Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/62

V) SHAD WORTH H. HODGSON. the ruin of the theory of the twelve Categories involved the credit of the Aristotelian logic, on which it was built, and at a stroke tore away that whole block of masonry from the crumbling edifice of Scholasticism. This however is a minor matter. Let us see what Kant's main and fatal assumption is. " Back to Kant " has long very naturally been the cry in Germany ; and it is a cry which all should echo, inasmuch as from Kant is dated the modern period of philosophy. But for what purpose back to Kant ? Is it to adopt his assumptions, or is it to avoid them ? The difference is great. To my mind the imperative reason for going back to Kant is this, that his system is the reductio ad cibsurdum of the main assumption upon which it is built, that assumption being a form of what I named above substantial agency. I mean his assumption of causal agency in the Subject. Many persons, especially those who make Scholastic assumptions, seem to think that, if Kant is not true or tenable, there is no use in going back to him. But the fact is, his unreliability is the valuable part about him. His logic is so good, that the assumptions from which he reasons are ruined. Common- sense philosophers, and Scholastics who formulate common- sense, think that, if they can refute Kant, they have done something towards saving their own assumptions. On the contrary they have but witnessed to the irrevocability of their loss. For his assumptions are their own. By all means, then, back to Kant. Let us see what his main assumption means. In both the great lines of thought from which Kant sprang, the line of Leibniz and the line of Locke, a causal agency in the Sub- ject had been spontaneously accepted. Hume, however, had remarked that Berkeley's arguments about an. external world, if consistently carried out, would tell against the real existence of the Subject as much as against the real existence of Matter. He, for his part, he said, could form no idea of power or causality anywhere. The causal agency of the Sub- ject was thus called in question. What then does Kant ? He begins by going to the root, or rather perhaps to one root, of the matter, by asking, How is experience itself, experience of anything, possible ? And the answer he gives is By the real existence of causal agency in the Subject, which syiithesises its feelings. His whole philosophy is founded 011 the assumption of the very thing required to be proved. It is true, the causal agent, with him, is never within, but prior to, experience ; mani- festing experience, and manifesting itself to experience, by