Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/205

IV. KANT'S ANTITHESIS OF DOGMATISM AND CRITICISM. BY ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY. KANT'S distinction between two sharply contrasted types of philosophical method, designated by the names of 'dog- matism ' and ' criticism ' has come to be one of the accepted rubrics in the current treatment of the history of philosophy. It is commonly supposed to correspond to actual historical differences that are both definite and important. For this celebrated antithesis not only sums up in a single phrase what Kant conceived to be the most important and dis- tinctive feature of his own doctrine ; it also, as Kant sets it forth, contains several plain implications as to matters of historical fact which concern much more than his own doc- trine : implications, namely, as to the real character of the philosophical procedure of his predecessors, especially of Leibniz and Wolff ; as to the measure of his own divergence from them, in his conception of the nature and scope of the ultimate criteria of truth ; and as to the degree of essential novelty and originality that can be claimed for the Kantian system. In particular, the customary assumption of the validity of the antithesis has brought about that many more or less instructed persons carry about with them, as their one firmly fixed philosophical idea, the persuasion that between the method of philosophy in vogue before Kant's day, and that in vogue since, there is a great gulf fixed. I propose here to show that the antithesis in question is seriously misleading, and to point out certain misrepresenta- tions of historic facts, certain exaggerations and certain am- biguities in Kant's way of presenting it, and certain errors in those ideas about the criteria of truth employed in meta- physical reasoning, upon which the antithesis is based. Behind this simple and popular and apparently convincing scheme for classifying historic tendencies lies a very con- siderable, though not uncharacteristic, confusion in Kant's thinking. He was able to make so sharp the antithesis be- een his own and earlier systems only because he had been