locke is obscure and apparently inconsistent: though clearly it should be all important to know how an idea can be caused by, or spring from, a material thing. When in his fourth book he comes to the question of what is the reality, or themeaningof our ideas, he does not really get beyond a few—rather dubiously reasoned-out—conclusions that, although strictly we cannot go beyond 'the present testimony ofour senses employed about the particular objects that do affect them,' we may for practical purposes allow a good deal to the presumptions of general probability.

But Locke had also begun to criticise our ideas, in his account of their formation out of the 'simple ideas'— (which neither Locke nor any other atomist of mind has succeeded in making clear)—which the several senses give, and by observing or reflecting on what goes on or is present inourminds,we'form,' he says, various ideas. In a style of discussion which is on the borderland between vulgar and philosophical analysis— (never quite false, but nearly always inadequate, because it almost invariably assumes what it ostensibly proposes to explain,) Locke tells us how we get one idea by 'enlarging,' another by 'repeating,' as we please, the bounteous data of the touch and sight. But amongst the compounds there are some of more disputable origin. There are some—e.g. ideas of punishable acts or legalised states—which are 'voluntary collections of ideas put together in the mind independent from any original patterns in nature,' These, though entirely subjective, are entirely real, because they only serve as patterns by which we may judge or designate things so and so. It is worse with the idea of power, which we only 'collect' or 'infer,' and that not from matter, where it is invisible, but only in a clear light when we consider God and spirits. Still worse, perhaps, is it with the idea of substance, which is a 'collection' of simple ideas with the 'supposition' of an 'incomprehensible' something in which the collection 'subsists.'

Hump put all this rather more pointedly. We have 'impressions,' i. e. lively perceptions by sense. We have also 'ideas,' i. e. fainter images of these, but otherwise identical. An ideashouldbe a copy of an impression. If you cannot point out any such impression, you maybe certain you are mistaken when you imagine you have any such idea. There is prevalent in the mental world a kind of association; a 'gentle force' connects ideas in our imagination according to certain relations they possess. This 'mind' or this 'imagination' is only a bundle or collection of impressions and ideas; but a collection which is continually and rapidly changing in its constituents, and in the scale of liveliness possessed by each constituent. When an idea is particularly fresh and forcible, it is abeliefor it is believed in: when faint, not so. Or, otherwise put, the object of an idea issaidtoexist, when the idea itself is vividlyfelt[3]. Really there is no such thing as 'external existence' taken literally. 'Our universe is the universe of the imagination': all existence is for a consciousness.

Impressions arise in certain orders of sequence or co-existence. When two impressions frequently recur and always in the same order, the custom binds them so closely together, that, should one of them only be given as impression, we cannot help having an idea of the other, which, growing more vivid by the contagion of the contiguous impression, creates, or is, a belief in its reality. Between the perceptions as such, there is no connexion; they are distinct and independent existences. They only get a connexion throughour feeling; we feela 'determination' of our thought to pass from one to another. The one impression has no power to produce the other; the one thing does not cause the other. 'We never have any impression that contains any power or efficacy[4],' Hence the power and necessity we attribute to the so-called causal agent and to the connexion are an illegitimate transference from our feeling, and a mistranslation ofourincapacity to resist the force of habitual association into a real bond between the two impressionsthemselves,The necessity is in the mind—as a habit-caused compulsion—not in the objects.

As with the relation of cause and effect, so it is with others. The identity of continued existence is only another name—an objective transcript—of the feeling of smooth uninterrupted succession of impressions in which our thought glides along from one in easy transition to another. And here the coherence and continuity of perceptions need not be absolute. A vivid impression of unbroken connexion in a part will, if predominant, by association fill up the gaps and weak points, and behind the admitted breaks in the line of our ideas will suppose—invent—or create an imperceptible butrealcontinuity in the supposed things. And by this fiction of a continuous existence of our perceptions, we easily lapse into the doctrine that our perceptions have an independent existence as objects or things in themselves:—a doctrine which according to Hume is contrary to the plainest experience.

But if the world is always the world of imagination—ofVorstellung—of mental representation, Hume is aware that we must admit two orders or grades of such representation. We must distinguish, he remarks[5], 'in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible and universal (such as the customary transition from causes to effects and from effects to causes), and the principles which are changeable, weak and irregular. The former are the foundation of all our thoughts and actions,' There are, in other words, normal and general laws of association—such as the relation of cause and effect—which persuade us of real existence. By its own laws, therefore,within the realm ofVorstellungor Mental idea, there grows up a permanent, objective world for all, contrasted with the temporary, accidental perception of the individual and of the moment; and this serves as the standard or the one common measure by which occasional perturbations are to be measured. Within the limits of the subjective in general there arises a subjective of higher order, which is truly objective. This same change of front—as it may be called—Hume makes in morals. There the mind can modify and control its passions according as it can feel the objects of them near or far; and though each of us has his 'peculiar position,' we can—so creating the ethical basis—'fix on some steady and general points of view, and always in our thoughts place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present situation[6]': we can 'choose some common point of view,' and from the vantage-ground of a permanent principle, however distant, we have a chance of gaining the victory over our passion, however near.

Thus far Hume had gone in the development of idealism,' Whether his theory is consistent from end to end, need not be here discussed. But it is evident that Hume was not lost in the quagmire of subjective idealism. The objective and the subjective are with him akin: the objective is the subjective, which is universal, permanent, and normal. The causal relation has, in the first instance, only a subjective necessity; but through that subjective necessity or its irresistible belief, it generates an objective world. But it has been and is the fortune of philosophers to be known in the philosophical world by some conspicuous red rag of their system which first caught the eye of the bull-like leaders of the human herd. It was so notably with Hobbesand Spinoza; and most of the thinkers whose names appear in the pages of Kant suffer from this curtailment. Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, aretherenot the real philosophers, discoverable in their works, but the creatures of historic reputation and of popular simplification who do duty for them.

Kant's Hume is therefore a somewhat imaginary being: the product, partly of imperfect knowledge of Hume's writings, partly of prepossessions derived from a long previous training in German rationalism. Such a Hume was—or would have been, had he existed—a philosopher who 'took the objects of experience for things in themselves,' who 'treated the conception of cause as a false and deceptive illusion,' who did not indeed venture to assail the certainty of mathematics, but held—as regards all knowledge about the existence of things—'empiricism to be the sole source of principles,' founding his conclusion mainly on an examination of the causal nexus[7]. This 'note of warning' sounded against the claims of pure reason—as he calls Hume'sEnquirywas what about 1762 broke Kant's dogmatic slumber and forced him to give his researches in speculative philosophy a new direction. His first step was to generalise Hume's problem from an inquiry into the origin of the causal idea into a general study of the synthetic principles in knowledge. His next was to attempt to fix the number of these concepts and synthetic principles. And his third was to 'deduce' them: i. e., to prove the reciprocal implication between experience or knowledge and the concepts or categories of intelligence.

[1]First Principles, p. 162. It may be as well to remark that Relation is scarcely an adequate description of the nature of thought as a whole. We shall see when we come to the theory of logic, that the term is applicable—and then somewhat imperfectly—only to the second phase of thought, the categories of reflection, which are the favourite categories of science and popular metaphysics.

[2]Arist.Metaph.i. 2. 26.

[3]Treatise of Human Nature(Understanding), iii. 7 and ii. 6.

[4]Ibid. iii. 14.

[5]Treatise of Human Nature(Understanding iv. 4.)

[6]Treatise of Human Nature(Morals), iii. i.

[7]Kant,Prolegomenato Metaph. Introduction andCrit. of Practical Reason(on the Claim of Pure Reason,Werke,viii. 167).

TheCriticism of Pure Reasonhas 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 judgmentsa prioripossible?'—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 andpsychology 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—theje ne sais quoiof 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 Kantsometimes 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-inmatter-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 bethere—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 absorptioninthething, 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 objectact(chemically, optically,mechanically, &c.) on the sense-organ on the periphery of my body, does not the nerve-stringconveythe impression to the brain; and is not perception theeffectof that process, in which the material object is the initialcause?

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 theidea corporis[1]: he would hardly have saidCorpus habet ideam. What he meant would scarcely have been well described by calling it aparallelismor 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 thestudentof 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 tothesubject or knowing mind as such and in its generality: what is constitutive of intelligence in general, what sense and intellect aresemper et ubique. Into the question how the humanbeing 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 subjectsoconstituted. 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 (aprima faciefact), 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 appearanceofsomething,—but rather an appearancetoorforsomething.

By an 'idea' the world in general understands what it is sometimes ready to call amereidea. And by a mere idea is meant something which isnotreality, 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-wallsfrom 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 regardsour owntrunk 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 thesepersonaliaas 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 animpetus 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 aneffectof the thing, under those of another it is animageor 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 andabsolutelyisolated thing, our knowledge is and must benil.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 standby 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 itis 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 formalismmaybe 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 welcometo the collector, and can more easily be put in evidence in the examination-room.

Thus the original question, Are synthetic judgmentsa prioripossible? 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 thefirstplace, the table of thecategories 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 thesecondplace, 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 thethirdplace, 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 theLogoswhich 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 thefirstplace 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 thesecondplace, 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.

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