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H. HOFFDING, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie. 405 purpose. In fact, one does Ethics no service by founding it on a basis outside and beyond all possible experience. Hoffding traces with exceeding care the relationship of the Kritik der Urteilskraff to the preceding Critiques. It did not appear to Kant that the two worlds of Nature and of Freedom could be absolutely separate. Between both there must be a principle of unity. He had, in his previous Critiques, employed the distinction between things in our mode of apprehending them, and the things in themselves. While, however, the assumption of such a distinc- tion belongs to the nature of our knowing faculty, it does not follow that the opposition which we (whose discursive thinking must analyse and distinguish in order to know) assume, or have to work with, should necessarily exist also in the essential nature of things. As Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, indicated, or hinted, that the ground of the matter of our cognition might be one with the ground of its form, and that the ground of material might be identical with that of spiritual phenomena ; so in the Urteilskraft he investigates the possibility that the foundation of nature is one with that of Freedom. As an architect on completing an edifice breaks down the scaffolding which gave elevation for his work, so Kant does with the distinction of which he had availed himself during his previous inquiries. He retracts it when he has attained by its help a concept lofty enough to complete his structure of thought. The facts of natural beauty and natural purposiveness involve for their interpretation the assump- tion that Nature according to her own laws works in a manner analogous to mind. In the unknown ground at the bottom of Nature, mechanism and purposiveness may be united in a single principle. This is the profoundest thought in Kant. In it he resumes a favourite theory of his early years, that the basis of the causal connexion of things is one with that of the purposiveness and harmony of Nature. With this thought his romantic suc- cessors were fain to commence. They would begin where he left off ; what he was content to leave as an hypothesis, they endeavoured to employ as a dogmatic position, a major premiss of philosophy. Our knowledge of the Kantian philosophy must be very imperfect if we do not know its defects as well as its merits. Some of the most dangerous as well as most instructive criticism it has had to encounter was formulated even by contemporaries, such as Hamann, Herder, Jacobi, but above all, Salomon Maimon. Yet the ordinary student has little knowledge of these writers. The whole subject is so vast, that few have either the ability or the time for dealing with it adequately. We are the more thankful to Hoffding, who gives us a conspectus of the intellectual forces with which the critical philosophy had to contend. It seems, from the first, to have been more indebted to its opponents than to its disciples. The latter as a rule, carrying some parts of it to extremes, brought undue discredit upon the whole. The former, while drawing attention to its weakest points,