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326 KANT. place of which it should rather take as an example the method which Newton introduced into natural science. Quantity constitutes the object of mathematics, qualities, the object of philosophy ; the former is easy and simple, the latter difficult and complicated — how much more com- prehensible the conception of a trillion is than the philo- sophical idea of freedom, which the philosophers thus far have been unable to make intelligible. In mathematics the general is considered under symbols in concrete, in philoso- phy, by means of symbols in abstracto ; the former con- structs its object in sensuous intuition, while the object of the latter is given to it, and that as a confused concept to be decomposed. Mathematics, therefore, may well begin with definitions, since the conception which is to be explained is first brought into being through the definition, while philosophy must begin by seeking her conceptions. In the former the definition is first in order, and in the lat- ter almost always last ; in the one case the method is synthetic, in the other it is analytic. It is the function of mathematics to connect and compare clear and certain con- cepts of quantity in order to draw conclusions from them ; the function of philosophy is to analyze concepts given in a confused state, and to make them detailed and definite. Philosophy has also this disadvantage, that it pos- sesses very many undecomposable concepts and undemon- strable propositions, while mathematics has only a few such. " Philosophical truths are like meteors, whose brightness gives no assurance of their permanence. They vanish, but mathematics remains. Metaphysics is without doubt the most difficult of all human sciences {Einsichteii), but a meta- physic has never yet been written"; for one cannot be so kind as to " apply the term philosophy to all that is con- tained in the books which bear this title." In the closing paragraphs, on the ultimate bases of ethics, the stern features of the categorical imperative are already seen, veiled by the English theory of moral sense, while the attractive Observa- tions on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, which appeared in the same year, still naively follow the empir- ical road. The empirical phase reaches its skeptical termination