Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/228

214 A. O. LOVE JOY: -KANT : DOGMATISM V. CRITICISM. space permitted ; but I must limit myself to two remarks. One is that, in Kant's own eyes, it is not upon this con- sideration that his distinction of ' criticism ' from ' dogma- tism ' turns, but upon the question how, even within the narrower range, non-identical judgments may be justified a priori. The other remark is that Kant himself, as we have already seen, affirmed that no reality whatever " can possess the formal character of Undenklichkeit," that is, can corre- spond to a logically ' impossible ' and self -contradictory con- cept. And inasmuch as he at first fails to deny, and in the end somewhat confusedly admits, that other predicates be- sides those contained in the definition of a concept may be involved in its internet possibilitas, and that other propositions besides tautological ones may be tested by the criterion of the inconceivability of their opposites it must be said that, even on this point, Kant did not successfully differentiate his position from that of Leibniz and of Wolff. And thus the whole distinction between ' criticism ' and ' dogmatism ' in so far as it is intended to correspond to an historical contrast between Kant and his German predeces- sors falls to the ground. The ' dogmatists ' were not, in Kant's sense, dogmatic ; Kant, in his principal writings, did not refute or even attack their real doctrine of the grounds of the legitimacy of non-identical propositions a priori ; when eventually compelled by Eberhard to define his attitude to that doctrine, he accepted though evidently without quite knowing what he was about the essential principle of it ; and he was himself unable to formulate any different doctrine of the grounds of the validity of such propositions since the theory of the reine Anschauung, even in the restricted field where it applies, expressly presupposes the a priori legitimacy of synthetic judgments in mathematics, and so cannot be regarded as the logical ground of their legitimacy. Finally, by his inability to deny the general applicability to all reality of the principle of contradiction, in its wider as well as in its more literal use, Kant undermined in advance his professedly negative and agnostic position with respect to the possibility of metaphysics as a theoretical science.