The World as Will and Representation/Appendix of Volume I
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
VOL. II.
IT is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a distinct and full exposition of its value. For the faults are particular and finite, and can therefore be fully comprehended; while, on the contrary, the very stamp which genius impresses upon its works is that their excellence is unfathomable and in exhaustible. Therefore they do not grow old, but become the instructor of many succeeding centuries. The per fected masterpiece of a truly great mind will always pro duce a deep and powerful effect upon the whole human race, so much so that it is impossible to calculate to what distant centuries and lands its enlightening influence may extend. This is always the case; for however cultivated and rich the age may be in which such a masterpiece appears, genius always rises like a palm-tree above the soil in which it is rooted.
But a deep-reaching and widespread effect of this kind cannot take place suddenly, because of the great difference between the genius and ordinary men. The knowledge which that one man in one lifetime drew directly from life and the world, won and presented to others as won and arranged, cannot yet at once become the possession of mankind; for mankind has not so much power to receive as the genius has power to give. But even after a suc cessful battle with unworthy opponents, who at its very birth contest the life of what is immortal and desire to nip in the bud the salvation of man (like the serpents in the cradle of Hercules), that knowledge must then traverse the circuitous paths of innumerable false con structions and distorted applications, must overcome the
4 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
attempts to unite it with old errors, and so live in conflict till a new and unprejudiced generation grows up to meet it. Little by little, even in youth, this new generation partially receives the contents of that spring through a thousand indirect channels, gradually assimilates it, and so participates in the benefit which was destined to flow to mankind from that great mind. So slowly does the education of the human race, the weak yet refractory pupil of genius, advance. Thus with Kant s teaching also; its full strength and importance will only be revealed through time, when the spirit of the age, itself gradually trans formed and altered in the most important and essential respects by, the influence of that teaching, will afford con vincing evidence of the power of that giant mind. I have, however, no intention of presumptuously anticipating the spirit of the age and assuming here the thankless rdle of Calchas and Cassandra. Only I must be allowed, in accordance with what has been said, to regard Kant s works as still very new, while many at the present day look upon them as already antiquated, and indeed have laid them aside as done with, or, as they express it, have left them behind^ and others, emboldened by this, ignore them altogether, and with brazen face go on philosophising about God and the soul on the assumption of the old realistic dogmatism and its scholastic teaching, which is as if one sought to introduce the doctrines of the alchemists into modern chemistry. For the rest, the works of Kant do not stand in need of my feeble eulogy, but will them selves for ever praise their author, and though perhaps not in the letter, yet in the spirit they will live for ever upon earth.
Certainly, however, if we look back at the first result of his teaching, at the efforts and events in the sphere of philosophy during the period that has elapsed since he wrote, a very depressing saying of Goethe obtains con firmation : " As the water that is displaced by a ship immediately flows in again behind it, so when great minds
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 5
have driven error aside and made room for themselves, it very quickly closes in behind them again by the law of its nature" (Walirlieit und Dichtung, Theil 3, s. 521). Yet this period has been only an episode, which is to be reckoned as part of the lot referred to above that befalls all new and great knowledge; an episode which is now unmistakably near its end, for the bubble so long blown out yet bursts at last. Men generally are begin ning to be conscious that true and serious philosophy still stands where Kant left it. At any rate, I cannot see that between Kant and myself anything has been done in philosophy; therefore I regard myself as his immediate successor.
What I have in view in this Appendix to my work is really only a defence of the doctrine I have set forth in it, inasmuch as in many points that doctrine does not agree with the Kantian philosophy, but indeed contradicts it. A discussion of this philosophy is, however, necessary, for it is clear that my train of thought, different as its con tent is from that of Kant, is yet throughout under its influence, necessarily presupposes it, starts from it; and I confess that, next to the impression of the world of per ception, I owe what is best in my own system to the impression made upon me by the works of Kant, by the sacred writings of the Hindus, and by Plato. But I can only justify the contradictions of Kant which are never theless present in my work by accusing him of error in these points, and exposing mistakes which he committed. Therefore in this Appendix I must proceed against Kant in a thoroughly polemical manner, and indeed seriously and with every effort; for it is only thus that his doctrine can be freed from the error that clings to it, and its truth shine out the more clearly and stand the more firmly. It must not, therefore, be expected that the sincere rever ence for Kant which I certainly feel shall extend to his weaknesses and errors also, and that I shall consequently refrain from exposing these except with the most careful
6 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
indulgence, whereby my language would necessarily be come weak and insipid through circumlocution. Towards a living writer such indulgence is needed, for human frailty cannot endure even the most just refutation of an error, unless tempered by soothing and flattery, and hardly even then; and a teacher of the age and benefactor of mankind deserves at least that the human weakness he also has should be indulged, so that he may not be caused pain. But he who is dead has thrown off this weakness; his merit stands firm; time will purify it more and more from all exaggeration and detraction. His mistakes must be separated from it, rendered harmless, and then given over to oblivion. Therefore in the polemic against Kant I am about to begin, I have only his mistakes and weak points in view. I oppose them with hostility, and wage a relentless war of extermination against them, always mindful not to conceal them indulgently, but rather to place them in the clearest light, in order to extirpate them the more surely. For the reasons given above, I am not conscious either of injustice or ingratitude towards Kant in doing this. However, in order that, in the eyes of others also, I may remove every appearance of malice, I wish first to bring out clearly my sincere reverence for Kant and gratitude to him, by expressing shortly what in my eyes appears to be his chief merit; and I shall do this .from a standpoint so general that I shall not require to touch upon the points in which I must afterwards contro vert him.
Kant s greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself, based upon the proof that between things and us there still always stands the intellect, so that they cannot be known as they may be in themselves. He was led into this path through Locke (see Prolegomena zu jcdcr Mctaph., 13, Anm. 2). The latter had shown that the secondary qualities of things, such as sound,
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 7
smell, colour, hardness, softness, smoothness, and the like, as founded on the affections of the senses, do not belong to the objective body, to the thing in itself. To this he attributed only the primary qualities, i.e., such as only pre suppose space and impenetrability; thus extension, figure, solidity, number, mobility. But this easily discovered Lockeian distinction was, as it were, only a youthful intro duction to the distinction of Kant. The latter, starting from an incomparably higher standpoint, explains all that Locke had accepted as primary qualities, i.e., qualities of the thing in itself, as also belonging only to its phe nomenal appearance in our faculty of apprehension, and this just because the conditions of this faculty, space, time, and causality, are known by us a priori. Thus Locke had abstracted from the thing in itself the share which the organs of sense have in its phenomenal appearance; Kant, however, further abstracted the share of the brain-functions (though not under that name). Thus the distinction be tween the phenomenon and the thing in itself now received an infinitely greater significance, and a very much deeper meaning. For this end he was obliged to take in hand
o o
the important separation of our a priori from our a pos teriori knowledge, which before him had never been car ried out with adequate strictness and completeness, nor with distinct consciousness. Accordingly this now became the principal subject of his profound investigations. Now here we would at once remark that Kant s philosophy has a threefold relation to that of his predecessors. First, as we have just seen, to the philosophy of Locke, confirming and extending it; secondly, to that of Hume, correcting and making use of it, a relation which is most distinctly ex pressed in the " Prolegomena " (that most beautiful and comprehensible of all Kant s important writings, which is far too little read, for it facilitates immensely the study of his philosophy); thirdly, a decidedly polemical and de structive relation to the Leibnitz-Wolfian philosophy. All three systems ought to be known before one proceeds
8 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
to the study of the Kantian philosophy. If now, accord ing to the above, the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself, thus the doctrine of the complete diver sity of the ideal and the real, is the fundamental character istic of the Kantian philosophy, then the assertion of the absolute identity of these two which appeared soon after wards is a sad proof of the saying of Goethe quoted above; all the more so as it rested upon nothing but the empty boast of intellectual intuition, and accordingly was only a return to the crudeness of the vulgar opinion, masked under bombast and nonsense, and the imposing impression of an air of importance. It became the fitting starting- point for the still grosser nonsense of the clumsy and stupid Hegel. Now as Kant s separation of the pheno menon from the thing in itself, arrived at in the manner explained above, far surpassed all that preceded it in the depth and thoughtfulness of its conception, it was also exceedingly important in its results. For in it he pro pounded, quite originally, in a perfectly new way, found from a new side and on a new path, the same truth which Plato never wearies of repeating, and in his language generally expresses thus : This world which appears to the senses has no true being, but only a ceaseless becom ing; it is, and it is not, and its comprehension is not so much knowledge as illusion. This is also what he ex presses mythically at the beginning of the seventh book of the Republic, the most important passage in all his writings, which has already been referred to in the third book of the present work. He says : Men, firmly chained in a dark cave, see neither the true original light nor real things, but only the meagre light of the fire in the cave and the shadows of real things which pass by the fire behind their backs; yet they think the shadows are the reality, and the determining of the succession of these shadows is true wisdom. The same truth, again quite differently presented, is also a leading doctrine of the Vedas and Puranas, the doctrine of Maya, by which really
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 9
nothing else is understood than what Kant calls the phenomenon in opposition to the thing in itself; for the work of Maya is said to be just this visible world in which we are, a summoned enchantment, an inconstant appearance without true being, like an optical illusion or a dream, a veil which surrounds human consciousness, . something of which it is equally false and true to say that it is and that it is not. But Kant not only expressed the same doctrine in a completely new and original way, but raised it to the position of proved and indisputable truth by means of the calmest and most temperate ex position; while both Plato and the Indian philosophers had founded their assertions merely upon a general per ception of the world, had advanced them as the direct utterance of their consciousness, and presented them rather mythically and poetically than philosophically and distinctly. In this respect they stand to Kant in the same relation as the Pythagoreans Hicetas, Philolaus, and Aristarchus, who already asserted the movement of the earth round the fixed sun, stand to Copernicus. Such distinct knowledge and calm, thoughtful exposition of this dream-like nature of the whole world is really the basis of the whole Kantian philosophy; it is its soul and its greatest merit. He accomplished this by taking to pieces the whole machinery of our intellect by means of which the phantasmagoria of the objective world is brought about, and presenting it in detail with marvel lous insight and ability. All earlier Western philosophy, appearing in comparison with the Kantian unspeakably clumsy, had failed to recognise that truth, and had there fore always spoken just as if in a dream. Kant first awakened it suddenly out of this dream; therefore the last sleepers (Mendelssohn) called him the " all-destroyer." He showed that the laws which reign with inviolable necessity in existence, i.e., in experience generally, are not to be applied to deduce and explain existence itself; that thus the validity of these laws is only relative, i.e., only
io CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
arises after existence; the world of experience in general is already established and present; that consequently these laws cannot be our guide when we come to the explanation of the existence of the world and of our selves. All earlier Western philosophers had imagined that these laws, according to which the phenomena are combined, and all of which time and space, as well as causality and inference I comprehend under the expres sion " the principle of sufficient reason," were absolute laws conditioned by nothing, ceternce veritates; that the world itself existed only in consequence of and in confor mity with them; and therefore that under their guidance the whole riddle of the world must be capable of solution. The assumptions made for this purpose, which Kant criti cises under the name of the Ideas of the reason, only served to raise the mere phenomenon, the work of Maya, the shadow world of Plato, to the one highest reality, to put it in the place of the inmost and true being of things, and thereby to make the real knowledge of this impos sible; that is, in a word, to send the dreamers still more soundly to sleep. Kant exhibited these laws, and there fore the whole world, as conditioned by the form of know ledge belonging to the subject; from which it followed, that however far one carried investigation and reasoning under the guidance of these laws, yet in the principal matter, i.e., in knowledge of the nature of the world in itself and outside the idea, no step in advance was made, but one only moved like a squirrel in its wheel. Thus, all the dogmatists may be compared to persons who sup posed that if they only went straight on long enough they would come to the end of the world; but Kant then cir cumnavigated the world and showed that, because it is round, one cannot get out of it by horizontal movement, but that yet by perpendicular movement this is perhaps not impossible. We may also say that Kant s doctrine affords the insight that we must seek the end and beginning of the world, not without, but within us.
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 11
All this, however, rests on the fundamental distinction between dogmatic and critical or transcendental philosophy. Whoever wishes to make this quite clear to himself, and realise it by means of an example, may do so very briefly by reading, as a specimen of dogmatic philosophy, an essay of Leibnitz entitled " DC Eerum Originatione Radicali," and printed for the first time in the edition of the philo sophical works of Leibnitz by Erdmann (vol. i. p. 147). Here the origin and excellence of the world is demon strated a priori, so thoroughly in the manner of realistic- dogmatism, on the ground of the veritates ceternce and with the assistance of the ontological and cosmological proofs. It is indeed once admitted, by the way, that ex perience shows the exact opposite of the excellence of the world here demonstrated; but experience is therefore given to understand that it knows nothing of the matter, and ought to hold its tongue when philosophy has spoken a priori. Now, with Kant, the critical philosophy appeared as the opponent of this whole method. It takes for its problem just these veritates ceternce, which serve as the foundation of every such dogmatic structure, investigates their origin, and finds it in the human mind, where they spring from the peculiar forms which belong to it, and which it carries in itself for the purpose of comprehending an objective world. Thus, here, in the brain, is the quarry which supplies the material for that proud dogmatic edi fice. But because the critical philosophy, in order to attain to this result, was obliged to go beyond the veritates mternce upon which all the preceding dogmatism was founded, and make these truths themselves the objects of in vestigation, it became transcendental philosophy. From this, then, it also follows that the objective world, as we know it, does not belong to the true being of the thing in itself, but is merely its phenomenal appearance conditioned by those very forms which lie a priori in the intellect (i.e., the brain), therefore it cannot contain anything but phenomena.
12 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
Kant, indeed, did not attain to the knowledge that the phenomenon is the world as idea, and the thing in itself is the will. But he showed that the phenomenal world is conditioned just as much through the subject as through the object, and because he isolated the most universal forms of its phenomenal appearance, i.e., of the idea, he proved that we may know these forms and consider them in their whole constitution, not only by starting from the object, but also just as well by starting from the subject, because they are really the limits between object and subject which are common to them both; and he con cluded that by following these limits we never penetrate to the inner nature either of the object or of the subject, consequently never know the true nature of the world, the thing in itself.
He did not deduce the thing in itself in the right way, as I shall show presently, but by means of an in consistency, and he had to pay the penalty of this in frequent and irresistible attacks upon this important part of his teaching. He did not recognise the thing in itself directly in the will; but he made a great initial step towards this knowledge in that he explained the undeni able moral significance of human action as quite different from and not dependent upon the laws of the pheno menon, nor even explicable in accordance with them, but as something which touches the thing in7 itself directly : this is the second important point of view for estimating his services.
We may regard as the third the complete overthrow of the Scholastic philosophy, a name by which I wish here to denote generally the whole period beginning with Augustine, the Church Father, and ending just before Kant. .:.,. For the chief characteristic of Scholasticism is, indeed, that which is very correctly stated by Tennemann, the guardianship of the prevailing national religion over philosophy, which had really nothing left for it to do but to prove and embellish the cardinal dogmas prescribed
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 13
to it by religion. The Schoolmen proper, down to Suarez, confess this openly; the succeeding philosophers do it more unconsciously, or at least unavowedly. It is held that Scholastic philosophy only extends to about a hun dred years before Descartes, and that then with him there begins an entirely new epoch of free investigation independent of all positive theological doctrine. Such investigation, however, is in fact not to be attributed to Descartes and his successors, 1 but only an appearance of it, and in any case an effort after it. Descartes was a man of supreme ability, and if we take account of the age he lived in, he accomplished a great deal. But if we set aside this consideration and measure him with reference to the free ing of thought from all fetters and the commencement of a new period of untrammelled original investigation with which he is credited, we are obliged to find that with his doubt still wanting in true seriousness, and therefore surrendering so quickly and so entirely, he has, indeed, the appearance of wishing to throw off at once all the early implanted opinions belonging to his age and nation, but does so only apparently and for a moment, to assume them again immediately and hold them all the more firmly; and so is it with all his successors down to Kant.
1 Bruno and Spinoza are here en- age, and he also shows a presenti-
tirely to be excepted. They stand ment of his fate which led him to
each for himself and alone, and delay the publication of his views,
belong neither to their age nor their till that inclination to communicate
quarter of the globe, which rewarded what one knows to be true, which
the one with death and the other is so strong in noble minds, pre-
with persecution and insult. Their vailed :
miserable existence and death in I( A / .
this Western world is like that of a Ad partum PP c r f c tu >
tropical plant in Europe. The banks ~ 77 quld , bstat .; ,
< iv. i /-i ii. oea/o luxe induino suit trwuenda
of the sacred Ganges were their / .?
true spiritual home; there they TT i j> t
would have led a peaceful and Umlrarum flactu terras mcrgente,
, j ,., r ... cacumcn
honoured life among men of like A it n?
mind. In the following lines, with AdMhmdarum, rwster Olympe,
which Bruno begins his book Delia
Causa Principio et Uno, for which Whoever has read this his prin-
he was brought to the stake, he cipal work, and also his other Italian
expresses clearly and beautifully writings, which were formerly so
how Jonely he felt himself in his rare, but are now accessible to all
14 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
Goethe s lines are, therefore, very applicable to a free independent thinker of this kind :
<: Saving Thy gracious presence, he to me A long-legged grasshopper appears to be, That springing flies, and flying springs, And in the grass the same old ditty sings." l
Kant had reasons for assuming the air of also intending nothing more. But the pretended spring, which was per mitted because it was known that it leads back to the grass, this time became a flight, and now those who remain below can only look after him, and can never catch him again.
Kant, then, ventured to show by his teaching that all those dogmas which had been so often professedly proved were incapable of proof. Speculative theology, and the rational psychology connected with it, received from him their deathblow. Since then they have vanished from German philosophy, and one must not allow oneself to be misled by the fact that here and there the word is retained after the thing has been given up, or some wretched pro fessor of philosophy has the fear of his master in view, and lets truth take care of itself. Only he who has ob served the pernicious influence of these conceptions upon natural science, and upon philosophy in all, even the best writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, can estimate the extent of this service of Kant s. The change of tone and of metaphysical background which has ap peared in German writing upon natural science since Kant
through a German edition, will find, this work of his, in the hands of
as I have done, that he alone of all coarse, furious priests as his judges
philosophers in some degree ap- and executioners, and thank Time
preaches to Plato, in respect of the which brought a brighter and a
strong blending of poetical power gentler age, so that the after-world
and tendency along with the philo- whose curse was to fall on those
sophical, and this he also shows espe- fiendish fanatics is the world we
cially in a dramatic form. Imagine now live in.
the tender, spiritual, thoughtful l Bayard Taylor s translation of
being, as he shows himself to us in "Faust," vol. i. p. 14. TRB.
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 15
is remarkable; before him it was in the same position as it still occupies in England. This merit of Kant s is con nected with the fact that the unreflecting pursuit of the laws of the phenomenon, the elevation of these to the position of eternal truths, and thus the raising of the fleeting appearance to the position of the real being of the world, in short, realism undisturbed in its illusion by any reflection, had reigned throughout all preceding philo sophy, ancient, mediaeval, and modern. Berkeley, who, like Malebranche before him, recognised its one-sidedness , and indeed falseness, was unable to overthrow it, for his attack was confined to one point. Thus it was reserved for Kant to enable the idealistic point of view to obtain the ascendancy in Europe, at least in philosophy; the point of view which throughout all non-Mohammedan Asia, and indeed essentially, is that of religion. Before Kant, then, we were in time; now time is in us, and so on. Ethics also were treated by that realistic philosophy according to the laws of the phenomenon, which it re garded as absolute and valid also for the thing in itself. They were therefore based now upon a doctrine of hap piness, now upon the will of the Creator, and finally upon the conception of perfection; a conception which, taken by itself, is entirely empty and void of content, for it denotes a mere relation that only receives significance from the things to which il is applied. " To be perfect " means nothing more than " to correspond to some concep tion which is presupposed and given," a conception which must therefore be previously framed, and without which the perfection is an unknown quantity, and consequently has no meaning when expressed alone. If, however, it is intended tacitly to presuppose the conception " humanity," and accordingly to make it the principle of morality to strive after human perfection, this is only saying : " Men ought to be as they ought to be," and we are just as wise as before. In fact " perfect " is very nearly a mere synonym of " complete," for it signifies that in one given
16 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
case or individual, all the predicates which lie in the conception of its species appear, thus are actually present. Therefore the conception " perfection," if used absolutely and in the abstract, is a word void of significance, and this is also the case with the talk about the " most perfect being," and other similar expressions. All this is a mere jingle of words. Nevertheless last century this conception of per fection and imperfection had become current coin; indeed it was the hinge upon which almost all speculation upon ethics, and even theology, turned. It was in every one s mouth, so that at last it became a simple nuisance. We see even the best writers of the time, for example Lessing, entangled in the most deplorable manner in perfections and imperfections, and struggling with them. At the same time, every thinking man must at least dimly have felt that this conception is void of all positive content, be cause, like an algebraical symbol, it denotes a mere relation in dbstracto. Kant, as we have already said, entirely separated the undeniably great ethical signiiicance of actions from the phenomenon and its laws, and showed that the former directly concerned the thing in itself, the inner nature of the world, while the latter, i.e., time, space, and all that fills them, and disposes itself in them according to the law of causality, is to be regarded as a changing and unsubstantial dream.
The little I have said, which by no means exhausts the subject, may suffice as evidence of my recognition of the great merits of Kant, a recognition expressed here both for my own satisfaction, and because justice demands that those merits should be recalled to the memory of every one who desires to follow me in the unsparing exposure of his errors to which I now proceed.
It may be inferred, upon purely historical grounds, that Kant s great achievements must have been accompanied by great errors. For although he effected the greatest
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 17
revolution in philosophy and made an end of Scholasticism, Avhich, understood in the wider sense we have indicated, had lasted for fourteen centuries, in order to begin what was really the third entirely new epoch in philosophy which the world has seen, yet the direct result of his appearance was only negative, not positive. For since he did not set up a completely new system, to which his dis ciples could only have adhered for a period, all indeed observed that something very great had happened, but yet no one rightly knew what. They certainly saw that all previous philosophy had been fruitless dreaming, from which the new age had now awakened, but what they ought to hold to now they did not know. A great void was felt; a great need had arisen; the universal attention even of the general public was aroused. Induced by this, but not urged by inward inclination and sense of power (which find utterance even at unfavourable times, as in the case of Spinoza), men without any exceptional talent made various weak, absurd, and indeed sometimes insane, attempts, to which, however, the now interested public gave its attention, and with great patience, such as is only found in Germany, long lent its ear.
The same thing must once have happened in Nature, when a great revolution had altered the whole surface of the earth, land and sea had changed places, and the scene was cleared for a new creation. It was then a long time before Nature could produce a new series of lasting forms all in harmony with themselves and with each other. Strange and monstrous organisations appeared which did not harmonise either with themselves or with each other, and therefore could not endure long, but whose still exist ing remains have brought down to us the tokens of that wavering and tentative procedure of Nature forming itself anew.
Since, now, in philosophy, a crisis precisely similar to this, and an age of fearful abortions, was, as we all know, introduced by Kant, it may be concluded that the ser-
VOL. II. B
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vices lie rendered were not complete, but must have been negative and one-sided, and burdened with great defects. These defects \ve now desire to search out.
First of all we shall present to ourselves clearly and examine the fundamental thought in which the aim of the whole " Critique of Pure Reason " lies. Kant placed himself at the standpoint of his predecessors, the dog matic philosophers, and accordingly he started with them from the following assumptions: (i.) Metaphysics is the science of that which lies beyond the possibility of all experience. (2.) Such a science can never be attained by applying principles which must first themselves be drawn from experience (Prolegomena, i); but only what we know before, and thus independently of all experience, can reach further than possible experience. (3.) In our reason certain principles of this kind are actually to be found : they are comprehended under the name of Knowledge of pure reason. So far Kant goes with his predecessors, but here he separates from them. They say: "These prin ciples, or this knowledge of pure reason, are expressions of the absolute possibility of things, ceternce vcritatcs, sources of ontology; they stand above the system of the world, as fate stood above the gods of the ancients." Kant says, they are mere forms of our intellect, laws, not of the existence of things, but of our idea of them; they are therefore valid merely for our apprehension of things, and hence they cannot extend beyond the possi bility of experience, which, according to assumption i, is what was aimed at; for the a priori nature of these forms of knowledge, since it can only rest on their sub jective origin, is just what cuts us off for ever from the knowledge of the nature of things in themselves, and con fines us to a world of mere phenomena, so that we cannot know things as they may be in themselves, even a pos teriori, not to speak of a priori. Accordingly metaphysics
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 19
is impossible, and criticism of pure reason takes its place. As opposed to the old dogmatism, Kant is here completely victorious; therefore all dogmatic attempts which have since appeared have been obliged to pursue an entirely different path from the earlier systems; and I shall now go on to the justification of my own system, according to the expressed intention of this criticism. A more care ful examination, then, of the reasoning given above will oblige one to confess that its first fundamental assumption is a petitio principii. It lies in the proposition (stated with particular clearness in the Prolegomena,^ i) : "The source of metaphysics must throughout be non-empirical; its fundamental principles and conceptions must never be taken from either inner or outer experience." Yet absolutely nothing is advanced in proof of tins cardinal assertion except the etymological argument from the word metaphysic. In truth, however, the matter stands thus : The world and our own existence presents itself to us necessarily as a riddle. It is now assumed, without more .ado, that the solution of this riddle cannot be arrived at from a thorough understanding of the world itself, but must be sought in something entirely different from the world (for that is the meaning of " beyond the possibility of all experience "); and that everything must be excluded from that solution of which we can in any way have immediate knowledge (for that is the meaning of possible experience, both inner and outer); the solution must rather be sought only in that at which we can arrive merely indirectly, that is, by means of inferences from universal principles a priori. After the principal source of all knowledge has in this way been excluded, and the direct way to truth has been closed, we must not wonder that the dogmatic systems failed, and that Kant was able to show the necessity of this failure; for metaphysics and knowledge a priori had been assumed beforehand to be identical. But for this it was first necessary to prove that the material for the solution of the riddle absolutely can-
20 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
not be contained in the world itself, but must be sought for only outside the world in something we can only attain to under the guidance of those forms of which we are conscious a priori. But so long as this is not proved, we have no grounds for shutting ourselves off, in the case of the most important and most difficult of all questions, from the richest of all sources of knowledge, inner and outer experience, in order to work only with empty forms. I therefore say that the solution of the riddle of the world must proceed from the understanding of the world itself; that thus the task of metaphysics is not to pass beyond the experience in which the world exists, but to understand it thoroughly, because outer and inner experience is at any rate the principal source of all knowledge; that there fore the solution of the riddle of the world is only possible through the proper connection of outer with inner expe rience, effected at the right point, and the combination thereby produced of these two very different sources of knowledge. Yet this solution is only possible within cer tain limits which are inseparable from our finite nature, so that we attain to a right understanding of the world itself without reaching a final explanation of its existence abolishing all further problems. Therefore est guadam prodire tenus, and my path lies midway between the omniscience of the earlier dogmatists and the despair of the Kantian Critique. The important truths, however, which Kant discovered, and through which the earlier metaphysical systems were overthrown, have supplied my system with data and materials. Compare what I have said concerning my method in chap. xvii. of the Supple ments. So much for the fundamental thought of Kant; we shall now consider his working out of it and its details.
Kant s style bears throughout the stamp of a pre eminent mind, genuine strong individuality, and quite
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY, 21
exceptional power of thought. Its characteristic quality may perhaps be aptly described as a brilliant dryness, by virtue of which he was able to grasp firmly and select the conceptions with great certainty, and then to turn them about with the greatest freedom, to the astonishment of the reader. I find the same brilliant dryness in the style of Aristotle, though it is much simpler. Nevertheless Kant s language is often indistinct, indefinite, inadequate, and sometimes obscure. Its obscurity, certainly, is partly excusable on account of the difficulty of the subject and the depth of the thought; but he who is himself clear to the bottom, and knows with perfect distinctness what he thinks and wishes, will never write indistinctly, will never set up wavering and indefinite conceptions, compose most difficult and complicated expressions from foreign lan guages to denote them, and use these expressions constantly afterwards, as Kant took words and formulas from earlier philosophy, especially Scholasticism, which he combined with each other to suit his purposes; as, for example, " transcendental synthetic unity of apperception," and in general " unity of synthesis " (Einlicit dcr Synthesis}, always used where " union " ( V&r&inigung) would be quite sufficient by itself. Moreover, a man who is himself quite clear will not be always explaining anew what has once been explained, as Kant does, for example, in the case of the understanding, the categories, experience, and other leading conceptions. In general, such a man will not incessantly repeat himself, and yet in every new ex position of the thought already expressed a hundred times leave it in just the same obscure condition, but he will express his meaning once distinctly, thoroughly, and ex haustively, and then let it alone. " Quo enim melius rein aliquam concipimus co magis ddcrminati sumus- ad eaiu unico modo cxprimcndam" says Descartes in his fifth letter. But the most injurious result of Kant s occasion ally obscure language is, that it acted as exemplar vitiis imitabile; indeed, it was misconstrued as a pernicious
22 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
authorisation. The public was compelled to see that what is obscure is not always without significance; conse quently, what was without significance took refuge behind obscure language. Fichte was the first to seize this new privilege and use it vigorously; Schelling at least equalled him; and a host of hungry scribblers, without talent and without honesty, soon outbade them both. But the height of audacity, in serving up pure nonsense, in string ing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously only been heard in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument of German stu pidity. In vain, meanwhile, Jean Paul wrote his beautiful paragraph, " Higher criticism of philosophical madness in the professorial chair, and poetical madness in the theatre " (^Esthctisclie Naclischulc); for in vain Goethe had already said
" They prate and teach, and no one interferes; All from the fellowship of fools are shrinking; Man usually believes, if only words he hears, That also with them goes material for thinking." 1
But let us return to Kant. We are compelled to admit that he entirely lacks grand, classical simplicity, na/ivctt, inyenultt, candeur. His philosophy has no analogy with Grecian architecture, which presents large simple propor tions revealing themselves at once to the glance; on the contrary, it reminds us strongly of the Gothic style of building. For a purely individual characteristic of Kant s mind is a remarkable love of symmetry, which delights in a varied multiplicity, so that it may reduce it to order, and repeat this order in subordinate orders, and so on indefinitely, just as happens in Gothic churches. Indeed, lie sometimes carries this to the extent of trifling, and from love of this tendency he goes so far as to do open
1 "Faust," scene vi., Bayard Taylor ^ translation, vol. i. p. 134. TRS.
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 23
violence to truth, and to deal with it as Nature was dealt with by the old-fashioned gardeners, whose work we see in symmetrical alleys, squares, and triangles, trees shaped like pyramids and spheres, and hedges winding in regular curves. I will support this with facts.
After he has treated space and time isolated from every thing else, and has then dismissed this whole world of perception which fills space and time, and in which we live and are, with the meaningless words "the empirical content of perception is given us," he immediately arrives with one spring at the logical basis of his whole philosophy, the table of judgments. From this table he deduces an exact dozen of categories, symmetrically arranged under four heads, which afterwards become the fearful pro- crustean bed into which he violently forces all things in the world and all that goes on in man, shrinking from no violence and disdaining no sophistry if only he is able to repeat everywhere the symmetry of that table. The first that is symmetrically deduced from it is the pure physio logical table of the general principles of natural science the axioms of intuition, anticipations of perception, ana logies of experience, and postulates of empirical thought in general. Of these fundamental principles, the first two are simple; but each of the last two sends out symme trically three shoots. The mere categories were what he calls conceptions; but these principles of natural science are judgments. Iii accordance with his highest guide to all wisdom, symmetry, the series must now prove itself fruit ful in the syllogisms, and this, indeed, is done symme trically and regularly. For, as by the application of the categories to sensibility, experience with all its a priori principles arose for the understanding, so by the applica tion of syllogisms to the categories, a task performed by the reason in accordance with its pretended principle of seeking the unconditioned, the Ideas of the reason arise. Now this takes place in the following manner : The three categories of relation supply to syllogistic reasoning the
24 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
three only possible kinds of major premisses, and syllogistic reasoning accordingly falls into three kinds, each of which
O O /
is to be regarded as an egg out of which the reason hatches an Idea; out of the categorical syllogism the Idea of the soul, out of the hypothetical the Idea of the world, and out of the disjunctive the Idea of God. In the second of these, the Idea of the world, the symmetry of the table of the categories now repeats itself again, for its four heads produce four theses, each of which has its antithesis as a symmetrical pendant.
We pay the tribute of our admiration to the really ex ceedingly acute combination which produced this elegant structure, but we shall none the less proceed to a thorough examination of its foundation and its parts. But the fol lowing remarks must come first.
It is astonishing how Kant, without further reflection, pursues his way, following his symmetry, ordering every thing in accordance with it, without ever taking one of the subjects so handled into consideration on its own account. I will explain myself more fully. After he has considered intuitive knowledge in a mathematical refer ence only, he neglects altogether the rest of knowledge of perception in which the world lies before us, and confines himself entirely to abstract thinking, although this receives the whole of its significance and value from the world of perception alone, which is infinitely more significant, gene rally present, and rich in content than the abstract part of our knowledge. Indeed, and this is an important point, he has nowhere clearly distinguished perception from abstract knowledge, and just on this account, as we shall afterwards see, he becomes involved in irresolvable contradictions with himself. After he has disposed of the whole sensible world with the meaningless " it is given," he makes, as we have said, the logical table of judgments the foundation-stone of his building. But here again he
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 25
does not reflect for a moment upon that which really lies before him. These forms of judgment are indeed words and combinations of words; yet it ought first to have been asked what these directly denote : it would have been found that they denote conceptions. The next question would then have been as to the nature of conceptions. It would have appeared from the answer what relation these have to the ideas of perception in which the world exists; for perception and reflection would have been distin guished. It would now have become necessarv to examine,
/
not merely how pure and merely formal intuition or per ception a priori, but also how its content, the empirical perception, comes into consciousness. But then it would have become apparent what part the understanding has in this, and thus also in general what the understanding is, and, on the other hand, what the reason properly is, the critique of which is being written. It is most remarkable that he does not once properly and adequately define the latter, but merely gives incidentally, and as the context in each case demands, incomplete and inaccurate explanations of it, in direct contradiction to the rule of Descartes given above. 1 For example, at p. 1 1; V. 24, of the " Critique of Pure Eeason," it is the faculty of principles a priori; but at p. 299; V. 356, it is said that reason is the faculty of principles, and it is opposed to the understanding, which is the faculty of rules! One would now think that there must be a very wide difference between principles and rules, since it entitles us to assume a special faculty of knowledge for each of them. But this great distinction is made to lie merely in this, that what is known a priori through pure perception or through the forms of the understanding is a rule, and only what results from mere
1 Observe here that I always quote sides this, I add the paging of the
the " Kritik der reinen Vernunft " fifth edition, preceded by a V.; all
according to the paging of the first the other editions, from the second
edition, for in Rosenkranz s edition onwards, are the same as the fifth,
of Kant s collected works this pag- and so also is their paging, ing is always given in addition. Be-
26 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
conceptions is a principle. We shall return to this arbi trary and inadmissible distinction later, when we come to the Dialectic. On p. 330; V. 386, reason is the faculty of inference; mere judging (p. 69; V. 94) he often explains as the work of the understanding. Now, this really amounts to saying : Judging is the work of the understanding so long as the ground of the judgment is empirical, trans cendental, or metalogical (Essay on the Principle of Sufficient Beason, 31, 32, 33); but if it is logical, as is the case with the syllogism, then we are here concerned with a quite special and much more important faculty of knowledge the reason. Nay, what is more, on p. 303; V. 360, it is explained that what follows directly from a proposition is still a matter of the understanding, and that only those conclusions which are arrived at by the use of a mediating conception are the work of the reason, and the example given is this : From the proposition, " All men are mortal," the inference, " Some mortals are men," may be drawn by the mere understanding. On the other hand, to draw the conclusion, "All the learned are mortal," demands an entirely different and far more important faculty the reason. How was it possible for a great thinker to write the like of this! On p. 553; V. 581, reason is all at once the constant condition of all voluntary action. On p. 614; V. 642, it consists in the fact that we can give an account of our assertions; on pp. 643, 644; V. 671, 672, in the circumstance that it brings unity into the conceptions of the understanding by means of Ideas, as the understanding brings unity into the multi plicity of objects by means of conceptions. On p. 646; V. 674, it is nothing else than the faculty which deduces the particular from the general.
The understanding also is constantly being explained anew. In seven passages of the " Critique of Pure Bea son " it is explained in the following terms. On p. 5 1; V. 75, it is the faculty which of itself produces ideas of perception. On p. 69; Y. 94, it is the faculty of judging,
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 27
i.e., of thinking, i.e., of knowing through conceptions. On p. 1 37 of the fifth edition, it is the faculty of knowledge generally. On p. 132; V. 171, it is the faculty of rules. On p. 158; V. 197, however, it is said : " It is not only the faculty of rules, but the source of principles (Grundsdtzc) according to which everything comes under rules; " and yet above it was opposed to the reason because the latter alone was the faculty of principles (Principieri). On p. 1 60; V. 199, the understanding is the faculty of concep tions; but on p. 302; V. 359, it is the faculty of the unity of phenomena by means of rules.
Against such really confused and groundless language on the subject (even though it comes from Kant) I shall have no need to defend the explanation which I have given of these two faculties of knowledge an explanation which is fixed, clearly defined, definite, simple, and in full agreement with the language of all nations and all ages. I have only quoted this language as a proof of my charge that Kant follows his symmetrical, logical system without sufficiently reflecting upon the subject he is thus handling.
Now, as I have said above, if Kant had seriously examined how far two such different faculties of know ledge, one of which is the specific difference of man, may be known, and what, in accordance with the language of all nations and all philosophers, reason and understand ing are, he would never, without further authority than the intcllectus theoreticus and practicus of the Schoolmen, which is used in an entirely different sense, have divided the reason into theoretical and practical, and made the latter the source of virtuous conduct. In the same way, before Kant separated so carefully conceptions of the understanding (by which he sometimes means his cate gories, sometimes all general conceptions) and conceptions of the reason (his so-called Ideas), and made them both the material of his philosophy, which for the most part deals only with the validity, application, and origin of all these conceptions; first, I say, he ought to have really
28 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
examined what in general a conception is. But this very necessary investigation has unfortunately been also ne glected, and has contributed much to the irremediable confusion of intuitive and abstract knowledge which I shall soon refer to. The same want of adequate reflection with which he passed over the questions : what is per ception? what is reflection? what is conception? what is reason? what is understanding? allowed him to pass over the following investigations, which were just as in evitably necessary : what is it that I call the object, which I distinguish from the idea? what is existence? what is object? what is subject? what is truth, illusion, error? But he follows his logical schema and his symmetry with out reflecting or looking about him. The table of judg ments ought to, and must, be the key to all wisdom.
I have given it above as the chief merit of Kant that he distinguished the phenomenon from the thing in itself, explained the whole visible world as phenomenon, and therefore denied all validity to its laws beyond the phe nomenon. It is certainly remarkable that he did not deduce this merely relative existence of the phenomenon from the simple undeniable truth which lay so near him, "No object without a subject," in order thus at the very root to show that the object, because it always exists merely in relation to a subject, is dependent upon it, conditioned by it, and therefore conditioned as mere phenomenon, which does not exist in itself nor uncon ditioned. Berkeley, to whose merits Kant did not do justice, had already made this important principle the foundation-stone of his philosophy, and thereby established an immortal reputation. Yet he himself did not draw the proper conclusions from this principle, and so he was both misunderstood and insufficiently attended to. In my first edition I explained Kant s avoidance of this Berkeleian principle as arising from an evident shrink-
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 29
ing from decided idealism; while, on the other hand, I found idealism distinctly expressed in many passages of the " Critique of Pure Reason," and accordingly I charged Kant with contradicting himself. And this charge was well founded, if, as was then my case, one only knew the " Critique of Pure Eeason " in the second or any of the five subsequent editions printed from it. But when later I read Kant s great work in the first edition, which is already so rare, I saw, to my great pleasure, all these contradic tions disappear, and found that although Kant does not use the formula, " No object without a subject," he yet ex plains, with just as much decision as Berkeley and I do, the outer world lying before us in space and time as the mere idea of the subject that knows it. Therefore, for example, he says there without reserve (p. 383): "If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must dis appear, for it is nothing but a phenomenon in the sensi bility of our subject, and a class of its ideas." But the whole passage from p. 348-392, in which Kant expounded his pronounced idealism with peculiar beauty and clear ness, was suppressed by him in the second edition, and instead of it a number of remarks controverting it were introduced. In this way then the text of the " Critique of Pure Eeason," as it has circulated from the year 1787 to the year 1838, was disfigured and spoilt, and it became a self-contradictory book, the sense of which could not therefore be thoroughly clear and comprehensible to any one. The particulars about this, and also my conjectures as to the reasons and the weaknesses which may have influenced Kant so to disfigure his immortal work, I have given in a letter to Professor Piosenkranz, and he has quoted the principal passage of it in his preface to the second volume of the edition of Kant s collected works edited by him, to which I therefore refer. In consequence of my representations, Professor Eosenkranz was induced in the year 1838 to restore the "Critique of Pure Eeason" to its original form, for in the second volume referred to
30 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
he had it printed according to ihe first edition of 1781, by which he has rendered an inestimable service to philo sophy; indeed, he has perhaps saved from destruction the most important work of German literature; and^this should always be remembered to his credit. But let no one imagine that he knows the " Critique of Pure Reason " and has a distinct conception of Kant s teaching if he has only read the second or one of the later editions. That is altogether impossible, for he has only read a mutilated, spoilt, and to a certain extent ungenuine text. It is my duty to say this here decidedly and for every one s warning. Yet the way in which Kant introduces the thing in itself stands in undeniable contradiction with the dis tinctly idealistic point of view so clearly expressed in the first edition of the " Critique of Pure Pteason," and without doubt this is the chief reason why, in the second edition, he suppressed the principal idealistic passage we have referred to, and directly declared himself opposed to the Berkeleian idealism, though by doing so he only intro duced inconsistencies into his work, without being able to remedy its principal defect. This defect, as is known, is the introduction of the thing in itself in the way chosen by him, the inadmissibleness of which was exposed at length by G. E. Schulze in " dSncsidemus" and was soon recognised as the untenable point of his system. The matter may be made clear in a very few words. Kant based the assumption of the thing in itself, though concealed under various modes of expression, upon an inference from the law of causality an inference that the empirical perception, or more accurately the sensation, in our organs of sense, from which it proceeds, must have an external cause. But according to his own account, which is correct, the law of causality is known to us a priori, consequently is a function of our intellect, and is thus of subjective origin; further, sensation itself, to which we here apply the law of causality, is undeniably subjective; and finally, even space, in which, by means of this application,
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 31
we place the cause of this sensation as object, is a form of our intellect given a priori, and is consequently subjective. Therefore the whole empirical perception remains always upon a subjective foundation, as a mere process in us, and nothing entirely different from it and independent of it can be brought in as a thing in itself, or shown to be a necessary assumption. The empirical perception actually is and remains merely our idea : it is the world as idea. An inner nature of this we can only arrive at on the entirely different path followed by me, by means of calling in the aid of self-consciousness, which proclaims the .will as the inner nature of our own phenomenon; but then the thing in itself will be one which is toto genere different from the idea and its elements, as I have explained.
The great defect of the Kantian system in this point, which, as has been said, was soon pointed out, is an illus tration of the truth of the beautiful Indian proverb : " No lotus without a stem." The erroneous deduction of the thing in itself is here the stem; yet only the method of the deduction, not the recognition of a thing in itself belonging to the given phenomenon. But this last was Fichte s misunderstanding of it, which could only happen because he was not concerned with truth, but with making a sensation for the furtherance of his individual ends. Accordingly he was bold and thoughtless enough to deny the thing in itself altogether, and to set up a system in which, not, as with Kant, the mere form of the idea, but also the matter, its whole content, was professedly deduced a priori from the subject. In doing this, he counted with perfect correctness upon the want of judgment and the stupidity of the public, which accepted miserable sophisms, mere hocus-pocus and senseless babble, for proofs; so that he succeeded in turning its attention from Kant to himself, and gave the direction to German philosophy in which it was afterwards carried further by Schelling, and ultimately reached its goal in the mad sophistry of Hegel.
I now return to the great mistake of Kant, already
32 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
touched on above, that he has not properly separated perceptible and abstract knowledge, whereby an inextri cable confusion has arisen which we have now to consider more closely. If he had sharply separated ideas of per ception from conceptions merely thought in abstracto, he would have held these two apart, and in every case would have known with which of the two he had to do. This, however, was unfortunately not the case, although this accusation has not yet been openly made, and may thus perhaps be unexpected. His "object of experience," of which he is constantly speaking, the proper object of the categories, is not the idea of perception; neither is it the abstract conception, but it is different from both, and yet both at once, and is a perfect chimera. For, incredible as it may seem, he lacked either the wisdom or the honesty to come to an understanding with himself about this, and to explain distinctly to himself and others whether his " object of experience, i.e., the knowledge produced by the application of the categories," is the idea of perception in space and time (my first class of ideas), or merely the abstract conception. Strange as it is, there always runs in his mind something between the two, and hence arises the unfortunate confusion which I must now bring to light. For this end I must go through the whole theory of elements in a general w T ay.
The " Transcendental ^Esthetic " is a work of such extra ordinary merit that it alone would have been sufficient to immortalise the name of Kant. Its proofs carry such perfect conviction, that I number its propositions among incontestable truths, and without doubt they are also among those that are richest in results, and are, therefore, to be regarded as the rarest thing in the world, a real and great discovery in metaphysics. The fact, strictly proved by him, that a part of our knowledge is known to us a priori, admits of no other explanation than that this
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 33
constitutes the forms of our intellect; indeed, this is less an explanation than merely the distinct expression of the fact itself. For a priori means nothing else than " not gained on the path of experience, thus not come into us from without." But what is present in the intellect, and has not come from without, is just what belongs originally to the intellect itself, its own nature. Now if what is thus present in the intellect itself consists of the general mode or manner in which it must present all its objects to itself, this is just saying that what is thus present is the intellect s forms of knowing, i.e., the mode, fixed once for all, in which it fulfils this its function. Accordingly, " knowledge a priori " and " the intellect s own forms " are at bottom only two expressions for the same things thus to a certain extent synonyms.
Therefore from the doctrine of the Transcendental ^Esthetic I knew of nothing to take away, only of some thing to add. Kant did not carry out his thought to the end, especially in this respect, that he did not reject Euclid s whole method of demonstration, even after having said on p. 87; V. 1 20, that all geometrical knowledge has direct evidence from perception. It is most remark able that one of Kant s opponents, and indeed the acutest of them, G. E. Schulze (Kritik der theorctischen Philo sophic, ii. 241), draws the conclusion that from his doc trine an entirely different treatment of geometry from that which is actually in use would arise; and thus he thought to bring an apagogical argument against Kant, but, in fact, without knowing it, he only began the war against the method of Euclid. Let me refer to 15 of the first book of this work.
After the full exposition of the universal forms of per ception given in the Transcendental Esthetic, one neces sarily expects to receive some explanation as to its content, as to the way in \vhich the empirical perception comes into our consciousness, how the knowledge of this whole world, which is for us so real and so important, arises in
VOL. II. C
34 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
us. But the whole teaching of Kant contains really nothing more about this than the oft-repeated meaning less expression : " The empirical element in perception is given from without." Consequently here also from the pure forms of perception Kant arrives with one spring at thinking at the Transcendental Logic. Just at the begin ning of the Transcendental Logic (Critique of Pure Eeason, p. 50; V. 74), where Kant cannot avoid touch ing upon the content of the empirical perception, he takes the first false step; he is guilty of the Trpcorov -^euSo?. " Our knowledge," he says, " has two sources, receptivity of impressions and spontaneity of conceptions : the first is the capacity for receiving ideas, the second that of know ing an object through these ideas : through the first an object is given us, through the second it is thought." This is false; for according to it the impression, for which alone we have mere receptivity, which thus comes from without and alone is properly " given," would be already an idea, and indeed an object. But it is nothing more than a mere sensation in the organ of sense, and only by the application of the understanding (i.e., of the law of causality) and the forms of perception, space and time, does our intellect change this mere sensation into an idea, which now exists as an object in space and time, and can not be distinguished from the latter (the object) except in so far as we ask after the thing in itself, but apart from this is identical with it. I have explained this point fully in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, 21. With this, however, the work of the understanding and of the faculty of perception is completed, and no conceptions and no thinking are required in addition; therefore the brute also has these ideas. If conceptions are added, if thinking is added, to which spontaneity may certainly be attributed, then knowledge of perception is entirely aban doned, and a completely different class of ideas comes into consciousness, non-perceptible abstract conceptions. This is the activity of the reason, which vet obtains the whole
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 35
-content of its thinking only from the previous perception, and the comparison of it with other perceptions and con ceptions. But thus Kant brings thinking into the percep tion, and lays the foundation for the inextricable confusion of intuitive and abstract knowledge which I am now en gaged in condemning. He allows the perception, taken by itself, to be without understanding, purely sensuous, and thus quite passive, and only through thinking (category of the understanding) does he allow an object to be appre hended : thus he brings thought into the perception. But then, again, the object of thinking is an individual real object; and in this way thinking loses its essential char acter of universality and abstraction, and instead of gene ral conceptions receives individual things as its object : thus again he brings perception into thinking. From this springs the inextricable confusion referred to, and the consequences of this first false step extend over his whole theory of knowledge. Through the whole of his theory the utter confusion of the idea of perception with the abstract idea tends towards a something between the two which he expounds as the object of knowledge through the understanding and its categories, and calls this know ledge experience. It is hard to believe that Kant really figured to himself something fully determined and really distinct in this object of the understanding; I shall now prove this through the tremendous contradiction which runs through the whole Transcendental Logic, and is the real source of the obscurity in which it is involved.
In the " Critique of Pure Reason," p. 67-69; V. 92-94; p. 89, 90; V. 122, 123; further, V. 135, 139, 153, he repeats and insists : the understanding is no faculty of perception, its knowledge is not intuitive but discursive; the understanding is the faculty of judging (p. 69; V. 94), and a judgment is indirect knowledge, an idea of an idea (p. 68; V. 93); the understanding is the faculty of thinking, and thinking is knowledge through conceptions (p. 69; V. 94); the categories of the understanding are by no means
36 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
the conditions under which objects are given in percep tion (p. 89; V. 122), and perception in no way requires the functions of thinking (p. 91; V. 123); our under standing can only think, not perceive (V. pp. 135, 139). Further, in the "Prolegomena," 20, he says that percep tion, sensation, pcrceptio, belongs merely to the senses; judgment to the understanding alone; and in 22, that the work of the senses is to perceive, that of the under standing to think, i.e., to judge. Finally, in the " Critique of Practical Eeason," fourth edition, p. 247; Eosenkranz s edition, p. 281, he says that the understanding is discur sive; its ideas are thoughts, not perceptions. All this is in Kant s own words.
From this it follows that this perceptible world would exist for us even if we had no understanding at all; that it comes into our head in a quite inexplicable manner, which he constantly indicates by his strange expression the perception is given, without ever explaining this in definite and metaphorical expression further.
Now all that has been quoted is contradicted in the most glaring manner by the whole of the rest of his doctrine of the understanding, of its categories, and of the possibility of experience as he explains it in the Trans cendental Logic. Thus (Critique of Pure Eeason, p. 79; V. 105), the understanding through its categories brings unity into the manifold of perception, and the pure conceptions of the understanding refer a priori to objects of per ception. P. 94; V. 1 26, the " categories are the condition of experience, whether of perception, which is found in it, or of thought." V. p. 127, the understanding is the originator of experience. V. p. 128, the categories deter mine the perception of objects. V. p. 130, all that we pre sent to ourselves as connected in the object (which is yet certainly something perceptible and not an abstraction), has been so connected by an act of the understanding. V. p.. 135, the understanding is explained anew as the faculty of combining a priori, and of bringing the multiplicity of given.
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 37
ideas under the unity of apperception; but according to all ordinary use of words, apperception is not the thinking of a conception, but is perception. V. p. 136, we find a first principle of the possibility of all perception in connection with the understanding. V. p. 143, it stands as the heading, that all sense perception is conditioned by the categories. At the same place the logical function of the judgment also brings the manifold of given perceptions under an apperception in general, and the manifold of a given perception stands necessarily under the categories. V. p. 144, unity comes into perception, by means of the categories, through the understanding. V. p. 145, the thinking of the understanding is very strangely explained as synthetically combining, connecting, and arranging the manifold of perception. V. p. 161, experience is only possible through the categories, and consists in the con nection of sensations, which, however, are just perceptions. V. P- T 59> the categories are a priori knowledge of the objects of perception in general. Further, here and at V. p. 163 and 165, a chief doctrine of Kant s is given, this : tlmt the understanding first makes Nature possible, because it pre scribes laws for it a priori, and Nature adapts itself to the system of the understanding, and so on. Nature, however, is certainly perceptible and not an abstraction; therefore, the understanding must be a faculty of perception. V. p. 1 68, it is said, the conceptions of the understanding are the principles of the possibility of experience, and the latter is the condition of phenomena in space and time in general; phenomena which, however, certainly exist in perception. Finally, p. 189-211; V. 232-265, the long proof is given (the incorrectness of which is shown in detail in my essay on the principle of sufficient reason, 23) that the ob jective succession and also the coexistence of objects of experience are not sensuously apprehended, but are only brought into Nature by the understanding, and that Nature itself first becomes possible in this way. Yet it is certain that Nature, the course of events, and the coexistence
3 8 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
of states, is purely perceptible, and no mere abstract thought.
I challenge every one who shares my respect towards Kant to reconcile these contradictions and to show that in his doctrine of the object of experience and the way it is determined by the activity of the understanding and its twelve functions, Kant thought something quite distinct and definite. I am convinced that the contra diction I have pointed out, which extends through the whole Transcendental Logic, is the real reason of the great obscurity of its language. Kant himself, in fact, was dimly conscious of the contradiction, inwardly com bated it, but yet either would not or could not bring it to distinct consciousness, and therefore veiled it from himself and others, and avoided it by all kinds of subter fuges. This is perhaps also the reason why he made out of the faculties of knowledge such a strange complicated machine, Avith so many wheels, as the twelve categories, the transcendental synthesis of imagination, of the inner sense, of the transcendental unity of apperception, also the schematism of the pure conceptions of the understand ing, &c., &c. And notwithstanding this great apparatus, not even an attempt is made to explain the perception of the external world, which is after all the principal fact in our knowledge; but this pressing claim is very meanly rejected, always through the same meaningless meta phorical expression : " The empirical perception is given us." On p. 145 of the fifth edition, we learn further that the perception is given through the object; therefore the object must be something different from the perception.
If, now, we endeavour to investigate Kant s inmost meaning, not clearly expressed by himself, we find that in reality such an object, different from the perception, but which is by no means a conception, is for him the proper object for the understanding; indeed that it must be by means of the strange assumption of such an object, which cannot be presented in perception, that the per-
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 39
ception first becomes experience. I believe that an old deeply-rooted prejudice in Kant, dead to all investigation, is the ultimate reason of the assumption of such an absolute object, which is an object in itself, i.e., without a subject. It is certainly not the perceived object, but through the conception it is added to the perception by thought, as something corresponding to it; and now the perception is experience, and has value and truth, which it thus only receives through the relation to a conception (in diametrical opposition to my exposition, according to which the con ception only receives value and truth from the perception). It is then the proper function of the categories to add on in thought to the perception this directly non-perceptible object. " The object is given only through perception, and is afterwards thought in accordance with the category " (Critique of Pure Beason, first edition, p. 399). This is made specially clear by a passage on p. 125 of the fifth edition : " Now the question arises whether conceptions a priori do not also come first as conditions under which alone a thing can be, not perceived certainly, but yet thought as an object in general," which he answers in the affirmative. Here the source of the error and the con fusion in which it is involved shows itself distinctly. For the object as such exists always only for perception and in it; it may now be completed through the senses, or, when it is absent, through the imagination. What is thought, on the contrary, is always an universal non-perceptible conception, which certainly can be the conception of an object in general; but only indirectly by means of con ceptions does thought relate itself to objects, which always are and remain perceptible. For our thinking is not able to impart reality to perceptions; this they have, so far as they are capable of it (empirical reality) of themselves; but it serves to bring together the common element and the results of perceptions, in order to preserve them, and to be able to use them more easily. But Kant ascribes the objects themselves to thought, in order to make expe-
40 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
rience and the objective world dependent upon under standing, yet without allowing understanding to be a faculty of perception. In this relation he certainly dis tinguishes perception from thought, but he makes par ticular things sometimes the object of perception and sometimes the object of thought. In reality, however, they are only the object of the former; our empirical perception is at once objective, just because it proceeds from the causal nexus. Things, not ideas different from them, are directly its object. Particular things as such are perceived in the understanding and through the senses; the one-sided impression upon the latter is at once com pleted by the imagination. But, on the contrary, as soon as we pass over to thought, we leave the particular things, and have to do with general conceptions, which cannot be presented in perception, although we afterwards apply the results of our thought to particular things. If we hold firmly to this, the inadmissibleness of the assumption becomes evident that the perception of things only obtains reality and becomes experience through the thought of these very things applying its twelve categories. Bather in perception itself the empirical reality, and consequently experience, is already given; but the perception itself can only come into existence by the application to sensation of the ^knowledge of the causal nexus, which is the one function of the understanding. Perception is accordingly in reality intellectual, which is just what Kant denies.
Besides in the passages quoted, the assumption of Kant here criticised will be found expressed with admirable clearness in the " Critique of Judgment," 36, just at the beginning; also in the "Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science," in the note to the first explanation of " Phenomenology." But with a naivete which Kant ven tured upon least of all with reference to this doubtful point, it is to be found most distinctly laid down in the book of a Kantian, Kiesewetter s " Grundriss einer alge- meinen Logik" third edition, part i., p. 434 of the exposi-
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 41
tion, and part ii., 52 and 53 of the exposition; similarly in Tieftrunk s " Denldehrc in rein Dcutschem Gewande" (1825). It there appears so clearly how those disciples who do not themselves think become a magnifying mirror of the errors of every thinker. Once having determined his doctrine of the categories, Kant was always cautious when expounding it, but his disciples on the contrary were quite bold, and thus exposed its falseness.
According to what has been said, the object of the cate gories is for Kant, not indeed the thing in itself, but yet most closely akin to it. It is the object in itself; it is an object that requires no subject; it is a particular thing, and yet not in space and time, because not perceptible; it is an object of thought, and yet not an abstract conception. Accordingly Kant really makes a triple division: (i.) the idea; (2.) the object of the idea; (3.) the thing in itself. The first belongs to the sensibility, which in its case, as in that of sensation, includes the pure forms of perception, space and time. The second belongs to the understand ing, which thinks it through its twelve categories. The third lies beyond the possibility of all knowledge. (In support of this, cf. Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, p. 1 08 and 109.) The distinction of the idea from the object of the idea is however unfounded; this had already been proved by Berkeley, and it appears from my whole exposition in the first book, especially chap. i. of the sup plements; nay, even from Kant s own completely idea listic point of view in the first edition. But if we should not wish to count the object of the idea as belonging to the idea and identify it with the idea, it would be neces sary to attribute it to the thing in itself : this ultimately depends on the sense which is attached to the word object. This, however, always remains certain, that, when we think clearly, nothing more can be found than idea and thing in itself. The illicit introduction of that hybrid, the object of the idea, is the source of Kant s errors; yet when it is taken away, the doctrine of the categories as concep-
42 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
tions a priori also falls to the ground; for they bring nothing to the perception, and are not supposed to hold good of the thing in itself, but by means of them we only think those " objects of the ideas," and thereby change ideas into experience. For every empirical perception is already experience; but every perception which proceeds from sensation is empirical: this sensation is related by the understanding, by means of its sole function (knowledge a priori of the law of causality), to its cause, which just on this account presents itself in space and time (forms of pure perception) as object of experience, material object, enduring in space through all time, yet as such always remains idea, as do space and time themselves. If we desire to go beyond this idea, then we arrive at the ques tion as to the thing in itself, the answer to which is the theme of my whole work, as of all metaphysics in general. Kant s error here explained is connected with his mistake, which we condemned before, that he gives no theory of the origin of empirical perception, but, without saying more, treats it as given, identifying it with the mere sen sation, to which he only adds the forms of intuition or per ception, space and time, comprehending both under the name sensibility. But from these materials no objective idea arises : this absolutely demands the relation of the idea to its cause, thus the application of the law of causality, and thus understanding; for without this the sensation still remains always subjective, and does not take the form of an object in space, even if space is given with it. But according to Kant, the understanding must not be assigned to perception; it is supposed merely to think, so as to remain within the transcendental logic. "With this again is connected another mistake of Kant s : that he left it to me to adduce the only valid proof of the a priori nature of the law of causality which he rightly recognised, the proof from the possibility of objective empirical per ception itself, and instead of it gives a palpably false one, as I have already shown in my essay on the principle of
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 43
sufficient reason, 23. From the above it is clear that Kant s "object of the idea" (2) is made up of what he has stolen partly from the idea (i), and partly from the thing in itself (3 ). If, in reality, experience were only brought about by the understanding applying its twelve different functions in order to think through as many conceptions a priori, the objects which were pre viously merely perceived, then every real thing would necessarily as such have a number of determinations, which, as given a priori, absolutely could not be thought away, just like space and time, but would belong quite essentially to the existence of the thing, and yet could not be deduced from the properties of space and time. But only one such determination is to be found that of causality. Upon this rests materiality, for the essence of matter consists in action, and it is through and through causality (cf. Bk. II. ch. iv.) But it is materiality alone that distinguishes the real thing from the picture of the imagination, which is then only idea. For matter, as per manent, gives to the thing permanence through all time, in respect of its matter, while the forms change in con formity with causality. Everything else in the thing consists either of determinations of space or of time, or of its empirical properties, which are all referable to its activity, and are thus fuller determinations of causality. But causality enters already as a condition into the em pirical perception, and this is accordingly a thing of the understanding, which makes even perception possible, and yet apart from the law of causality contributes nothing to experience and its possibilty. What fills the old ontolo gies is, with the exception of what is given here, nothing more than relations of things to each other, or to our re flection, and a farrago of nonsense.
The language in which the doctrine of the categories is expressed affords an evidence of its baselessness. What a difference in this respect between the Transcenden tal Esthetic and the Transcendental Analytic! IQ the
44 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
former, what clearness, definiteness, certainty, firm con viction which is freely expressed and infallibly com municates itself! All is full of light, no dark lurking- places are left : Kant knows what he wants and knows that he is right. In the latter, on the other hand, all is obscure, confused, indefinite, wavering, uncertain, the language anxious, full of excuses and appeals to what is coming, or indeed of suppression. Moreover, the whole second and third sections of the Deduction of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding are completely changed in the second edition, because they did not satisfy Kant himself, and they have become quite different from the first edition, though not clearer. We actually see Kant in conflict with the truth in order to carry out his hypothe sis which he has once fixed upon. In the Transcenden tal .^Esthetic all his propositions are really proved from undeniable facts of consciousness; in the Transcenden tal Analytic, on the contrary, we find, if we consider it closely, mere assertions that thus it is and must be. Here, then, as everywhere, the language bears the stamp of the thought from which it has proceeded, for style is the physiognomy of the mind. We have still to remark, that whenever Kant wishes to give an example for the purpose of fuller explanation, he almost always takes for this end the category of causality, and then what he has said turns out correct; for the law of causality is indeed the real form of the understanding, but it is also its only form, and the remaining eleven categories are merely blind windows. The deduction of the categories is simpler and less involved in the first edition than in the second. He labours to explain how, according to the perception given by sensibility, the understanding produces experi ence by means of thinking the categories. In doing so, the w r ords recognition, reproduction, association, appre hension, transcendental unity of apperception, are re peated to weariness, and yet no distinctness is attained. It is well worth noticing, however, that in this explana-
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 45
tion he does not once touch upon what must nevertheless first occur to every one the relation of the sensation to its external cause. If he did not intend this relation to hold good, he ought to have expressly denied it; but neither does he do this. Thus in this way he evades the point, and all the Kantians have in like manner evaded it. The secret motive of this is, that he reserves the causal nexus, under the name "ground of the phenome non," for his false deduction of the thing in itself; and also that perception would become intellectual through the relation to the cause, which he dare not admit. Besides this, he seems to have been afraid that if the causal nexus were allowed to hold good between sensation and object, the latter would at once become the thing in itself, and introduce the empiricism of Locke. But this difficulty is removed by reflection, which shows us that the law of causality is of subjective origin, as well as the sensation itself; and besides this, our own body also, inasmuch as it appears in space, already belongs to ideas. But Kant was hindered from confessing this by his fear of the Berkeleian idealism.
" The combination of the manifold of perception " is repeatedly given as the essential operation of the under standing, by means of its twelve categories. Yet this is never adequately explained, nor is it shown what this manifold of perception is before it is combined by the understanding. But time and space, the latter in all its three dimensions, are contimia, i.e., all their parts are originally not separate but combined. Thus, then, every thing that exhibits itself in them (is given) appears origi nally as a continuum, i.e., its parts appear already com bined and require no adventitious combination of a manifold. If, however, some one should seek to interpret that combining of the manifold of perception by saying that I refer the different sense-impressions of one object to this one only thus, for example, perceiving a bell, I recognise that what affects my eye as yellow, my hand as
46 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
smooth and hard, my ear as sounding, is yet only one and the same body, then I reply that this is rather a conse quence of the knowledge a priori of the causal nexus (this actual and only function of the understanding), by virtue of which all those different effects upon my different organs of sense yet lead me only to one common cause of them, the nature of the body standing before me, so that my understanding, in spite of the difference and multi plicity of the effects, still apprehends the unity of the cause as a single object, which just on that account ex hibits itself in perception. In the beautiful recapitulation of his doctrine which Kant gives at p. 719-726 or V. 747-754 of the " Critique of Pure Eeason," he explains the categories, perhaps more distinctly than anywhere else, as " the mere rule of the synthesis of that which empirical apprehension has given a posteriori." It seems as if here he had something in his mind, such as that, in the construc tion of the triangle, the angles give the rule for the com position of the lines; at least by this image one can best explain to oneself what he says of the function of the cate gories. The preface to the " Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science " contains a long note which likewise gives an explanation of the categories, and says that they " differ in no respect from the formal acts of the under standing in judging," except that in the latter subject and predicate can always change places; then the judgment in general is defined in the same passage as "an act through which given ideas first become knowledge of an object." According to this, the brutes, since they do not judge, must also have no knowledge of objects. In general, according to Kant, there are only conceptions of objects, no perceptions. I, on the contrary, say : Objects exist primarily only for perception, and conceptions are always abstractions from this perception. Therefore ab stract thinking must be conducted exactly according to the world present in perception, for it is only their rela tion to this that gives content to conceptions; and we must
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 47
assume for the conceptions no other a priori determined form than the faculty of reflection in general, the nature of which is the construction of conceptions, i.e., of abstract non-perceptible ideas, which constitutes the sole function of the reason, as I have shown in the first book. I therefore require that we should reject eleven of the categories, and only retain that of causality, and yet that we should see clearly that its activity is indeed the condition of empirical perception, which accordingly is not merely sensuous but intellectual, and that the object so per ceived, the object of experience, is one with the idea, from which there remains nothing to distinguish except the thing in itself.
After repeated study of the " Critique of Pure Eeason " at different periods of my life, a conviction has forced itself upon me with regard to the origin of the Transcen dental Logic, which I now impart as very helpful to an understanding of it. Kant s only discovery, which is based upon objective comprehension and the highest human thought, is the appcr^u that time and space are known by us a priori. Gratified by this happy hit, he wished to pursue the same vein further, and his love of architectonic symmetry afforded him the clue. As he had found that a pure intuition or perception a priori underlay the empirical perception as its condition, he thought that in the same way certain pure conceptions as presuppositions in our faculty of knowledge must lie at the foundation of the empirically obtained conceptions, and that real empirical thought must be only possible through a pure thought a priori, which, however, would have no objects in itself, but would be obliged to take them from perception. So that as the Transcendental ^Esthetic estab lishes an a priori basis of mathematics, there must, he supposed, also be a similar basis for logic; and thus, then for the sake of symmetry, the former received a pendant in a Transcendental Logic. From this point onwards Kant was no more free, no more in the position of purely,
48 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
investigating and observing what is present in conscious ness; but he was guided by an assumption and pursued a purpose the purpose of finding what he assumed, in order to add to the Transcendental ^Esthetic so happily discovered a Transcendental Logic analogous to it, and thus symmetrically corresponding to it, as a second storey. Now for this purpose he hit upon the table of judgments, out of which he constructed, as well as he could, the table of categories, the doctrine of twelve pure a priori con ceptions, which are supposed to be the conditions of our thinking those very things the perception of which is con ditioned by the two a priori forms of sensibility : thus a pure understanding now corresponded symmetrically to a pure sensibility. Then another consideration occurred to him, which offered a means of increasing the plausi bility of the thing, by the assumption of the schematism of the pure conceptions of the understanding. But just through this the way in which his procedure had, uncon sciously indeed, originated betrayed itself most distinctly. For because he aimed at finding something a priori analogous to every empirical function of the faculty of knowledge, he remarked that between our empirical per ception and our empirical thinking, conducted in abstract non-perceptible conceptions, a connection very frequently, though not always, takes place, because every now and then we try to go back from abstract thinking to percep tion; but try to do so merely in order really to convince ourselves that our abstract thought has not strayed far from the safe ground of perception, and perhaps become exaggeration, or, it may be, mere empty talk; much in the same way as, when we are walking in the dark, we stretch out our hand every now and then to the guiding wall. We go back, then, to the perception only tentatively and for the moment, by calling up in imagination a perception corresponding to the conceptions which are occupying us at the time a perception which can yet never be quite adequate to the conception, but is merely a temporary
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representative of it. I have already adduced what is needful on this point in my essay on the principle of sufficient reason, 28. Kant calls a fleeting phantasy of this kind a schema, in opposition to the perfected picture of the imagination. He says it is like a mono gram of the imagination, and asserts that just as such a schema stands midway between our abstract thinking of empirically obtained conceptions, and our clear percep tion which comes to us through the senses, so there are a priori schemata of the pure conceptions of the under standing between the faculty of perception a priori of pure sensibility and the faculty of thinking a priori of the pure understanding (thus the categories). These schemata, as monograms of the pure imagination a priori, he describes one by one, and assigns to each of them its corresponding category, in the wonderful " Chapter on the Schematism of the Pure Conceptions of the Under standing," which is noted as exceedingly obscure, because no man has ever been able to make anything out of it. Its obscurity, however, vanishes if it is considered from the point of view here indicated, but there also comes out more clearly in it than anywhere else the intentional nature of Kant s procedure, and of the determination formed beforehand of finding what would correspond to the analogy, and could assist the architectonic symmetry; indeed this is here the case to such a degree as to be almost comical. For when he assumes schemata of the pure (empty) a priori conceptions of the understanding (categories) analogous to the empirical schemata (or re presentatives through the fancy of our actual conceptions), he overlooks the fact that the end of such schemata is here entirely wanting. For the end of the schemata in the case of empirical (real) thinking is entirely connected with the material content of such conceptions. For since these conceptions are drawn from empirical perception, we assist and guide ourselves when engaged in abstract thinking by now and then casting a momentary glance back at
VOL. II. 1>
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the perception out of which the conceptions are framed, in order to assure ourselves that our thought has still real content. This, however, necessarily presupposes that the conceptions which occupy us are sprung from perception, and it is merely a glance back at their material content, indeed a mere aid to our weakness. But in the case of a priori conceptions which as yet have no content at all, clearly this is necessarily omitted. For these conceptions are not sprung from perception, but come to it from within, in order to receive a content first from it. Thus they have as yet nothing on which they could look back. I speak fully upon this point, because it is just this that throws light upon the secret origin of the Kantian philo sophising, which accordingly consists in this, that Kant, after the happy discovery of the two forms of intuition or perception a priori, exerted himself, under the guidance of the analogy, to prove that for every determination of our empirical knowledge there is an a priori analogue, and this finally extended, in the schemata, even to a mere psychological fact. Here the apparent depth and the difficulty of the exposition just serve to conceal from the reader that its content remains a wholly undemon- strable and merely arbitrary assumption. But he who has penetrated at last to the meaning of such an ex position is then easily induced to mistake this under standing so painfully attained for a conviction of the truth of the matter. If, on the contrary, Kant had kept himself here as unprejudiced and purely observant as in the discovery of a priori intuition or perception, he must have found that what is added to the pure intuition or perception of space and time, if an empirical perception arises from it, is on the one hand the sensation, and on the other hand the knowledge of causality, which changes the mere sensation into objective empirical perception, but just on this account is not first derived and learned from sensation, but exists a priori, and is indeed the form and function of the pure understanding. It is also, however,
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its sole form and function, yet one so rich in results that all our empirical knowledge rests upon it. If, as has often been said, the refutation of an error is only complete when the way it originated has been psychologically demonstrated, I believe I have achieved this, with regard to Kant s doctrine of the categories and their schemata, in what I have said above.
After Kant had thus introduced such great errors into the first simple outlines of a theory of the faculty of per ception, he adopted a variety of very complicated assump tions. To these belongs first of all the synthetic unity of apperception : a very strange thing, very strangely explained. "The / think must be able to accompany all my ideas." Must be able : this is a problem atic- apodictic enunciation; in plain English, a proposition which takes with one hand what it gives with the other. And what is the meaning of this carefully balanced .proposition? That all knowledge of ideas is thinking? That is not the case : and it would be dreadful; there would then be nothing but abstract conceptions, or at any rate a pure perception free from reflection and will, such as that of the beautiful, the deepest comprehension of the true nature of things, i.e., of their Platonic Ideas. And besides, the brutes would then either think also, or else they would not even have ideas. Or is the proposition perhaps intended to mean: no object without a subject? That would be very badly expressed by it, and would come too late. If we collect Kant s utterances on the subject, we shall find that what he understands by the synthetic unity of apperception is, as it were, the exten- sionless centre of the sphere of all our ideas, whose radii converge to it. It is what I call the subject of knowing, the correlative of all ideas, and it is also that which I have fully described and explained in the 22d chapter of the Supplements, as the focus in which the rays of the activity
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of the brain converge. Therefore, to avoid repetition, I now refer to that chapter.
That I reject the whole doctrine of the categories, and reckon it among the groundless assumptions with which Kant burdened the theory of knowledge, results from the criticism given above; and also from the proof of the con tradictions in the Transcendental Logic, which had their ground in the confusion of perception and abstract know ledge; also further from the proof of the want of a distinct and definite conception of the nature of the understanding and of the reason, instead of which we found in Kant s writ ings only incoherent, inconsistent, insufficient, and incorrect utterances with regard to these two faculties of the mind. Finally, it results from the explanations which I myself have given of these faculties of the mind in the first book and its Supplements, and more fully in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, 21, 26, and 34, explana tions which are very definite and distinct, which clearly follow from the consideration of the nature of our know ledge, and which completely agree with the conceptions of those two faculties of knowledge that appear in the language and writings of all ages and all nations, but were not brought to distinctness. Their defence against the very different exposition of Kant has, for the most part, been given already along with the exposure of the errors of that exposition. Since, however, the table of judgments, which Kant makes the foundation of his theory of thinking, and indeed of^his whole philosophy, has, in itself, as a whole, its correctness, it is still incumbent upon me to show how these universal forms of all judgment arise in our faculty of knowledge, and to reconcile them with my exposition of it. In this discussion I shall always- attach to the concepts understanding and reason the sense given them in my explanation, which I therefore assume- the reader is familiar with.
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An essential difference between Kant s method and that which I follow lies in this, that he starts from indirect, reflected knowledge, while I start from direct or intuitive knowledge. He may be compared to a man who measures the height of a tower by its shadow, while I am like him who applies the measuring-rule directly to the tower itself. Therefore, for him philosophy is a science of con ceptions, but for me it is a science in conceptions, drawn from knowledge of perception, the one source of all evi dence, and comprehended and made permanent in general conceptions. He passes over this whole world of perception which surrounds us, so multifarious and rich in signi ficance, and confines himself to the forms of abstract thinking; and, although he never expressly says so, this procedure is founded on the assumption that reflection is the ectype of all perception, that, therefore, all that is essential in perception must be expressed in reflection, and expressed in very contracted forms and outlines, which are thus easily surveyed. According to this, what is essential and conformable to law in abstract know ledge would, as it were, place in our hands all the threads by which the varied puppet-show of the world of per ception is set in motion before our eyes. If Kant had only distinctly expressed this first principle of his method, and then followed it consistently, he would at least have been obliged to separate clearly the intuitive from the abstract, and we would not have had to contend with inextricable contradictions and confusions. But from the way in which he solves his problem we see that that fundamental principle of his method was only very in distinctly present to his mind, and thus we have still to arrive at it by conjecture even after a thorough study of his philosophy.
Now as concerns the specified method and fundamental maxim itself, there is much to be said for it, and it is a brilliant thought. The nature of all science indeed con sists in this, that we comprehend the endless manifold of
54 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
perceptible phenomena under comparatively few abstract conceptions, and out of these construct a system by means of which we have all those phenomena completely in the power of our knowledge, can explain the past and deter mine the future. The sciences, however, divide the wide sphere of phenomena among them according to the special and manifold classes of the latter. Now it was a bold and happy thought to isolate what is absolutely essential to the conceptions as such and apart from their content, in order to discover from these forms of all thought found in this way what is essential to all intuitive knowledge also, and consequently to the world as phenomenon in general; and because this would be found a priori on account of the necessity of those forms of thought, it would be of subjective origin, and would just lead to the ends Kant had in view. Here, however, before going further, the relation of reflection to knowledge of perception ought to have been investigated (which certainly presupposes the clear separation of the two, which was neglected by Kant). He ought to have inquired in what way the former really repeats and represents the latter, whether quite pure, or changed and to some extent disguised by being taken up into its special forms (forms of reflection); whether the form of abstract reflective knowledge becomes more determined through the form of knowledge of percep tion, or through the nature or constitution which unalter ably belongs to itself, i.e., to reflective knowledge, so that even what is very heterogeneous in intuitive knowledge can no longer be distinguished when it has entered reflective knowledge, and conversely many distinctions of which we are conscious in the reflective method of knowledge have also sprung from this knowledge itself, and by no means point to corresponding differences in intuitive knowledge. As the result of this investigation, however, it would have appeared that knowledge of perception suffers very nearly as much change when it is taken up into reflection as food when it is taken into the animal organism whose
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forms and compounds are determined by itself, so that the nature of the food can no longer be recognised from the result they produce. Or (for this is going a little too far) at least it would have appeared that reflection is by no means related to knowledge of perception as the reflection in water is related to the reflected objects, but scarcely even as the mere shadow of these objects stands to the objects themselves; which shadow repeats only a few external outlines, but also unites the most manifold in the same form and presents the most diverse through the same outline; so that it is by no means possible, starting from it, to construe the forms of things with completeness and certainty.
The whole of reflective knowledge, or the reason, has only one chief form, and that is the abstract conception. It is proper to the reason itself, and has no direct necessary connection with the world of perception, which therefore exists for the brutes entirely without conceptions, and in deed, even if it were quite another world from what it is, that form of reflection would suit it just as well. But the combination of conceptions for the purpose of judging has certain definite and normal forms, which have been found by induction, and constitute the table of judgments. These forms are for the most part deducible from the nature of reflective knowledge itself, thus directly from the reason, because they spring from the four laws of thought (called by me metalogical truths) and the dictum de omni et nullo. Certain others of these forms, however, have their ground in the nature of knowledge of percep tion, thus in the understanding; yet they by no means point to a like number of special forms of the under standing, but can all be fully deduced from the sole function which the understanding has the direct know ledge of cause and effect. Lastly, still others of these forms have sprung from the concurrence and combination of the reflective and intuitive modes of knowledge, or more properly from the assumption of the latter into the
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former. I shall now go through the moments of the judgment one by one, and point out the origin of each of them in the sources referred to; and from this it follows of itself that a deduction of categories from them is want ing, and the assumption of this is just as groundless as its exposition was found to be entangled and self- con flicting.
i. The so-called Quantity of judgments springs from the nature of concepts as such. It thus has its ground in the reason alone, and has absolutely no direct connection with the understanding and with knowledge of perception. It is indeed, as is explained at length in the first book, essential to concepts, as such, that they should have an extent, a sphere, and the wider, less determined concept includes the narrower and more determined. The latter can therefore be separated from the former, and this may happen in two ways, either the narrower concept may be indicated as an indefinite part of the wider concept in general, or it may be defined and completely separated by means of the addition of a special name. The judgment which carries out this operation is in the first case called a particular, and in the second case an universal judg ment. For example, one and the same part of the sphere of the concept tree may be isolated through a particular and through an universal judgment, thus " Some trees bear gall-nuts," or "All oaks bear gall-nuts." One sees that the difference of the two operations is very slight; indeed, that the possibility of it depends upon the rich ness of the language. Nevertheless, Kant has explained this difference as disclosing two fundamentally different actions, functions, categories of the pure understanding, which determines experience a priori through them.
Finally, a concept may also be used in order to arrive by means of it at a definite particular idea of perception, from which, as well as from many others, this concept itself is drawn; this happens in the singular judgment. Such a judgment merely indicates the boundary -line
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between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception, and passes directly to the latter, "This tree here bears gall-nuts." Kant has made of this also a special cate gory.
After all that has been said there is no need of further polemic here.
2. In the same way the Quality of the judgment lies entirely within the province of reason, and is not an adumbration of any law of that understanding which makes perception possible, i.e., it does not point to it. The nature of abstract concepts, which is just the nature of the reason itself objectively comprehended, carries with it the possibility of uniting and separating their spheres, as was already explained in the first book, and upon this possibility, as their presupposition, rest the universal laws of thought of identity and contradiction, to which I have given the name of mctalogical truths, because they spring purely from the reason, and cannot be further explained. They determine that what is united must remain united, and what is separated must remain separate, thus that what is established cannot at the same time be also abolished, and thus they presuppose the possibility of the combination and separation of spheres, i.e., of judgment. This, however, lies, according to its form, simply and solely in the reason, and this form has not, like the content of th^e judgments, been brought over from the perceptible knowledge of the understanding, and therefore there is no correlative or analogue of it to be looked for there. After the perception has been brought about through the under standing and for the understanding, it exists complete, subject to no doubt nor error, and therefore knows neither assertion nor denial; for it expresses itself, and has not, like the abstract knowledge of the reason, its value and content in its mere relation to something outside of it, according to the principle of the ground of knowing. It is, therefore, pure reality; all negation is foreign to its nature, can only be added on through reflection, and just
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on this account remains always in the province of abstract thought.
To the affirmative and negative Kant adds the infinite judgment, making use of a crotchet of the old scholastics, an ingeniously invented stop-gap, which does not even require to be explained, a blind window, such as many others he made for the sake of his architectonic sym metry.
3. Under the very wide conception of Relation Kant has brought three entirely different properties of judgments, which we must, therefore, examine singly, in order to recognise their origin.
(a.) The hypothetical judgment in general is the abstract expression of that most universal form of all our know ledge, the principle of sufficient reason. In my essay on this principle, I already showed in 1813 that it has four entirely different meanings, and in each of these originally originates in a different faculty of knowledge, and also concerns a different class of ideas. It clearly follows from this, that the source of the hypothetical judgment in general, of that universal form of thought, cannot be, as Kant wishes to make it, merely the understanding and its category of causality; but that the law of causality which, according to my exposition, is the one form of knowledge of the pure understanding, is only one of the forms of that principle which embraces all pure or a priori knowledge the principle of sufficient reason which, on the other hand, in each of its meanings has this hypothetical form of judg ment as its expression. We see here, however, very dis tinctly how kinds of knowledge which are quite different in their origin and significance yet appear, if thought in abstracto by the reason, in one and the same form of com bination of concepts and judgments, and then in this form can no longer be distinguished, but, in order to distinguish them, we must go back to knowledge of perception, leaving abstract knowledge altogether. Therefore the path which was followed by Kant, starting from the point of view of
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abstract knowledge, to find the elements and the inmost spring of intuitive knowledge also, was quite a wrong one. For the rest, my whole introductory essay on the principle of sufficient reason is, to a certain extent, to be regarded merely as a thorough exposition of the significance of the hypothetical form of judgment; therefore I do not dwell upon it longer here.
(I.) The form of the categorical judgment is nothing but the form of judgment in general, in its strictest sense. Tor, strictly speaking, judging merely means thinking, the combination of, or the impossibility of combining, the spheres of the concepts. Therefore the hypothetical and the disjunctive combination are properly no special forms of the judgment; for they are only applied to already completed judgments, in which the combination of the concepts remains unchanged the categorical. But they again connect these judgments, for the hypothetical form expresses their dependence upon each other, and the dis junctive their incompatibility. Mere concepts, however, have only one class of relations to each other, those which are expressed in the categorical judgment. The fuller determination, or the sub-species of this relation, are the intersection and the complete separateness of the concept-spheres, i.e., thus affirmation and negation; out of which Kant has made special categories, under quite a different title, that of quality. Intersection and separate- ness have again sub-species, according as the spheres He within each other entirely, or only in part, a deter mination which constitutes the quantity of the judg ments; out of which Kant has again made a quite special class of categories. Thus he separates what is very closely related, and even identical, the easily surveyed modifica tions of the one possible relation of mere concepts to each other, and, on the other hand, unites what is very different under this title of relation.
Categorical judgments have as their metalogical prin ciple the laws of thought of identity and contradiction.
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But the ground of the connection of the concept-spheres which gives truth to the judgment, which is nothing but this connection, may be of very different kinds; and, according to this, the truth of the judgment is either logical, or empirical, or metaphysical, or metalogical, as is explained in the introductory essay. 30-33, and does not require to be repeated here. But it is apparent from this how very various the direct cognitions may be, all of which exhibit themselves in the abstract, through the combination of the spheres of two concepts, as subject and predicate, and that we can by no means set up the sole function of the understanding as corresponding to them and producing them. For example, the judgments, "Water boils, the sine measures the angle, the will resolves, busi ness distracts, distinction is difficult," express through the same logical form the most different kinds of relations; but from this we obtain the right, however irregular the beginning may be, of placing ourselves at the standpoint of abstract knowledge to analyse direct intuitive know ledge. For the rest, the categorical judgment springs from knowledge of the understanding proper, in my sense, only when causation is expressed by it; this is, however, the case in all judgments which refer to a physical quality. For if I say, " This body is heavy, hard, fluid, green, sour, alkaline, organic, &c., &c.," this always refers to its effect, and thus is knowledge which is only possible through the pure understanding. Now, after this, like much which is quite different from it (for example, the subordination of very abstract concepts), has been expressed in the abstract through subject and predicate, these mere relations of concepts have been transferred back to knowledge of per ception, and it has been supposed that the subject and predicate of the judgment must have a peculiar and special correlative in perception, substance and accident. But I shall show clearly further on that the conception substance has no other true content than that of the conception matter. Accidents, however, are quite ^ synonymous with
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kinds of effects, so that the supposed knowledge of sub stance and accident is never anything more than the knowledge of cause and effect by the understanding. But the special manner in which the idea of matter arises is explained partly in 4 of the first book, and still more clearly in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason at the end of 21, p. 77 (3d ed., p. 82), and in some respects we shall see it still more closely when we in vestigate the principle of the permanence of substance.
(c.) Disjunctive judgments spring from the law of thought of excluded third, which is a metalogical truth; they are, therefore, entirely the property of the reason, and have not their origin in the understanding. The deduction of the category of community or reciprocity from them is, however, a glaring example of the violence which Kant sometimes allowed to be done to truth, merely in order to satisfy his love of architectonic sym metry. The illegitimacy of that deduction has already often been justly condemned and proved upon various grounds, especially by G. E. Schulze in his " Kritik der theoretischen Philosophic" and by Berg in his " Epikritik der Philosophic." What real analogy is there, indeed, between the problematical determination of a concept by disjunctive predicates and the thought of reciprocity? The two are indeed absolutely opposed, for in the dis junctive judgment the actual affirmation of one of the two alternative propositions is also necessarily the negation of the other; if, on the other hand, we think two things in the relation of reciprocity, the affirmation of one is also necessarily the affirmation of the other, and vice versa. Therefore, unquestionably, the real logical analogue of reciprocity is the vicious circle, for in it, as nominally in the case of reciprocity, what is proved is also the proof, and conversely. And just as logic rejects the vicious circle, so the conception of reciprocity ought to be ban ished from metaphysics. For I now intend, quite seri ously, to prove that there is no reciprocity in the strict
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sense, and this conception, which people are so fond of using, just on account of the indefiniteness of the thought, is seen, if more closely considered, to be empty, false, and invalid. First of all, the reader must call to mind what causality really is, and to assist my exposition, see upon this subject 20 of the introductory essay, also my prize-essay on the freedom of the will, chap. iii. p. 27 scq., and lastly the fourth chapter of the second book of this work. Causality is the law according to which the con ditions or states of matter which appear determine their position in time. Causality has to do merely with con ditions or states, indeed, properly, only with changes, and neither with matter as such, nor with permanence with out change. Matter, as such, does not come under the law of causality, for it neither comes into being nor passes away; thus neither does the whole thing, as we commonly express ourselves, come under this law, but only the conditions or states of matter. Further, the law of causality has nothing to do with permanence, for where nothing changes there is no producing of effects and no causality, but a continuing quiet condition or state. But if, now, such a state is changed, then the new state is either again permanent or it is not, but immediately intro duces a third state, and the necessity with which this happens is just the law of causality, which is a form of the principle of sufficient reason, and therefore cannot be further explained, because the principle of sufficient reason is the principle of all explanation and of all neces sity. From this it is clear that cause and effect stand in intimate connection with, and necessary relation to, the course of time. Only because the state A. precedes in time the state B., and their succession is necessary and not accidental, i.e., no mere sequence but a consequence only because of this is the state A. cause and the state B. effect. The conception reciprocity, however, contains this, that both are cause and both are effect of each other; but this really amounts to saying that each of the two is the
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earlier and also the later; thus it is an absurdity. For that both states are simultaneous, and indeed necessarily simultaneous, cannot be admitted; because, as necessarily belonging to each other and existing at the same time, they constitute only one state. For the permanence of this state there is. certainly required the continued exis tence of all its determinations, but we are then no longer concerned with change and causality, but with duration and rest, and nothing further is said than that if one determination of the whole state be changed, the new state which then appears cannot continue, but becomes the cause of the change of all the other determinations of the first state, so that a new third state appears; which all happens merely in accordance with the simple law of causality, and does not establish a new law, that of reci procity.
I also definitely assert that the conception reciprocity cannot be supported by a single example. Everything that one seeks to pass off as such is either a state of rest, to which the conception of causality, which has only sig nificance with reference to changes, finds no application at all, or else it is an alternating succession of states of the same name which condition each other, for the explanation of which simple causality is quite sufficient. An example of the first class is afforded by a pair of scales brought to rest by equal weights. Here there is no effect produced, for there is no change; it is a state of rest; gravity acts, equally divided, as in every body which is supported at its centre of gravity, but it cannot show its force by any effect. That the taking away of one weight produces a second state, which at once be comes the cause of the third, the sinking of the other scale, happens according to the simple law of cause and effect, and requires no special category of the under standing, and not even a special name. An example of the second class is the continuous burning of a fire. The combination of oxygen with the combustible body is the
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cause of heat, and heat, again, is the cause of the renewed occurrence of the chemical combination. But this is nothing more than a chain of causes and effects, the links of which have alternately the same name. The burning, A., produces free heat, B., this produces new burning, C. (i.e., a new effect which has the same name as the cause A., but is not individually identical with it), this pro duces new heat, D. (which is not really identical with the effect B., but only according to the concept, i.e., it has the same name), and so on indefinitely. A good example of what in ordinary life is called reciprocity is afforded by a theory about deserts given by Humboldt (Ansichten dcr Natur, 2d ed., vol. ii. p. 79). In the sandy deserts it does not rain, but it rains upon the wooded mountains surrounding them. The cause is not the attraction of the clouds by the mountains; but it is the column of heated air rising from the sandy plain which prevents the par ticles of vapour from condensing, and drives the clouds high into the heavens. On the mountains the perpen dicular rising stream of air is weaker, the clouds descend, and the rainfall ensues in the cooler air. Thus, want of rain and the absence of plants in the desert stand in the relation of reciprocity; it does not rain because the heated sand-plain sends out more heat; the desert does not be come a steppe or prairie because it does not rain. But clearly we have here again, as in the example given above, only a succession of causes and effects -of the same names, and throughout nothing essentially different from simple causality. This is also the case with the swinging of the pendulum, and indeed also with the self-conserva tion of the organised body, in which case likewise every state introduces a new one, which is of the same kind as that by which it was itself brought about, but indivi dually is new. Only here the matter is complicated, because the chain no longer consists of links of two kinds, but of many kinds, so that a link of the same name only recurs after several others have intervened. Bui we
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always see before us only an application of the single and simple law of causality which gives the rule to the sequence of states, but never anything which must be comprehended by means of a new and special function of the understanding.
Or is it perhaps advanced in support of the conception of reciprocity that action and reaction are equal? But the reason of this is what I urge so strongly and have fully explained in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, that the cause and the effect are not two bodies, but two successive states of bodies, consequently each of the two states implicates all bodies concerned; thus the effect, i.e., the newly appearing state, for example, in the case of an impulse, extends to both bodies in the same proportion; therefore the body impelled produces just as great a change in the body impelling as it itself sustains (each in proportion to its mass and velocity). If one pleases to call this reciprocity, then absolutely every effect is a reciprocal effect, and no new conception is introduced on this account, still less does it require a new function of the understanding, but we only have a superfluous synonym for causality. But Kant himself, in a moment of thought lessness, exactly expressed this view in the " Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science," at the beginning of the proof of the fourth principle of mechanics : " All external effect in the world is reciprocal effect." How then should different functions lie a priori in the understanding for simple causality and for reciprocity, and, indeed, how should the real succession of things only be possible and knowable by means of the first, and their co-existence by means of the second? According to this, if all effect is reciprocal effect, succession and simultaneity would be the same thing, and therefore everything in the world would take place at the same moment. If there were true reciprocity, then perpetual motion would also be possible, and indeed a priori certain; but it is rather the case that the a priori conviction that there is no true reciprocity, VOL. ir. E
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and no corresponding form of the understanding, is the ground of the assertion that perpetual motion is impossible.
Aristotle also denies reciprocity in the strict sense; for lie remarks that two things may certainly be reciprocal causes of each other, but only if this is understood in a different sense of each of them; for example, that one acts upon the other as the motive, but the latter acts iipon the former as the cause of its movement. We find in two passages the same words : Physic., lib. ii. c. 3, and Metaph., lib. v. c. 2. Eari Se rtva tcai aXX^Xcyy atria olov TO Troveiv ainov XT;? eye^ta?, teat avrr) TOV iroveiv aXX ov TOV aurov rpoirov, aXXa TO fjbev &>? TeNo?, TO Se &>? ap%Tj Kivrja-ecos. (Sunt prceterea qucc sibi sunt mutuo causes, ut exercitium bonce lidbitudinis, et hccc exercitii : at non eodem modo, sed hcec ut finis, aliud ut principium motus.) If, besides this, he had accepted a reciprocity proper, he would have introduced it here, for in both passages he is concerned with enumerating all the possible kinds of causes. In the Analyt. post., lib. ii. c. 1 1, he speaks of a circle of causes and effects, but not of reciprocity.
4. The categories of Modality have this advantage over all others, that what is expressed through each of them really corresponds to the form of judgment from which it is derived; which with the other categories is scarcely ever the case, because for the most part they are deduced from the forms of judgment with the most capricious violence.
Thus that it is the conceptions of the possible, the actual, and the necessary which occasion the problematic, asserta- tory, and apodictic forms of judgment, is perfectly true; but that those conceptions are special, original forms of knowledge of the understanding which cannot be further deduced is not true. On the contrary, they spring from the single original form of all knowledge, which is, there fore, known to us a priori, the principle of sufficient rea son; and indeed out of this the knowledge of necessity
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springs directly. On the other hand, it is only because reflection is applied to this that the conceptions of con tingency, possibility, impossibility, and actuality arise. Therefore all these do not by any means spring from one faculty of the mind, the understanding, but arise through the conflict of abstract and intuitive knowledge, as will be seen directly.
I hold that to be necessary and to be the consequent of a given reason are absolutely interchangeable notions, and completely identical. We can never know, nor even think, anything as necessary, except so far as \ve regard it as the consequent of a given reason; and the concep tion of necessity contains absolutely nothing more than this dependence, this being established through something else, and this inevitable following from it. Thus it arises and exists simply and solely [through the application of the principle of sufficient reason. Therefore, there is, according to the different forms of this principle, a physical necessity (the effect from the cause), a logical (through the ground of knowing, in analytical judgments, syllogisms, Ac.), a mathematical (according to the ground of being in time and space), and finally a practical necessity, by which we intend to signify not determination through a pre tended categorical imperative, but the necessary occurrence of an action according to the motives presented, in the case of a given empirical character. But everything necessary is only so relatively, that is, under the pre supposition of the reason from which it follows; there fore absolute necessity is a contradiction. With regard to the rest, I refer to 49 of the essay on the principle of sufficient reason.
The contradictory opposite, i.e., the denial of necessity, is contingency. The content of this conception is, therefore, negative nothing more than this : absence of the con nection expressed by the principle of sufficient reason. Consequently the contingent is also always merely rela tive. It is contingent in relation to something which is
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not its reason. Every object, of whatever kind it may be for example, every event in the actual world is always at once necessary and contingent; necessary in relation to the one condition which is its cause : contingent in relation to everything else. For its contact in time and space with everything else is a mere coincidence without neces sary connection : hence also the words chance, crvfj.Trrco/jLa, contingens. Therefore an absolute contingency is just as inconceivable as an absolute necessity. For the former would be simply an object which stood to no other in the relation of consequent to its reason. But the incon ceivability of such a thing is just the content of the principle of sufficient reason negatively expressed, and therefore this principle must first be upset before we can think an absolute contingency; and even then it itself would have lost all significance, for the conception of con tingency has meaning only in relation to that principle, and signifies that two objects do not stand to each other in the relation of reason and consequent.
In nature, which consists of ideas of perception, every thing that happens is necessary; for it proceeds from its cause. If, however, we consider this individual with re ference to everything else which is not its cause, we know it as contingent; but this is already an abstract reflection. Now, further, let us abstract entirely from a natural object its causal relation to everything else, thus its necessity and its contingency; then this kind of know ledge comprehends the conception of the actual, in which one only considers the effect, without looking for the cause,, in relation to which one would otherwise have to call it necessary, and in relation to everything else contingent. All this rests ultimately upon the fact that the modality of the judgment does not indicate so much the objective nature of things as the relation of our knowledge to them. Since, however, in nature everything proceeds from a cause, everything actual is also necessary, yet only so far as it is at this time, in this place; for only so far does
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determination by the law of causality extend. Let us leave, however, concrete nature and pass over to abstract thinking; then we can present to ourselves in reflection all the natural laws which are known to us partly a priori, partly only a posteriori, and this abstract idea contains all that is in nature at any time, in any place, but with abstraction from every definite time and place; and just in this way, through such reflection, we have entered the wide kingdom of the, possible. But what finds no place even here is the impossible. It is clear that possibility and impossibility exist only for reflection, for abstract knowledge of the reason, not for knowledge of perception; although it is the pure forms of perception which supply the reason with the determination of the possible and impossible. According as the laws of nature, from which we start in the thought of the possible and impossible, are known a priori or a posteriori, is the pos sibility or impossibility metaphysical or physical.
From this exposition, which requires no proof because it rests directly upon the knowledge of the principle of sufficient reason and upon the development of the concep tions of the necessary, the actual, and the possible, it is sufficiently evident how entirely groundless is Kant s assumption of three special functions of the understanding for these three conceptions, and that here again he has allowed himself to be disturbed by no reflection in the carrying out of his architectonic symmetry.
To this, however, we have to add the other great mistake, that, certainly according to the procedure of earlier philo sophy, he has confounded the conceptions of necessity and contingency with each other. That earlier philosophy has applied abstraction to the following mistaken use. It was clear that that of which the reason is given inevitably follows, i.e., cannot not be, and thus necessarily is. But that philosophy held to this last determination alone, and said that is necessary which cannot be otherwise, or the opposite of which is impossible. It left, however, the
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ground and root of such necessity out of account, over looked the relativity of all necessity which follows from it, and thereby made the quite unthinkable fiction of an absolute necessity, i.e., of something the existence of which would be as inevitable as the consequent of a reason, but which yet was not the consequent of a reason, and therefore depended upon nothing; an addition which is an absurd petitio, for it conflicts with the principle of sufficient reason. Now, starting from this fiction, it ex plained, in diametrical opposition to the truth, all that is established by a reason as contingent, because it looked at the relative nature of its necessity and compared this with that entirely imaginary absolute necessity, which is self-contradictory in its conception. 1 Now Kant ad heres to this fundamentally perverse definition of the contingent and gives it as explanation. (Critique of Pure Eeason, V. p. 289-291; 243. V. 301; 419. V. 447, 486, 488.) He falls indeed into the most evident contra diction with himself upon this point, for on p. 301 he says : " Everything contingent has a cause," and adds, " That is contingent which might possibly not be." But whatever has a cause cannot possibly not be : thus it is necessary. For the rest, the source of the whole of this false explanation of the necessary and the contingent is to be found in Aristotle in "De Generatione et Corrupt-zone," lib. ii. c. 9 et n, where the necessary is explained as that which cannot possibly not be : there stands in opposi-
1 Cf. Christian Wolf s "Vcrniin- matical truths. The reason he as-
ftige Gcdanken von Gott, Welt und signs for this is, that only the law
Seele" 577~579- It is strange of causality gives infinite series,
that he only explains as contingent while the other kinds of grounds
what is necessary according to the give only finite series. Yet this is
principle of sufficient reason of be- by no means the case with the forms
coming, i.e., what takes place from of the principle of sufficient reason
causes, and on the contrary recog- in pure space and time, but only
nises as necessary that which is so holds good of the logical ground of
according to the other forms of the knowledge; but he held mathe-
principle of sufficient reason; for matical necessity to be such also,
example, what follows from the Compare the essay on the principle
essentia (definition), thus analytical of sufficient reason, 50. judgments, and further also mathe-
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 71
tion to it that which caiinot possibly be, and between these two lies that which can both be and not be, thus that which comes into being and passes away, and this would then be the contingent. In accordance with what has been said above, it is clear that this explanation, like so many of Aristotle s, has resulted from sticking to abstract conceptions without going back to the concrete and per ceptible, in which, however, the source of all abstract conceptions lies, and by which therefore they must al ways be controlled. " Something which cannot possibly not be " can certainly be thought in the abstract, but if we go with it to the concrete, the real, the perceptible we find nothing to support the thought, even as possible, as even merely the asserted consequent of a given reason, whose necessity is yet relative and conditioned.
I take this opportunity of adding a few further remarks on these conceptions of modality. Since all necessity rests upon the principle of sufficient reason, and is on this account relative, all apodictic judgments are originally, and according to their ultimate significance, hypothetical. They become categorical only through the addition of an assertatory minor, thus in the conclusion. If this minor is still undecided, and this indecision is expressed, this gives the problematical judgment.
What in general (as a rule) is apodictic (a law of nature), is in reference to a particular case only problematical, because the condition must actually appear which brings the case under the rule. And conversely, what in the particular as such is necessary (apodictic) (every particular change necessary through the cause), is again in general, and predicated universally, only problematical; because the causes which appear only concern the particular case, and the apodictic, always hypothetical judgment, always expresses merely the general law, not the particular case directly. All this has its ground in the fact that possi bility exists only in the province of reflection and for the reason; the actual, in the province of perception and for
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the understanding; the necessary, for both. Indeed, the distinction between necessary, actual, and possible really exists only in the abstract and according to the concep tion; in the real world, on the other hand, all three fall into one. For all that happens, happens necessarily, be cause it happens from causes; but these themselves have again causes, so that the whole of the events of the world, great and small, are a strict concatenation of necessary occurrences. Accordingly everything actual is also neces sary, and in the real world there is no difference between actuality and necessity, and in the same way no difference between actuality and possibility; for what has not hap pened, i.e., has not become actual, was also not possible, because the causes without which it could never appear ha.ve not themselves appeared, nor could appear, in the great concatenation of causes; thus it was an impossibility. Every event is therefore either necessary or impossible. All this holds good only of the empirically real world, i.e., the complex of individual things, thus of the whole particular as such. If, on the other hand, we consider things generally, comprehending them in abstracto, neces sity, actuality, and possibility are again separated; we then know everything which is in accordance with the a priori laws which belong to our intellect as possible in general; that which corresponds to the empirical laws of nature as possible in this world, even if it has never become actual; thus we distinguish clearly the possible from the actual. The actual is in itself always also necessary, but is only comprehended as such by him who knows its cause; regarded apart from this, it is and is called contingent. This consideration also gives us the key to that contentio irept, Swarwu between the Megaric Diodorus and Chry- sippus the Stoic which Cicero refers to in his book De Fato. Diodorus says : " Only what becomes actual was possible, and all that is actual is also necessary." Chry- sippus on the other hand says: "Much that is possible never becomes actual; for only the necessary becomes
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actual." We may explain this thus : Actuality is the conclusion of a syllogism to which possibility gives the premises. But for this is required not only the major but also the minor; only the two give complete possibility. The major gives a merely theoretical, general possibility in abstracto, but this of itself does not make anything possible, i.e., capable of becoming actual. For this the minor also is needed, which gives the possibility for the particular case, because it brings it under the rule, and thereby it becomes at once actual. For example :
MaJ. All houses (consequently also my house) can be destroyed by fire.
Min. My house is on fire.
Concl. My house is being destroyed by fire.
For every general proposition, thus every major, always determines things with reference to actuality only under a presupposition, therefore hypothetically; for example, the capability of being burnt down has as a presupposition the catching fire. This presupposition is produced in the minor. The major always loads the cannon, but only if the minor brings the match does the shot, i.e., the con clusion, follow. This holds good throughout of the rela tion of possibility to actuality. Since now the conclusion, which is the assertion of actuality, always follows neces sarily, it is evident from this that all that is actual is also necessary, which can also be seen from the fact that necessity only means being the consequent of a given reason : this is in the case of the actual a cause : thus everything actual is necessary. Accordingly, we see here the conceptions of the possible, the actual, and the neces sary unite, and not merely the last presuppose the first, but also the converse. What keeps them apart is the limi tation of our intellect through the form of time; for time is the mediator between possibility and actuality. The neces sity of the particular event may be fully seen from the knowledge of all its causes; but the concurrence of the whole of these different and independent causes seems to
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us contingent; indeed their independence of each other is just the conception of contingency. Since, however, each of them was the necessary effect of its causes, the chain of which has no beginning, it is evident that contingency is merely a subjective phenomenon, arising from the limita tion of the horizon of our understanding, and just as sub jective as the optical horizon at which the heavens touch the earth.
Since necessity is the same thing as following from given grounds, it must appear in a special way in the case of every form of the principle of sufficient reason, and also have its opposite in the possibility and impossibility which always arises only through the application of the abstract reflection of the reason to the object. Therefore the four kinds of necessity mentioned above stand opposed to as many kinds of impossibility, physical, logical, mathe matical, and practical. It may further be remarked that if one remains entirely within the province of abstract concepts, possibility is always connected with the more general, and necessity with the more limited concept; for example, " An animal may be a bird, a fish, an amphibious creature, &c." " A nightingale must be a bird, a bird must be an animal, an animal must be an organism, an organism must be a body." This is because logical necessity, the expression of which is the syllogism, proceeds from the general to the particular, and never conversely. In the concrete world of nature (ideas of the first class), on the contrary, everything is really necessary through the law of causality; only added reflection can conceive it as also con tingent, comparing it with that which is not its cause, and also as merely and purely actual, by disregarding all causal connection. Only in this class of ideas does the concep tion of the actual properly occur, as is also shown by the derivation of the word from the conception of causality. In the third class of ideas, that of pure mathematical per ception or intuition, if we confine ourselves strictly to it, there is only necessity. Possibility occurs here also only
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through relation to the concepts of reflection : for example, " A triangle may be right-angled, obtuse-angled, or equi angular; its three angles must be equal to two right-angles." Thus here we only arrive at the possible through the tran sition from the perceptible to the abstract.
After this exposition, which presupposes the recollec tion of what was said both in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason and in the first book of the present work, there will, it is hoped, be no further doubt as to the true and very heterogeneous source of those forms which the table of judgments lays before us, nor as to the inadmissibility and utter groundlessness of the assump tion of twelve special functions of the understanding for the explanation of them. The latter point is also sup ported by a number of special circumstances very easily noted. Thus, for example, it requires great love of sym metry and much trust in a clue derived from it, to lead one to assume that an affirmative, a categorical, and an assertatory judgment are three such different things that they justify the assumption of an entirely special function of the understanding for each of them.
Kant himself betrays his consciousness of the unten able nature of his doctrine of the categories by the fact that in the third chapter of the Analytic of Principles (phenomena et noumena) several long passages of the first edition (p. 241, 242, 244-246, 248-253) are omitted in the second passages which displayed the weakness of that doctrine too openly. So, for example, he says there (p. 241) that he has not denned the individual categories, because he could not define them even if he had wished to do so, inasmuch as they were susceptible of no defini tion. In saying this he forgot that at p. 82 of the same first edition he had said : " I purposely dispense with the definition of the categories although I may be in possession of it." This then was, sit venia verbo, wind. But this last passage he has allowed to stand. And so all those passages wisely omitted afterwards betray the fact that
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nothing distinct can be thought in connection with the categories, and this whole doctrine stands upon a weak foundation.
This table of the categories is now made the guiding clue according to which every metaphysical, and indeed every scientific inquiry is to be conducted (Prolegomena, 39). And, in fact, it is not only the foundation of the whole Kantian philosophy and the type according to which its symmetry is everywhere carried out, as I have already shown above, but it has also really become the procrustean bed into which Kant forces every possible inquiry, by means of a violence which I shall now consider somewhat more closely. But with such an opportunity what must not the imitatores servumpecus have done! We have seen. That violence then is applied in this way. The meaning of the expressions denoted by the titles, forms of judgment and categories, is entirely set aside and forgotten, and the expressions alone are retained. These have their source partly in Aristotle s Analyt. priora, i. 23 (irepi TrotoT^ro? Kai TTOCTOT^TO? T(av Tov av\\ojtcr/j,ov opwv . de qualitatc ct quantitate terminorum syllogismi), but are arbitrarily chosen; for the extent of the concepts might certainly have been otherwise expressed than through the word quantity, though this word is more suited to its object than the rest of the titles of the categories. Even the word quality has obviously been chosen on account of the custom of opposing quality to quantity; for the name quality is certainly taken arbitrarily enough for affirmation and negation. But now in every inquiry instituted by Kant, every quantity in time and space, and every possible quality of things, physical, moral, &c., is brought by him under those category titles, although between these things and those titles of the forms of judgment and of thought there is absolutely nothing in common except the acci dental and arbitrary nomenclature. It is needful to keep in mind all the respect which in other regards is due to Kant to enable one to refrain from expressing in hard
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terms one s repugnance to this procedure. The nearest example is afforded us at once by the pure physiological table of the general principles of natural science. What in all the world has the quantity of judgments to do with the fact that every perception has nn extensive magni tude? What has the quality of judgments to do with the fact that every sensation has a degree? The former rests rather on the fact that space is the form of our external perception, and the latter is nothing more than an empirical, and, moreover, entirely subjective feeling, drawn merely from the consideration of the nature of our organs of sense. Further, in the table which gives the basis of rational psychology (Critique of Pure Eeason, p. 344; V. 402), the simplicity of the soul is cited under quality; but this is just a quantitative property, and has absolutely no relation to the affirmation or negation in the judgment. But quantity had to be completed by the unity of the soul, which is, however, already included in its simplicity. Then modality is forced in in an absurd way; the soul stands in connection with possible objects; but connection belongs to relation, only this is already taken possession of by substance. Then the four cosmo- logical Ideas, which are the material of the antinomies, are referred to the titles of the categories; but of this we shall speak more fully further on, when we come to the examination of these antinomies. Several, if possible, still more glaring examples are to be found in the table of the Categories of Freedom! in the " Critique of Practical Reason; " also in the first book of the " Critique of Judgment," which goes through the judgment of taste
O O O v O
according to the four titles of the categories; and, finally, in the " Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science," which are entirely adapted to the table of the categories, whereby the false that is mingled here and there with what is true and excellent in this important work is for the most part introduced. See, for example, at the end of the first chapter how the unity, the multiplicity, and the
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totality of the directions of lines are supposed to corre spond to the categories, which are so named according to the quantity of judgments.
The principle of the Permanence of Substance is deduced from the category of subsistence and inherence. This, however, we know only from the form of the categorical judgment, i.e., from the connection of two concepts as subject and predicate. With what violence then is that great metaphysical principle made dependent upon this simple, purely logical form! Yet this is only done pro forma, and for the sake of symmetry. The proof of this principle, which is given here, sets entirely aside its sup posed origin in the understanding and in the category, and is based upon the pure intuition or perception of time. But this proof also is quite incorrect. It is false that in mere time there is simultaneity and duration; these ideas only arise from the union of space with time, as I have already shown in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, 18, and worked out more fully in 4 of the present work. I must assume a knowledge of both these expositions for the understanding of what follows. It is false that time remains the same through all change; on the contrary, it is just time itself that is fleeting; a permanent time is a contradiction. Kant s proof is un tenable, strenuously as he has supported it with sophisms; indeed, he falls into the most palpable contradictions. Thus, after he has falsely set up co-existence as a mode of time (p. 177; V. 219), he says, quite rightly (p. 183; V. 226), " Co-existence is not a mode of time, for in time there are absolutely no parts together, but all in succession." In truth, space is quite as much implicated in co-existence as time. For if two things are co-existent and yet not one, they are different in respect of space; if two states of one thing are co-existent (e.g., the glow and the heat of iron), then they are two contemporaneous effects of one thing,
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therefore presuppose matter, and matter presupposes space. Strictly speaking, co-existence is a negative determination, which merely signifies that two things or states are not different in respect of time; thus their difference is to be sought for elsewhere. But in any case, our knowledge of the permanence of substance, i.e., of matter, must be based upon insight a priori; for it is raised above all doubt, and therefore cannot be drawn from experience. I deduce it from the fact that the principle of all becoming and passing away, the law of causality, of which we are con scious a priori, is essentially concerned only with the changes, i.e., the successive states of matter, is thus limited to the form, and leaves the matter untouched, which therefore exists in our consciousness as the foundation of all things, which is not subject to becoming or passing away, which has therefore always been and will always continue to be. A deeper proof of the permanence of substance, drawn from the analysis of our perception of the empirical world in general, is to be found in the first book of this work, 4, where it is shown that the nature of matter consists in the absolute union of space and time, a union which is only possible by means of the idea of causality, consequently only for the understanding, which is nothing but the subjective correlative of causality. Hence, also, matter is never known otherwise than as producing effects, i.e., as through and through causality; to be and to act are with it one, which is indeed signified by the word actuality. Intimate union of space and time causality, matter, actuality are thus one, and the subjective correlative of this one is the understanding. Matter must bear in itself the conflicting properties of both factors from which it proceeds, and it is the idea of causality which abolishes what is contradictory in both, and makes their co-existence conceivable by the under standing, through which and for which alone matter is, and whose whole faculty consists in the knowledge of cause and effect. Thus for the understanding there is
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united in matter the inconstant flux of time, appearing as change of the accidents, with the rigid immobility of space, which exhibits itself as the permanence of substance. For if the substance passed away like the accidents, the pheno menon would be torn away from space altogether, and would only belong to time; the world of experience would be destroyed by the abolition of matter, annihilation. Thus from the share which space has in matter, i.e., in all phenomena of the actual in that it is the opposite and counterpart of time, and therefore in itself and apart from the union with the latter knows absolutely no change the principle of the permanence of substance, which recognises everything as a priori certain, had to be deduced and ex plained; but not from mere time, to which for this purpose and quite erroneously Kant has attributed permanence.
In the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, 23, I have fully explained the incorrectness of the following proof of the a priori nature and of the necessity of the law of causality from the mere succession of events in time; I must, therefore, content myself here by referring to that passage. 1 This is precisely the case with the proof of reciprocity also, the concept of which I was obliged to explain above as invalid. What is necessary has also been said of modality, the working out of the principles of which now follows.
There are still a few points in the further course of the transcendental analytic which I should have to refute were it not that I am afraid of trying the patience of the reader; I therefore leave them to his own reflection. But ever anew in the " Critique of Pure Eeason " we meet that prin cipal and fundamental error of Kant s, which I have copiously denounced above, the complete failure to dis tinguish abstract, discursive knowledge from intuitive. It is this that throws a constant obscurity over Kant s whole
_ * With my refutation of the Kan- Zcit, Raum und Kausalitcit, 28; and tian proof may be compared the ear- by G. E. Schulze, Kritik der thcoret- lier attacks upon it by Feder, Ueber ischen Philosophic, Bd. ii. S. 422-442
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theory of the faculty of knowledge, and never allows the reader to know what he is really speaking about at any time, so that instead of understanding, he always merely conjectures, for he alternately tries to understand what is said as referring to thought and to perception, and remains always in suspense. In the chapter " On the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and ISToumena," Kant carries that incredible want of reflection as to the nature of the idea of perception and the abstract idea, as I shall explain more fully immediately, so far as to make the monstrous assertion that without thought, that is, without abstract conceptions, there is no knowledge of an object; and that perception, because it is not thought, is also not know ledge, and, in general, is nothing but a mere affection of sensibility, mere sensation! Nay, more, that perception without conception is absolutely void; but conception without perception is yet always something (p. 253; V. 309). Now this is exactly the opposite of the truth; for concepts obtain all significance, all content, only from their relation to ideas of perception, from which they have been abstracted, derived, that is, constructed through the omission of all that is unessential : therefore if the foundation of perception is taken away from them, they are empty and void. Perceptions, on the contrary, have in themselves immediate and very great significance (in them, indeed, the thing in itself objectifies itself); they represent themselves, express themselves, have no mere borrowed content like concepts. For the principle of suf ficient reason governs them only as the law of causality, and determines as such only their position in space and time; it does not, however, condition their content and their significance, as is the case with concepts, in which it appears as the principle of the ground of knowing. For the rest, it looks as if Kant really wished here to set about distinguishing the idea of perception and the abstract idea. He objects to Leibnitz and Locke that the former reduced everything to abstract ideas, and the latter every -
VOL. II. F
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thing to ideas of perception. But yet he arrives at no distinction; and although Locke and Leibnitz really com mitted these errors, Kant himself is burdened with a third error which includes them both the error of having so mixed up knowledge of perception and abstract knowledge that a monstrous hybrid of the two resulted, a chimera of which no distinct idea is possible, and which therefore necessarily only confused and stupefied students, and set them at variance.
Certainly thought and perception are separated more in the chapter referred to " On the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena " than anywhere else, but the nature of this distinction is here a fundamentally false one. On p. 253; V. 309, it is said: "If I take away all thought (through the categories) from empirical know ledge, there remains absolutely no knowledge of an object, for through mere perception nothing at all is thought, and that this affection of sensibility is in me establishes really no relation of such ideas to any object." This sentence contains, in some degree, all the errors of Kant in a nut shell; for it brings out clearly that he has falsely con ceived the relation between sensation, perception, and thought, and accordingly identifies the perception, whose form he yet supposes to be space, and indeed space in all its three dimensions, with the mere subjective sensation in the organs of sense, but only allows the knowledge of an object to be given through thought, which is different from perception. I, on the contrary, say : Objects are first of all objects of perception, not of thought, and all knowledge of objects is originally and in itself perception. Perception, however, is by no means mere sensation, but the understanding is already active in it. The thought, which is added only in the case of men, not in the case of the brutes, is mere abstraction from perception, gives no fundamentally new knowledge, does not itself establish objects which were not before, but merely changes the form of the knowledge already won through perception,
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makes it abstract knowledge in concepts, whereby its con crete or perceptible character is lost, but, on the other hand, combination of it becomes possible, which immeasur ably extends the range of its applicability. The material of our thought is, on the other hand, nothing else than our perceptions themselves, and not something which the per ceptions did not contain, and which was added by the thought; therefore the material of everything that appears in our thought must be capable of verification in our per ception, for otherwise it would be an empty thought. Although this material is variously manipulated and transformed by thought, it must yet be capable of being reduced to perception, and the thought traced back to this just as a piece of gold can be reduced from all its solutions, oxides, sublimates, and combinations, and presented pure and undiminished. This could not happen if thought itself had added something, and, indeed, the principal thing, to the object.
The whole of the chapter on the Amphiboly, which fol lows this, is merely a criticism of the Leibnitzian philo sophy, and as such is on the whole correct, though the form or pattern on which it is constructed is chosen merely for the sake of architectonic symmetry, which here also is the guiding clue. Thus, to carry out the analogy with the Aristotelian Organon, a transcendental Topic is set up, which consists in this, that every conception is to be con sidered from four points of view, in order to make out to which faculty of knowledge it belongs. But these four points of view are quite arbitrarily selected, and ten others might be added to them with just as much right; but their fourfold number corresponds to the titles of the categories, and therefore the chief doctrine of Leibnitz is divided among them as best it may be. By this critique, also, to some extent, certain errors are stamped as natural to the reason, whereas they were merely false abstractions of Leibnitz s, who, rather than learn from his great philo sophical contemporaries, Spinoza and Locke, preferred to
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serve up his own strange inventions. In the chapter on the Amphiboly of Eeflection it is finally said that there may possibly be a kind of perception entirely different from ours, to which, however, our categories are appli cable; therefore the objects of that supposed perception would be noumena, things which can only be thought by us; but since the perception which would give that thought meaning is wanting to us, and indeed is altogether quite problematical, the object of that thought would also merely be a wholly indefinite possibility. I have shown above by quotations that Kant, in utter contradiction with himself, sets up the categories now as the condition of knowledge of perception, now as the function of merely abstract thought. Here they appear exclusively in the latter sense, and it seems quite as if he wished to attribute them merely to discursive thought. But if this is really his opinion, then necessarily at the beginning of the Transcendental Logic, before specifying the different functions of thought at such length, he was necessarily bound to characterise thought in general, and consequently to distinguish it from per ception; he ought to have shown what knowledge is given by mere perception, and what that is new is added by thought. Then we would have known what he was really speaking about; or rather, he would then have spoken quite differently, first of perception, and then of thought; instead of which, as it is, he is always dealing with some thing between the two, which is a mere delusion. There would not then be that great gap between the transcen dental ^Esthetic and the transcendental Logic, where, after the exposition of the mere form of perception, he simply dismisses its content, all that is empirically apprehended* with the phrase " It is given," and does not ask how it came about, ivhether with or without understanding; but, with one spring, passes over to abstract thought; and not even to thought in general, but at once to certain forms of thought, and does not say a word about what thought is, what the concept is, what is the relation of abstract and
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discursive to concrete and intuitive, what is the difference between the knowledge of men and that of brutes, and what is reason.
Yet it was just this distinction between abstract know ledge and knowledge of perception, entirely overlooked by Kant, which the ancients denoted by fyaivopeva and voovpeva, 1 and whose opposition and incommensurability occupied them so much in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato s doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later the Scholastics in the controversy between Nominalism and Realism, the seed of which, so late in developing, was already contained in the opposite mental tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who, in an inexcusable manner, entirely neglected the thing to denote which the words <f)aivofj,eva and voovpeva had already been taken, took possession of the words, as if they were still unappropriated, in order to denote by them his thing in itself and his phenomenon.
Since I have been obliged to reject Kant s doctrine of the categories, just as he rejected that of Aristotle, I wish here to indicate as a suggestion a third way of reaching what is aimed at. What both Kant and Aristotle sought for under the name of the categories were the most general conceptions under which all things, however different, must be subsumed, and through which therefore everything that exists would ultimately be thought. Just on this account Kant conceived them as the forms of all thought.
Grammar is related to logic as clothes to the body. Should not, therefore, these primary conceptions, the ground- bass of the reason, which is the foundation of all special thought, without whose application, therefore, no thought can take place, ultimately lie in those conceptions which
1 See Sext. Empir. Pyrrhon. ky- vois avrtTidti \va.%OLyopa.s(inteUi<jibilia, l>otyp., lib. i. c. 13, vooviJ.(.va. ifiaivcfj.:- apparentibus Ojijiosuit Amixagoras.
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just on account of their exceeding generality (transcen dentalism) have their expression not in single words, but in whole classes of words, because one of them is thought along with every word whatever it may be, whose de signation would therefore have to be looked for, not in the lexicon but in the grammar? In fact, should they not be those distinctions of conceptions on account of which the word which expresses them is either a substantive or an adjective, a verb or an adverb, a pronoun, a preposition, or some other particle in short, the parts of speech? For undoubtedly these denote the forms which all thought primarily assumes, and in which it directly moves; ac cordingly they are the essential forms of speech, the fundamental constituent elements of every language, so that we cannot imagine any language which would not consist of at least substantives, adjectives, and verbs. These fundamental forms would then have subordinated to them those forms of thought which are expressed through their inflections, that is, through declension and conjugation, and it is unessential to the chief concern whether in denoting them we call in the assistance of the article and the pronoun. We will examine the thing, however, somewhat more closely, and ask the question anew : What are the forms of thought?
(l.) Thought consists throughout of judging; judgments are the threads of its whole web, for without making use of a verb our thought does not move, and as often as we use a verb we judge.
(2.) Every judgment consists in the recognition of the relation between subject and predicate, which it separates or unites with various restrictions. It unites them from the recognition of the actual identity of the two, which can only happen in the case of synonyms; then in the recognition that the one is always thought along with the other, though the converse does not hold in the universal affirmative proposition; up to the recognition that the one is sometimes thought along with the other, in the
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particular affirmative proposition. The negative propo sitions take the opposite course. Accordingly in every judgment the subject, the predicate, and the copula, the latter affirmative or negative, must be to be found; even although each of these is not denoted by a word of its own, as is however generally the case. The predicate and the copula are often denoted by one word, as " Caius ages; " sometimes one word denotes all three, as con- curritur, i.e., "the armies engage." From this it is evi dent that the forms of thought are not to be sought for precisely and directly in words, nor even in the parts of speech, for even in the same language the same judgment may be expressed in different words, and indeed in different parts of speech, yet the thought remains the same, and consequently also its form; for the thought could not be the same if the form of thought itself were different. But with the same thought and the same form of thought the form of words may very well be different, for it is merely the outward clothing of the thought, which, on the other hand, is inseparable from its form. Thus grammar only explains the clothing of the forms of thought. The parts of speech can therefore be deduced from the original forms of thought themselves which are independent of all language; their work is to express these forms of thought in all their modifications. They are the instrument and the clothing of the forms of thought, and must be accurately adapted to the structure of the latter, so that it may be recognised in them.
(3.) These real, unalterable, original forms of thought are certainly those of Kant s logical table of judgments; only that in this table are to be found blind windows for the sake of symmetry and the table of the categories; these must all be omitted, and also a false arrangement. Thus :
(a.) Quality : affirmation and negation, i.e., combination and separation of concepts : two forms. It depends on the copula.
(6.) Quantity : the subject-concept is taken either in
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whole or in part : totality or multiplicity. To the first belong also individual subjects : Socrates means " all Socrateses." Thus two forms. It depends on the subject.
(c.) Modality : has really three forms. It determines the quality as necessary, actual, or contingent. It con sequently depends also on the copula.
These three forms of thought spring from the laws of thought of contradiction and identity. But from the principle of sufficient reason and the law of excluded middle springs
(d.) Edation. It only appears if we judge concerning completed judgments, and can only consist in this, that it either asserts the dependence of one judgment upon another (also in the plurality of both), and therefore combines them in the hypothetical proposition; or else asserts that judgments exclude each other, and therefore separates them in the disjunctive proposition. It depends on the copula, which here separates or combines the completed judgments.
The parts of speech and grammatical forms are ways of expressing the three constituent parts of the judgment, the subject, the predicate, and the copula, and also of the possible relations of these; thus of the forms of thought just enumerated, and the fuller determinations and modi fications of these. Substantive, adjective, and verb are therefore essential fundamental constituent elements of language in general; therefore they must be found in all languages. Yet it is possible to conceive a language in which adjective and verb would always be fused together, us is sometimes the case in all languages. Provisionally it may be said, for the expression of the subject are intended the substantive, the article, and the pronoun; for the expression of the predicate, the adjective, the ad verb, and the preposition; for the expression of the copula, the verb, which, however, with the exception of the verb to be, also contains the predicate. It is the task of the philosophy of grammar to teach the precise mechanism of
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the expression of the forms of thought, as it is the task of logic to teach the operations with the forms of thought themselves.
Note. As a warning against a false path and to illus trate the above, I mention S. Stern s " Vorlaufige Grund- laye zur Sprachpliilosopliie" 1835, which is an utterly abortive attempt to construct the categories out of the grammatical forms. He has entirely confused thought with perception, and therefore, instead of the categories of thought, he has tried to deduce the supposed categories of perception from the grammatical forms, and conse quently has placed the grammatical forms in direct rela tion to perception. He is involved in the great error that language is immediately related to perception, instead of being directly related only to thought as such, thus to the abstract concepts, and only by means of these to per ception, to which they, however, have a relation which introduces an entire change of the form. What exists in perception, thus also the relations which proceed from time and space, certainly becomes an object of thought; thus there must also be forms of speech to express it, yet always merely in the abstract, as concepts. Concepts are always the primary material of thought, and the forms of logic are always related to these, never directly to perception. Perception always determines only the material, never the formal truth of the proposition, for the formal truth is determined according to the logical rules alone.
I return to the Kantian philosophy, and come now to the Transcendental Dialectic. Kant opens it with the explanation of reason, the faculty which is to play the principal part in it, for hitherto only sensibility and understanding were on the scene. When considering his different explanations of reason, I have already spoken above of the explanation he gives here that "it is the
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faculty of principles." It is now taught here that all the a priori knowledge hitherto considered, which makes pure mathematics and pure natural science possible, affords only rules, and no principles; because it proceeds from perceptions and forms of knowledge, and not from mere conceptions, which is demanded if it is to be called a principle. Such a principle must accordingly be know ledge from pure conceptions and yet synthetical. But this is absolutely impossible. From pure conceptions nothing but analytical propositions can ever proceed. If concep tions are to be synthetically and yet a priori combined, this combination must necessarily be accomplished by some third thing, through a pure perception of the formal possibility of experience, just as synthetic judgments a posteriori are brought about through empirical percep tion; consequently a synthetic proposition a priori can never proceed from pure conceptions. In general, how ever, we are a priori conscious of nothing more than the principle of sufficient reason in its different forms, and therefore no other synthetic judgments a priori are pos sible than those which proceed from that which receives its content from that principle.
However, Kant finally comes forward with a pretended principle of the reason answering to his demand, yet only with this one, from which others afterwards follow as corollaries. It is the principle which Chr. Wolf set up and explained in his " Cosmologia" sect. i. c. 2, 93, and in his " Ontologia," 178. As now above, under the title of the Amphiboly, mere Leibnitzian philosophemes were taken for natural and necessary aberrations of the reason, and were criticised as such, so here precisely the same thing happens with the philosophemes of Wolf. Kant still presents this principle of the reason in an obscure light, through indistinctness, indefiniteness, and breaking of it up (p. 307; V. 361, and 322; V. 379). Clearly ex pressed, however, it is as follows : " If the conditioned is given, the totality of its conditions must also be given,
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and therefore also the unconditioned, through which alone that totality becomes complete." We become most vividly aware of the apparent truth of this proposition if we imagine the conditions and the conditioned as the links of a suspended chain, the upper end of which, however, is not visible, so that it might extend ad infinitum; since, how ever, the chain does not fall, but hangs, there must be above one link which is the first, and in some way is fixed. Or, more briefly : the reason desires to have a point of attach ment for the causal chain which reaches back to infinity; it would be convenient for it. But we will examine the proposition, not in figures, but in itself. Synthetic it cer tainly is; for, analytically, nothing more follows from the conception of the conditioned than that of the condition. It has not, however, a priori truth, nor even a posteriori, but it surreptitiously obtains its appearance of truth in a very subtle way, which I must now point out. Immediately, and a priori, we have the knowledge which the principle of sufficient reason in its four forms expresses. From this immediate knowledge all abstract expressions of the principle of sufficient reason are derived, and they are thus indirect; still more, however, is this the case with inferences or corollaries from them. I have already ex plained above how abstract knowledge often unites a variety of intuitive cognitions in one form or one concept in such a way that they can no longer be distinguished; therefore abstract knowledge stands to intuitive knowledge as the shadow to the real objects, the great multiplicity of which it presents through one outline comprehending them all. Now the pretended principle of the reason makes use of this shadow. In order to deduce from the principle of sufficient reason the unconditioned, which directly contra dicts it, it prudently abandons the immediate concrete knowledge of the content of the principle of sufficient reason in its particular forms, and only makes use of abstract concepts which are derived from it, and have value and significance only through it, in order to smuggle
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its unconditioned somehow or other into the wide sphere of those concepts. Its procedure becomes most distinct when clothed in dialectical form; for example, thus : " If the conditioned exists, its condition must also be given, and indeed all given, thus completely, thus the totality of its conditions; consequently, if they constitute a series, the M hole series, consequently also its first beginning, thus the unconditioned." Here it is false that the conditions of a conditioned can constitute a series. Bather must the totality of the conditions of everything conditioned be contained in its nearest ground or reason from which it directly proceeds, and which is only thus a sufficient ground or reason. For example, the different determinations of the state which is the cause, all of which must be present together before the effect can take place. But the series, for example, the chain of causes, arises merely from the fact that we regard what immediately before was the con dition as now a conditioned; but then at once the whole operation begins again from the beginning, and the prin ciple of sufficient reason appears anew with its claim. But there can never be for a conditioned a properly suc cessive scries of conditions, which exist merely as such, and on account of that which is at last conditioned; it is always an alternating series of conditioneds and condi tions; as each link is laid aside the chain is broken, and the claim of the principle of sufficient reason entirely satisfied, it arises anew because the condition becomes the conditioned. Thus the principle of sufficient reason always demands only the completeness of the immediate or next condition, never the completeness of a series. But just this conception of the completeness of the condition leaves it undetermined whether this completeness should be simultaneous or successive; and since the latter is chosen, the demand now arises for a complete series of conditions following each other. Only through an arbi trary abstraction is a series of causes and effects regarded as a series of causes alone, which exists merely on account
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of the last effect, and is therefore demanded as its sufficient reason. From closer and more intelligent consideration, and by rising from the indefinite generality of abstraction to the particular definite reality, it appears, on the con trary, that the demand for a sufficient reason extends only to the completeness of the determinations of the immediate cause, not to the completeness of a series. The demand of the principle of sufficient reason is completely extin guished in each sufficient reason given. It arises, however, immediately anew, because this reason is again regarded as a consequent; but it never demands directly a series of reasons. If, on the other hand, instead of going to the thing itself, we confine ourselves to the abstract concepts, these distinctions vanish. Then a chain of alternating causes and effects, or of alternating logical reasons and consequents, is given out as simply a chain of causes of the last effect, or reasons of the last consequent, and the completeness of the conditions, through which alone a reason becomes sufficient, appears as the completeness of that as sumed series of reasons alone, which only exist on account of the last consequent. There then appears the abstract principle of the reason very boldly with its demand for the unconditioned. But, in order to recognise the in validity of this claim, there is no need of a critique of reason by means of antinomies and their solution, but only of a critique of reason understood in my sense, an examination of the relation of abstract knowledge to direct intuitive knowledge, by means of ascending from the indefinite generality of the former to the fixed de- finiteness of the latter. From such a critique, then, it here appears that the nature of the reason by no means consists in the demand for an unconditioned; for, when ever it proceeds with full deliberation, it must itself find that an unconditioned is an absurdity. The reason as a faculty of knowledge can always have to do only with objects; but every object for the subject is necessarily and irrevocably subordinated to the principle of sufficient
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reason, both a parte ante and a parte post. The validity of the principle of sufficient reason is so involved in the form of consciousness that we absolutely cannot imagine anything objective of which no why could further be de manded; thus we cannot imagine an absolute absolute, like a blind wall in front of us. That his convenience should lead this or that person to stop at some point, and assume such an absolute at pleasure, is of no avail against that incontestable certainty a priori, even if he should put on an air of great importance in doing so. In fact, the whole talk about the absolute, almost the sole theme of philosophies since Kant, is nothing but the cosmological proof incognito. This proof, in consequence of the case brought against it by Kant, deprived of all right and declared outlawed, dare no longer show itself in its true form, and therefore appears in all kinds of disguises now in distinguished form, concealed under intellectual intui tion or pure thought; now as a suspicious vagabond, half begging, half demanding what it wants in more unpre tending philosophemes. If an absolute must absolutely be had, then I will give one which is far better fitted to meet all the demands which are made on such a thing than these visionary phantoms; it is matter. It has no beginning, and it is imperishable; thus it is really inde pendent, and quod per se est et per se concipitur; from its womb all proceeds, and to it all returns; what more can be desired of an absolute? But to those with whom no critique of reason has succeeded, we should rather say
" Are not ye like unto women, who ever Return to the point from which they set out, Though reason should have been talked by the hour 1 "
That the return to an unconditioned cause, to a first beginning, by no means lies in the nature of reason, is, moreover, practically proved by the fact that the primi tive religions of our race, which even yet have the greatest number of followers upon earth, Brahmanism and
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Buddhaism, neither know nor admit such assumptions, but carry the series of phenomena conditioning each other into infinity. Upon this point, I refer to the note appended to the criticism of the first antinomy, which occurs further on; and the reader may also see Upham s " Doctrine of Buddhaism" (p. 9), and in general all genuine accounts of the religions of Asia. Judaism and reason ought not to be identified.
Kant, who by no means desires to maintain his pre tended principle of reason as objectively valid, but merely as subjectively necessary, deduces it even as such only by means of a shallow sophism, p. 307; V. 364. He says that because we seek to subsume every truth known to us under a more general truth, as far as this process can be carried, this is nothing else than the pursuit of the uncon ditioned, which we already presuppose. But, in truth, in this endeavour we do nothing more than apply reason, and intentionally make use of it to simplify our knowledge by enabling us to survey it reason, which is that faculty of abstract, general knowledge that distinguishes the reflec tive, thinking man, endowed with speech, from the brute, which is the slave of the present. For the use of reason just consists in this, that we know the particular through the universal, the case through the rule, the rule through the more general rule; thus that we seek the most general points of view. Through such survey or general view our knowledge is so facilitated and perfected that from it arises the great difference between the life of the brutes and that of men, and again between the life of educated and that of uneducated men. Now, certainly the series of grounds of knowledge, which exist only in the sphere of the abstract, thus of reason, always finds an end in what is indemonstrable, i.e., in an idea which is not further conditioned according to this form of the principle of sufficient reason, thus in the a priori or a posteriori directly perceptible ground of the first proposition of the train of reasoning. I have already shown in the essay on
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the principle of sufficient reason, 50, that here the series of grounds of knowledge really passes over into grounds of becoming or of being. But one can only desire to make this circumstance hold good as a proof of an unconditioned according to the law of causality, or even of the mere demand for such an unconditioned, if one has not yet dis tinguished the forms of the principle of sufficient reason at all, but, holding to the abstract expression, has con founded them all. Kant, however, seeks to establish that confusion, through a mere play upon words, with Univer- salitas and Universitas, p. 322; V. 379. Thus it is fun damentally false that our search for higher grounds of knowledge, more general truths, springs from the pre supposition of an object unconditioned in its being, or has anything whatever in common with this. Moreover, how should it be essential to the reason to presuppose something which it must know to be an absurdity as soon as it reflects? The source of that conception of the un conditioned is rather to be found only in the indolence of the individual who wishes by means of it to get rid of all further questions, whether his own or of others, though entirely without justification.
Now Kant himself denies objective validity to this pretended principle of reason; he gives it, however, as a necessary subjective assumption, and thus introduces an irremediable split into our knowledge, which he soon allows to appear more clearly. With this purpose he unfolds that principle of reason further, p. 322; V, 379, in accordance with the method of architectonic symmetry of which he is so fond. From the three categories of relation spring three kinds of syllogisms, each of which gives the clue for the discovery of a special unconditioned, of which again there are three : the soul, the world (as an object in itself and absolute totality), and God. Now here we must at once note a great contradiction, of which Kant, however, takes no notice, because it would be very dangerous to the symmetry. Two of these unconditioneds
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are themselves conditioned by the third, the soul and the world by God, who is the cause of their existence. Thus the two former have by no means the predicate of uncon- ditionedness in common with the latter, though this is really the point here, but only that of inferred being according to the principles of experience, beyond the sphere of the possibility of experience.
Setting this aside, we recognise in the three uncon- ditioneds, to which, according to Kant, reason, following its essential laws, must come, the three principal subjects round which the whole of philosophy under the influence of Christianity, from the Scholastics down to Christian Wolf, has turned. Accessible and familiar as these con ceptions have become through all these philosophers, and now also through the philosophers of pure reason, this by no means shows that, without revelation, they would necessarily have proceeded from the development of all reason as a production peculiar to its very nature. In order to prove this it would be necessary to call in the aid of historical criticism, and to examine whether the ancient and non-European nations, especially the peoples of Hindostan and many of the oldest Greek philosophers, really attained to those conceptions, or whether it is only we who, by quite falsely translating the Brahma of the Hindus and the Tien of the Chinese as "God," good- naturedly attribute such conceptions to them, just as the Greeks recognised their gods everywhere; whether it is not rather the case that theism proper is only to be found in the religion of the Jews, and in the two religions which have proceeded from it, whose followers just on this account comprise the adherents of all other religions on earth under the name of heathen, which, by the way, is a most absurd and crude expression, and ought to be banished at least from the writings of the learned, because it identifies and jumbles together Brahmanists, Buddhists, Egyptians, Greeks, Eomans, Germans, Gauls, Iroquois, Patagonians, Caribbeans, Otaheiteans, Australians, and
VOL. II. G
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many others. Such an expression is all very well for priests, but in the learned world it must at once be shown the door: it can go to England and take up its abode at Oxford. It is a thoroughly established fact that Buddhism, the religion which numbers more followers than any other on earth, contains absolutely no theism, indeed rejects it. As regards Plato, it is my opinion that he owes to the Jews the theism with which he is periodically seized. On this account Numenius (accord ing to Clem. Alex., Strom., i. c. 22, Euseb. prcep. cvang., xiii. 12, and Suidas under Numenius) called him the Moses grcccisans : Ti jap eari HXarwv, rj Ma)ar)$ arriKi^tov; and he accuses him of having stolen (aTroa-vX.fjo-a^) his doctrine of God and the creation from the Mosaical writings. Clemens often repeats that Plato knew and made use of Moses, e.g., Strom., i. 25. v. c. 14, 90, &c., &c.; Pccdarjog., ii. IO, and iii. n; also in the Cohortatio ad gentes, c. 6, where, after he has bitterly censured and derided the whole of the Greek philosophers in the pre ceding chapter because they were not Jews, he bestows on Plato nothing but praise, and breaks out into pure exultation that as Plato had learnt his geometry from the Egyptians, his astronomy from the Babylonians, magic from the Thracians, and much also from the Assyrians, so he had learnt his theism from the Jews : OiSa crov TOU? SiSaavcaAou?, /cav aTTOKpVTrreiv e0e\.f)$, . . . o%av TIJV rov deov Trap aviwv co^eXtjaet rcov Efipaiwv (Tuos Qiiayistros novi, licet cos celare velis, . . . ilia de Deo sentcntia wppeditata tibi est db Hebrcels). A pathetic scene of recognition. But I see a remarkable confirmation of the matter in what follows. According to Plutarch (in Mario), and, better, according to Lactantius (i. 3, 19), Plato thanked Nature that he had been born a human being and not a brute, a man and not a woman, a Greek and not a barbarian. Now in Isaac Euchel s " Prayers of the Jews," from the Hebrew, second edition, 1799, p. 7, there is a morning prayer in which God is thanked and praised
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that the worshipper was born a Jew and not a heathen, a free man and not a slave, a man and not a woman. Such an historical investigation would have spared Kant an unfortunate necessity in which he now becomes involved, in that he makes these three conceptions spring necessarily from the nature of reason, and yet explains that they are untenable and unverifiable by the reason, and thus makes the reason itself a sophisticator; for he says, p. 339; V. 397: "There are sophistications, not of man, but of pure reason itself, from which even the wisest cannot free himself, and although after much trouble he may be able to avoid error, yet he never can escape from the illusion which unceasingly torments and mocks him." Therefore these Kantian " Ideas of the Reason " might be compared to the focus in which the converging re flected rays from a concave mirror meet several inches before its surface, in consequence of which, by an inevit able process of the understanding, an object presents itself to us there which is a thing without reality.
But the name " Idea " is very unfortunately chosen for these pretended necessary productions of the pure theo retical reason, and violently appropriated from Plato, who used it to denote the eternal forms which, multiplied through space and time, become partially visible in the innumerable individual fleeting things. Plato s " Ideas " are accordingly throughout perceptible, as indeed the word which he chose so definitely signifies, for it could only be adequately translated by means of perceptible or visible things; and Kant has appropriated it to denote that which lies so far from all possibility of perception that even abstract thought can only half attain to it. The word " Idea," which Plato first introduced, has, more over, since then, through two-and-t\venty centuries, always retained the significance in which he used it; for not only all ancient philosophers, but also all the Scholastics, and indeed the Church Fathers and the theologians of
o
the Middle Ages, used it only in that Platonic sense, the
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sense of the Latin word exemplar, as Suarez expressly mentions in his twenty-fifth Disputation, sect. i. That Englishmen and Frenchmen were later induced by the poverty of their languages to misuse this word is bad enough, but not of importance. Kant s misuse of the word idea, by the substitution of a new significance introduced by means of the slender clue of not being object of experience, which it has in common with Plato s ideas, but also in common with every possible chimera, is thus altogether unjustifiable. Now, since the misuse of a few years is not to be considered against the authority of many centuries, I have always used the word in its old, original, Platonic significance.
The refutation of rational psychology is much fuller and more thorough in the first edition of the " Critique of Pure Pieason " than in the second and following editions, and therefore upon this point we must make use of the first edition exclusively. This refutation has as a whole very great merit and much truth. Yet I am clearly of opinion that it was merely from his love of symmetry that Kant deduced as necessary the conception of the soul from the paralogism of substantiality by applying the demand for the unconditioned to the conception substance, which is the first category of relation, and accordingly maintained that the conception of a soul arose in this way in every speculative reason. If this conception really had its origin in the presupposition of a final subject of all predicates of a thing, one would have assumed a soul not in men alone, but also just as neces sarily in every lifeless thing, for such a thing also requires a final subject of all its predicates. Speaking generally, however. Kant makes use of a quite inadmissible ex pression when he talks of something which can exist only as subject and not as predicate (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason, p. 323; V. 412; Prolegomena, 4 and
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47); though a precedent for this is to be found in Aristotle s " Metaphysics," iv. ch. 8. Nothing whatever exists as subject and predicate, for these expressions belong exclusively to logic, and denote the relations of abstract conceptions to each other. Now their correlative or representative in the world of perception must be substance and accident. But then we need not look further for that which exists always as substance and never as accident, but have it directly in matter. It is the substance corresponding to all properties of things which are their accidents. It is, in fact, if one wishes to retain the expression of Kant which has just been con demned, the final subject of all predicates of that empiri cally given thing, that which remains after the abstraction of all its properties of every kind. And this holds good of man as of a brute, a plant, or a stone, and is so evident, that in order not to see it a determined desire not to see is required. That it is really the prototype of the con ception substance, I will show soon. But subject and predicate are related to substance and accident rather as the principle of sufficient reason in logic to the law of causality in nature, and the substitution or identification of the former is just as inadmissible as that of the latter. Yet in the " Prolegomena," 46, Kant carries this sub stitution and identification to its fullest extent in order to make the conception of the soul arise from that of the final subject of all predicates and from the form of the categorical syllogism. In order to discover the sophistical nature of this paragraph, one only needs to reflect that subject and predicate are purely logical determinations, which concern abstract conceptions solely and alone, and that according to their relation in the judgment. Sub stance and accident, on the other hand, belong to the world of perception and its apprehension in the under standing, and are even there only as identical with matter and form or quality. Of this more shortly.
The antithesis which has given occasion for the assump-
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tion of two fundamentally different substances, body and soul, is in truth that of objective and subjective. If a man apprehends himself objectively in external percep tion, he finds a being extended in space and in general merely corporeal; but if, on the other hand, he apprehends himself in mere self-consciousness, thus purely subjectively, he finds himself a merely willing and perceiving being, free from all forms of perception, thus also without a single one of the properties which belong to bodies. Now he forms the conception of the soul, like all the trans cendental conceptions called by Kant Ideas, by applying the principle of sufficient reason, the form of all objects, to that which is not an object, and in this case indeed to the subject of knowing and willing. He treats, in fact, knowing, thinking, and willing as effects of which he seeks the cause, and as he cannot accept the body as their cause, he assumes a cause of them entirely different from the body. In this manner the first and the last of the dogmatists proves the existence of the soul : Plato in the " Phsedrus " and also Wolf : from thinking and willing as the effects which lead to that cause. Only after in this way, by hypostatising a cause corresponding to the effect, the conception of an immaterial, simple, indestructible being had arisen, the school developed and demonstrated this from the conception of substance. But this conception itself they had previously constructed specially for this purpose by the following artifice, which is worthy of notice.
With the first class of ideas, i.e., the real world of per ception, the idea of matter is also given; because the law governing this class of ideas, the law of causality, deter mines the change of the states or conditions, and these conditions themselves presuppose something permanent, whose changes they are. When speaking above of the principle of the permanence of substance, I showed, by reference to earlier passages, that this idea of matter arises because in the understanding, for which alone it
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exists, time and space are intimately united, and the share of space in this product exhibits itself as the per manence of matter, while the share of time appears as the change of states. Purely in itself, matter can only be thought in dbstracto, and not perceived; for to perception it always appears already in form and quality. From this conception of matter, substance is again an abstraction, consequently a higher genus, and arose in this way. Of the conception of matter, only the predicate of permanence was allowed to remain, while all its other essential pro perties, extension, impenetrability, divisibility, &c., were thought away. Like every higher genus, then, the concept substance contains less in itself than the concept matter, but, unlike every other higher genus, it does not contain more under it, because it does not include several lower genera besides matter; but this remains the one true species of the concept substance, the only assignable thing by which its content is realised and receives a proof. Thus the aim with which in other cases the reason pro duces by abstraction a higher conception, in order that in it several subordinate species may be thought at once through common determinations, has here no place; con sequently that abstraction is either undertaken idly and entirely without aim, or it has a secret secondary purpose. This secret purpose is now brought to light; for under the conception substance, along with its true sub-species matter, a second species is co-ordinated the immaterial, simple, indestructible substance, soul. But the surrep titious introduction of this last concept arose from the fact that the higher concept substance was framed illogi- cally, and in a manner contrary to law. In its legitimate procedure the reason always frames the concept of a higher genus by placing together the concepts of several species, and now comparing them, proceeds discursively, and by omitting their differences and retaining the qualities in which they agree, obtains the generic concept which includes them all but has a smaller content. From this
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it follows that the concepts of the species must always precede the concept of the genus. But, in the present case, the converse is true. Only the concept matter existed before the generic concept substance. The latter was without occasion, and consequently without justifica tion, as it were aimlessly framed from the former by the arbitrary omission of all its determinations except one. Not till afterwards was the second ungenuine species placed beside the concept matter, and so foisted in. But for the framing of this second concept nothing more was now required than an express denial of what had already been tacitly omitted in the higher generic concept, exten sion, impenetrability, arid divisibility. Thus the concept substance was framed merely to be the vehicle for the sur reptitious introduction of the concept of the immaterial substance. Consequently, it is very far from being capable of holding good as a category or necessary function of the understanding; rather is it an exceedingly superfluous concept, because its only true content lies already in the concept of matter, besides which it contains only a great void, which can be filled up by nothing but the illicitly introduced species immaterial substance; and, indeed, it was solely for the purpose of containing this that it was framed. Accordingly, in strictness, the concept substance must be entirely rejected, and the concept matter every where put in its place.
The categories were a procrustean bed for every possible thing, but the three kinds of syllogisms are so only for the three so-called Ideas. The Idea of the soul was compelled to find its origin in the form of the categorical syllogism. It is now the turn of the dogmatic ideas concerning the universe, so far as it is thought as an object in itself, be tween two limits that of the smallest (atom), and that of the largest (limits of the universe in time and space). These must now proceed from the form of the hypothetical
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syllogism. Nor for this in itself is any special violence necessary. For the hypothetical judgment has its form from the principle of sufficient reason, and not the cosmo- logical alone but all those so-called Ideas really have their origin in the inconsiderate and unrestricted applica tion of that principle, and the laying aside of it at pleasure. For, in accordance with that principle, the mere dependence of an object upon another is ever sought for, till finally the exhaustion of the imagination puts an end to the journey; and thus it is lost sight of that every object, and indeed the whole chain of objects and the principle of sufficient reason itself, stand in a far closer and greater dependence, the dependence upon the knowing subject, for whose objects alone, i.e., ideas, that principle is valid, for their mere position in space and time is determined by it. Thus, since the form of knowledge from which here merely the cosmological Ideas are derived, the principle of sufficient reason, is the source of all subtle hypostases, in this case no sophisms need be resorted to; but so much the more is sophistry required in order to classify those Ideas according to the four titles of the categories.
( i .) The cosmological Ideas with regard to time and space, thus of the limits of the world in both, are boldly regarded as determined through the category of quantity, with which they clearly have nothing in common, except the accidental denotation in logic of the extent of the concept of the subject in the judgment by the word quantity, a pictorial expression instead of which some other might just as well have been chosen. But for Kant s love of symmetry this is enough. He takes advantage of the fortunate accident of this nomenclature, and links to it the transcendent dogmas of the world s extension.
(2.) Yet more boldly does Kant link to quality, i.e., the affirmation or negation in a judgment, the transcendent Ideas concerning matter; a procedure which has not even an accidental similarity of words as a basis. For it is just
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to the quantity, and not to the quality of matter that its mechanical (not chemical) divisibility is related. But, M hat is more, this whole idea of divisibility by no means belongs to those inferences according to the principle of sufficient reason, from which, however, as the content of the hypothetical form, all cosmological Ideas ought to flow. For the assertion upon which Kant there relies, that the relation of the parts to the whole is that of the condition to the conditioned, thus a relation according to the principle of sufficient reason, is certainly an ingenious but yet a groundless sophism. That relation is rather based upon the principle of contradiction; for the whole is not through the part, nor the parts through the whole, but both are necessarily together because they are one, and their separation is only an arbitrary act. It depends upon this, according to the principle of contradiction, that if the parts are thought away, the whole is also thought away, and conversely; and by no means upon the fact that the parts as the reason conditioned the whole as the consequent, and that therefore, in accordance with the principle of suf ficient reason, we were necessarily led to seek the ultimate parts, in order, as its reason, to understand from them the whole. Such great difficulties are here overcome by the love of symmetry.
(3.) The Idea of the first cause of the world would now quite properly come under the title of relation; but Kant must reserve this for the fourth title, that of modality, for which otherwise nothing would remain, and under which he forces this idea to come by saying that the contingent (i.e., according to his explanation, which is diametrically opposed to the truth, every consequent of its reason) becomes the necessary through the first cause. Therefore, for the sake of symmetry, the conception vt freedom appears here as the third Idea. By this conception, however, as is distinctly stated in the observations on the thesis of the third conflict, what is really meant is only that Idea of the cause of the world which alone is admissible
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 107
here. The third and fourth conflicts are at bottom tauto logical.
About all this, however, I find and assert that the whole antinomy is a mere delusion, a sham fight. Only the as sertions of the antitheses really rest upon the forms of our faculty of knowledge, i.e., if we express it objectively, on the necessary, a priori certain, most universal laws of nature. Their proofs alone are therefore drawn from objective grounds. On the other hand, the assertions and proofs of the theses have no other than a subjective ground, rest solely on the weakness of the reasoning individual; for his imagination becomes tired with an endless regression, and therefore he puts an end to it by arbitrary assumptions, which he tries to smooth over as well as he can; and his judgment, moreover, is in this case paralysed by early and deeply imprinted prejudices. On this account the proof of the thesis in all the four conflicts is throughout a mere sophism, while that of the antithesis is a necessary inference of the reason from the laws of the world as idea known to us a priori. It is, moreover, only with great pains and skill that Kant is able to sustain the thesis, and make it appear to attack its opponent, which is endowed with native power. Now in this regard his first and constant artifice is, that he does not render prominent the nervus argumentationis, and thus present it in as isolated, naked, and distinct a manner as he possibly can; but rather introduces the same argu ment on both sides, concealed under and mixed up with a mass of superfluous and prolix sentences.
The theses and antitheses which here appear in such conflict remind one of the SIKO.IOS and aSiKos \oyos which Socrates, in the " Clouds " of Aristophanes, brings forward as contending. Yet this resemblance extends only to the form and not to the content, though this would gladly be asserted by those who ascribe to these most speculative of all questions of theoretical philosophy an influence upon morality, and therefore seriously regard the thesis as the
io8 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
&tfcaio<;, and the antithesis as the aSio? \oyos. I shall not, however, accommodate myself here with reference to such small, narrow, and perverse minds; and, giving honour not to them, but to the truth, I shall show that the proofs which Kant adduced of the individual theses are sophisms, while those of the antitheses are quite fairly and correctly drawn from objective grounds. I assume that in this examination the reader has always before him the Kantian antinomy itself.
If the proof of the thesis in the first conflict is to be held as valid, then it proves too much, for it would be just as applicable to time itself as to change in time, and would therefore prove that time itself must have had a beginning, which is absurd. Besides, the sophism consists in this, that instead of the beginninglessness of the series of states, which was at first the question, suddenly the endlessness (infinity) of the series is substituted; and now it is proved that this is logically contradicted by com pleteness, and yet every present is the end of the past, which no one doubted. The end of a beginningless series can, however, always be tJwught, without prejudice to the fact that it has no beginning; just as, conversely, the be ginning of an endless series can also be thought. But against the real, true argument of the antithesis, that the changes of the world necessarily presuppose an infinite series of changes backwards, absolutely nothing is ad vanced. We can think the possibility that the causal chain will some day end in an absolute standstill, but we can by no means think the possibility of an absolute beginning. 1
1 That the assumption of a limit this fleeting and baseless web of
of the world in time is certainly not Maya, for they at once bring out
a necessary thought of the reason very ingeniously the relativity of all
may be also proved historically, for periods of time in the following my-
the Hindus teach nothing of the thus (Polier, Mythologie des Jndous,
kind, even in the religion of the vol. ii. p. 585). The four ages, in
people, much less in the Vedas, but the last of which we live, embrace
try to express mythologically by together 4,320,000 years. Each day
means of a monstrous chronology the of the creating Brahma has looo
infinity of this phenomenal world, such periods of four ages, and his
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 109
With reference to the spatial limits of the world, it is proved that, if it is to he regarded as a given whole, it must necessarily have limits. The reasoning is correct, only it was just the first link of it that was to be proved, and that remains unproved. Totality presupposes limits, and limits presuppose totality; but here both together are arbitrarily presupposed. For this second point, however, the antithesis affords no such satisfactory proof as for the first, because the law of causality provides us with neces sary determinations only with reference to time, not to space, and affords us a priori the certainty that no occupied time can ever be bounded by a previous empty time, and that no change can be the first change, but not that an occupied space can have no empty space beside it. So far no a priori decision on the latter point would be possible; yet the difficulty of conceiving the world in space as limited lies in the fact that space itself is neces sarily infinite, and therefore a limited finite world in space, however large it may be, becomes an infinitely small magnitude; and in this incongruity the imagination finds an insuperable stumbling-block, because there remains for it only the choice of thinking the world either as infinitely large or infinitely small. This was already seen by the ancient philosophers : MyrpoScopos, 6 Ejrucovpov, (f>r]<7iv aroTrov etvai ev fj^e^aXw TreSib) e <yevvr]dr]vai, /cat eva Kocrpov ev ry aTreipat (MetrodoTUS, caput scliolcc Epicuri, absurdum ait, in magno campo spicam unam produci, et unum in infinite munduni) Stob. Eel., i. c. 23. Therefore many of them taught (as immediately follows), aTret/aoi"? Kocrpovs ev rw aTreipw (infinites mundos in inftnito). This is also the sense of the Kantian argument for the
nights have also 1000. His year Polier s work, vol. ii. p. 594, from
has 365 days and as many nights, the Puranas. In it a Kajah, after a
He lives 100 of his years, always visit of a few seconds to Vishnu in
creating; and if he dies, at once a his heaven, finds on his return to
new Brahma is born, and so on from earth that several millions of years
eternity to eternity. The same re- have elapsed, and a new age has
lativity of time is also expressed in begun; for every day of Vishnu is
the special myth which is quoted in 100 recurrences of the four ages.
no CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
antithesis, only he has disfigured it by a scholastic and ambiguous expression. The same argument might be used against the limitation of the world in time, only we have a far better one under the guidance of causality. In the case of the assumption of a world limited in space, there arises further the unanswerable question, What advantage has the filled part of space enjoyed over the infinite space that has remained empty? In the fifth dialogue of his book, "Del Infinite, Univcrso e Mondi," Giordano Bruno gives a full account of the arguments for and against the finiteness of the world, which is very well worth reading. For the rest, Kant himself asserts seriously, and upon objective grounds, the infinity of the world in space in his " Natural History of the Theory of the Heavens," part ii. ch. 7. Aristotle also acknow ledges the same, " Phys.," iii. ch. 4, a chapter which, together with the following one, is very well worth reading with reference to this antinomy.
In the second conflict the thesis is at once guilty of a very palpable petitio principii, for it commences, " Every compound substance consists of simple parts." From the compoundness here arbitrarily assumed, no doubt it after wards very easily proves the simple parts. But the pro position, "All matter is compound," which is just the point, remains unproved, because it is simply a groundless assumption. The opposite of simple is not compound, but extended, that which has parts and is divisible. Here, however, it is really tacitly assumed that the parts existed before the whole, and were brought together, whence the whole has arisen : for this is the meanin^ of the word
o
" compound." Yet this can just as little be asserted as the opposite. Divisibility means merely the possibility of separating the whole into parts, and not that the whole is compounded out of parts and thus came into being. Divisibility merely asserts the parts a parte post; com poundness asserts them a parte ante. For there is essen tially no temporal relation between the parts and the
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY, in
whole; they rather condition each other reciprocally, and thus always exist at the same time, for only so far as both are there is there anything extended in space. Therefore what Kant says in the observations on the thesis, " Space ought not to be called a compositum, but a totum" &c., holds good absolutely of matter also, which is simply space become perceptible. On the other hand, the infinite divisibility of matter, which the antithesis asserts, follows a priori and incontrovertibly from that of space, which it fills. This proposition has absolutely nothing against it; and therefore Kant also (p. 513; V. 541), when he speaks seriously and in his own person, no longer as the mouth piece of the aSt/co? ^0709, presents it as objective truth; and also in the " Metaphysical First Principles of Natural .Science" (p. 108, first edition), the proposition, "Matter is infinitely divisible," is placed at the beginning of the proof of the first proposition of mechanics as established truth, having appeared and been proved as the fourth proposition in the Dynamics. But here Kant spoils the proof of the antithesis by the greatest obscurity of style and useless accumulation of words, with the cunning intention that the evidence of the antithesis shall not throw the sophisms of the thesis too much into the shade. Atoms are no necessary thought of the reason, but merely an hypothesis for the explanation of the difference of the specific gravity of bodies. But Kant himself has shown, in the dynamics of his " Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science," that this can be otherwise, and indeed better and more simply explained than by atomism. In this, however, he was anticipated by Priestley, " On Matter and Spirit," sect. i. Indeed, even in Aristotle, " Phys." iv. 9, the fundamental thought of this is to be found.
The argument for the third thesis is a very fine sophism, and is really Kant s pretended principle of pure reason itself entirely unadulterated and unchanged. It tries to prove the finiteness of the series of causes by saying that, in order to be sufficient, a cause must contain
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the complete sum of the conditions from which the suc ceeding state, the effect, proceeds. For the completeness of the determinations present together in the state which is the cause, the argument now substitutes the completeness of the series of causes by which that state itself was brought to actuality; and because completeness presupposes the condition of being rounded off or closed in, and this again presupposes finiteness, the argument infers from this a first cause, closing the series and therefore unconditioned. But the juggling is obvious. In order to conceive the state A. as the sufficient cause of the state B., I assume that it contains the sum of the necessary determinations from the co-existence of which the estate B. inevitably follows. Now by this my demand upon it as a sufficient cause is entirely satisfied, and has no direct connection with the question how the state A. itself came to be; this rather belongs to an entirely different consideration, in which I regard the said state A. no more as cause, but as itself an effect; in which case another state again must be related to it, just as it was related to B. The assumption of the finiteness of the series of causes and effects, and accordingly of a first beginning, appears nowhere in this as necessary, any more than the present- ness of the present moment requires us to assume a beginning of time itself. It only comes to be added on account of the laziness of the speculating individual. That this assumption lies in the acceptance of a cause as a sufficient reason is thus unfairly arrived at and false, as I have shown at length above when considering the Kantian principle of pure reason which coincides with this thesis. In illustration of the assertion of this false thesis, Kant is bold enough in his observations upon it to give as an example of an unconditioned be^innino- his
o j. o o
rising from his chair; as if it were not just as impossible for him to rise without a motive as for a ball to roll without a cause. I certainly do not need to prove the baselessness of the appeal which, induced by a sense of
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 113
weakness, he makes to the philosophers of antiquity, by quoting from Ocellus Lucanus, the Eleatics, &c., not to speak of the Hindus. Against the proof of this anti thesis, as in the case of the previous ones, there is nothing to advance.
The fourth conflict is, as I have already remarked, really tautological with the third; and the proof of the thesis is also essentially the same as that of the preceding one. His assertion that every conditioned presupposes a complete series of conditions, and therefore a series which ends with an unconditioned, is a petitio principii, which must simply be denied. Everything conditioned presupposes nothing but its condition; that this is again conditioned raises a new consideration which is not directly contained in the first.
A certain appearance of probability cannot be denied to the antinomy; yet it is remarkable that no part of the Kantian philosophy has met so little contradiction, indeed has found so much acceptance, as this exceed ingly paradoxical doctrine. Almost all philosophical parties and text-books have regarded it as valid, and have also repeatedly reconstructed it; while nearly all Kant s other doctrines have been contested, and indeed there have never been wanting some perverse minds which rejected even the transcendental aesthetic. The undivided assent which the antinomy, on the other hand, has met with may ultimately arise from the fact that certain persons regard with inward satisfaction the point at which the understanding is so thoroughly brought to a standstill, having hit upon something which at once is and is not, so that they actually have before them here the sixth trick of Philadelphia in Lichtenberg s broadsheet.
If we examine the real meaning of Kant s Critical Solu tion of the cosmological problem which now follows, we find that it is not what he gives it out to be, the solution of the problem by the disclosure that both sides, starting from false assumptions, are wrong in the first and second
VOL. II. H
114 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
conflicts, and that in the third and fourth both, are right. It is really the confirmation of the antitheses by the ex planation of their assertions.
First Kant asserts, in this solution, obviously wrongly, that both sides started from the assumption, as their first principle, that with the conditioned the completed (thus rounded off) series of its conditions is given. Only the thesis laid down this proposition, Kant s principle of pure reason, as the ground of its assertions; the antithesis, on the other hand, expressly denied it throughout, and asserted the contrary. Further, Kant charges both sides with this assumption, that the world exists in itself, i.e., indepen dently of being known and of the forms of this knowledge, but this assumption also is only made by the thesis; in deed, it is so far from forming the ground of the assertions of the antithesis that it is absolutely inconsistent with them. For that it should all be given is absolutely con tradictory of the conception of an infinite series. It is therefore essential to it that it should always exist only with reference to the process of going through it, and not independently of this. On the other hand, in the assump tion of definite limits also lies that of a whole which exists absolutely and independently of the process of completely measuring it. Thus it is only the thesis that makes the false assumption of a self-existent universe, i.e., a universe given prior to all knowledge, and to which knowledge came as to something external to itself. The antithesis from the outset combats this assumption abso lutely; for the infinity of the series which it asserts merely under the guidance of the principle of sufficient reason can only exist if the regressus is fully carried out, but not independently of it. As the object in general pre supposes the subject, so also the object which is determined as an endless chain of conditions necessarily presupposes in the subject the kind of knowledge corresponding to this, that is, the constant folloiving of the links of that chain. But this is just what Kant gives as the solution
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 115
of the problem, and so often repeats : " The infinity of the world is only through the regressus, not "before it." This his solution of the conflict is thus really only the decision in favour of the antithesis in the assertion of which this truth already lies, while it is altogether inconsistent with the assertions of the thesis. If the antithesis had asserted that the world consisted of infinite series of reasons and consequents, and yet existed independently of the idea and its regressive series, thus in itself, and therefore con stituted a given whole, it would have contradicted not only the thesis but also itself. For an infinite can never be given as a whole, nor an endless series exist, except as an endless progress; nor can what is boundless constitute .a whole. Thus this assumption, of which Kant asserts that it led both sides into error, belongs only to the thesis.
It is already a doctrine of Aristotle s that an infinity can never be actu, i.e., actual and given, but only potentid. OVK ecmi> evepyeta etvai ro aireipov , . . a\X abvvaTov TO evTe\^eta ov cnreipov (infinitum non potest esse actu: . . . sed impossibile, actu esse infinitum), Metaph. K. i o. Further : KCUT evepyeiav pev yap ovbev ecrriv cnreipov, SvvctfMei Se eiri, TTJV Siaipeaiv (nihil cnim actu infinitum est, sed potentia tantum, nempe divisione ipsa). De generat, et corrupt., i., 3. He develops this fully in the "Physics," iii. 5 and 6, where to a certain extent he gives the perfectly correct solution of the whole of the antinomies. He expounds the antinomies in his short way, and then says, " A medi ator (SiaiTijTov) is required;" upon which he gives the solution that the infinite, both of the world in space and in time and in division, is never before the regressus, or progressus, but in it. This truth lies then in the rightly apprehended conception of the infinite. Thus one mis understands himself if he imagines that he can think the infinite, of whatever kind it may be, as something objec tively present and complete, and independent of the re gressus.
Indeed if, reversing the procedure, we take as the
ii6 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
starting-point what Kant gives as the solution of the conflict, the assertion of the antithesis follows exactly from it. Thus : if the world is not an unconditioned whole and does not exist absolutely but only in the idea, and if its series of reasons and consequents do not exist before the regressus of the ideas of them but only through this regressus, then the world cannot contain determined and finite series, because their determination and limita tion would necessarily be independent of the idea, which would then only come afterwards; but all its series must be infinite, i.e., inexhaustible by any idea.
On p. 506; V. 534, Kant tries to prove from the falseness of both sides the transcendental ideality of the phenomenon, and begins, " If the world is a whole existing by itself, it is either finite or infinite." But this is false; a whole existing of itself cannot possibly be infinite. That ideality may rather be concluded from the infinity of the series in the world in the following manner : If the series of reasons and consequents in the world are absolutely without end, the world cannot be a given whole independent of the idea; for such a world always presupposes definite limits, just as on the contrary infinite series presuppose an infinite regressus. Therefore, the presupposed infinity of the series must be determined through the form of reason and consequent, and this again through the form of knowledge of the subject; thus the world as it is known must exist only in the idea of the subject.
Now whether Kant himself was aware or not that his critical solution of the problem is really a decision in favour of the antithesis, I am unable to decide. For it depends upon whether what Schelling has somewhere very happily called Kant s system of accommodation extended so far; or whether Kant s mind was here- already involved in an unconscious accommodation to the influence of his time and surroundings.
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 117
The solution of the third antinomy, the subject of which was the Idea of freedom, deserves a special con sideration, because it is for us very well worth notice that it is just here in connection with the Idea of freedom that Kant is obliged to speak more fully of the thing in itself, which was hitherto only seen in the background. This is very explicable to us since we have recognised the thing in itself as the will. Speaking generally, this is the point at which the Kantian philosophy leads to mine, or at which mine springs out of his as its parent stem. One will be convinced of this if one reads with attention pp. 536 and 537; V. 564 and 565, of the " Critique of Pure Reason," and, further, compares these passages with the introduction to the " Critique of Judg ment," pp. xviii. and xix. of the third edition, or p. 13 of liosenkranz s edition, where indeed it is said : " The conception of freedom can in its object (that is then the will) present to the mind a thing in itself, but not in perception; the conception of nature, on the other hand, can present its object to the mind in perception, but not as a thing in itself." But specially let any one read con cerning the solution of the antinomies the fifty-third paragraph of the Prolegomena, and then honestly answer the question whether all that is said there does not sound like a riddle to which my doctrine is the answer. Kant never completed his thought; I have merely carried out his work. Accordingly, what Kant says only of the human phenomenon I have extended to all phenomena in general, as differing from the human phenomenon only in degree, that their true being is something absolutely free, i.e., a will. It appears from my work how fruitful this insight is in connection with Kant s doctrine of the ideality of space, time, and causality.
Kant has nowhere made the thing in itself the subject of a special exposition or distinct deduction; but, when ever he wants it, he introduces it at once by means of the conclusion that the phenomenon, thus the visible world,
ii8 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
must have a reason, an intelligible cause, which is not a phenomenon, and therefore belongs to no possible expe rience. He does this after having assiduously insisted that the categories, and thus causality also, had a use which was absolutely confined to possible experience; that they were merely forms of the understanding, which, served to spell out the phenomena of the world of sense, beyond which, on the other hand, they had no signifi cance, &c., &c. Therefore, he denies in the most uncom promising manner their application to things beyond experience, and rightly explains and at once rejects all earlier dogmatism as based upon the neglect of this law. The incredible inconsistency which Kant here fell into was soon noticed, and used by his first opponents to make attacks on his philosophy to which it could offer no resistance. For certainly we apply the law of causality entirely a priori and before all experience to the changes felt in our organs of sense. But, on this very account, this law is just as much of subjective origin as these sensations themselves, and thus does not lead to a thing in itself. The truth is, that upon the path of the idea one can never get beyond the idea; it is a rounded-off whole, and has in its own resources no clue leading to the nature of the thing in itself, which is toto genere different from it. If we were merely perceiving beings, the way to the thing in itself would be absolutely cut off from us. Only the other side of our own being can disclose to us the other side of the inner being of things. This path I have followed. But Kant s inference to the thing in itself, contrary as it is to his own teaching, obtains some excuse from the following circumstance. He does not say, as truth required, simply and absolutely that the object is conditioned by the subject, and conversely; but only that the manner of the appearance of the object is conditioned by the forms of knowledge of the subject, which, there fore, also come a priori to consciousness. But that now which in opposition to this is only known a posteriori is
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 119
for him the immediate effect of the thing in itself, which becomes phenomenon only in its passage through these forms which are given a priori. From this point of view it is to some extent explicable how it could escape him that objectivity in general belongs to the form of the phenomenon, and is just as much conditioned by subjec tivity in general as the mode of appearing of the object is conditioned by the forms of knowledge of the subject; that thus if a thing in itself must be assumed, it abso lutely cannot be an object, which however he always assumes it to be, but such a thing in itself must neces sarily lie in a sphere toto genere different from the idea (from knowing and being known), and therefore could least of all be arrived at through the laws of the com bination of objects among themselves.
With the proof of the thing in itself it has happened to Kant precisely as with that of the a priori nature of the law of causality. Both doctrines are true, but their proof is false. They thus belong to the class of true conclu sions from false premises. I have retained them both, but have proved them in an entirely different way, and with certainty.
The thing in itself I have neither introduced surrepti tiously nor inferred according to laws which exclude it, because they really belong to its phenomenal appearance; nor, in general, have I arrived at it by roundabout ways. On the contrary, I have shown it directly, there where it lies immediately, in the will, which reveals itself to every one directly as the in-itself of his own phenomenal being.
And it is also this immediate knowledge of his own will out of which in human consciousness the concep tion of freedom springs; for certainly the will, as world- creating, as thing in itself, is free from the principle of sufficient reason, and therewith from all necessity, thus is completely independent, free, and indeed almighty. Yet, in truth, this only holds good of the will in itself, not of its manifestations, the individuals, who, just through the
120 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
will itself, are unalterably determined as its manifestations in time. But in the ordinary consciousness, unenlightened by philosophy, the will is at once confused with its mani festation, and what belongs only to the former is attributed to the latter, whence arises the illusion of the uncondi tioned freedom of the individual. Therefore Spinoza says rightly that if the projected stone had consciousness, it would believe that it flew of its own free will. For cer tainly the in-itself of the stone also is the will, which alone is free; but, as in all its manifestations, here also, where it appears as a stone, it is already fully determined. But of all this enough has already been said in the text of this work.
Kant fails to understand and overlooks this immediate origin of the conception of freedom in every human con sciousness, and therefore he now places (p. 533; V. 561) the source of that conception in a very subtle speculation, through which the unconditioned, to which the reason must always tend, leads us to hypostatise the conception of free dom, and it is only upon this transcendent Idea of freedom that the practical conception of it is supposed to be founded. In the " Critique of Practical Eeason," 6, and p. 158 of the fourth and 235 of Rosenkranz s edition, he yet deduces this last conception differently by saying that the cate gorical imperative presupposes it. The speculative Idea is accordingly only the primary source of the conception of freedom for the sake of this presupposition, but here it obtains both significance and application. Neither, however, is the case. For the delusion of a perfect freedom of the individual in his particular actions is most lively in the conviction of the least cultivated man who has never reflected, and it is thus founded on no specula tion, although often assumed by speculation from without. Thus only philosophers, and indeed only the most profound of them, are free from it, and also the most thoughtful and enlightened of the writers of the Church.
It follows, then, from all that has been said, that the
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 121
true source of the conception of freedom is in no way essentially an inference, either from the speculative Idea of an unconditioned cause, nor from the fact that it is presupposed by the categorical imperative. But it springs directly from the consciousness in which each one recog nises himself at once as the will, i.e., as that which, as the thing in itself, has not the principle of sufficient reason for its form, and which itself depends upon nothing, but on which everything else rather depends. Every one, how ever, does not recognise himself at once with the critical and reflective insight of philosophy as a determined mani festation of this will which has already entered time, as we might say, an act of will distinguished from that will to live itself; and, therefore, instead of recognising his whole existence as an act of his freedom, he rather seeks for freedom in his individual actions. Upon this point I refer the reader to my prize-essay on the freedom of the will.
Now if Kant, as he here pretends, and also apparently did in earlier cases, had merely inferred the thing in itself, and that with the great inconsistency of an inference absolutely forbidden by himself, what a remarkable acci dent would it then be that here, where for the first time he approaches the thing in itself more closely and explains it, he should recognise in it at once the will, the free will showing itself in the world only in temporal manifesta tions! I therefore really assume, though it cannot be proved, that whenever Kant spoke of the thing in itself, in the obscure depths of his mind he already always in distinctly thought of the will. This receives support from a passage in the preface to the second edition of the " Critique of Pure Ixeason," pp. xxvii. and xxviii., in liosen- kranz s edition, p. 677 of the Supplement.
For the rest, it is just this predetermined solution of the sham third conflict that affords Kant the opportunity of expressing very beautifully the deepest thoughts of his whole philosophy. This is the case in the whole of the
122 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
" Sixth Section of the Antinomy of Pure Eeason; " but, above all, in the exposition of the opposition between the empirical and the intelligible character, p. 534-550; V. 562-578, which I number among the most admirable things that have ever been said by man. (As a supple mental explanation of this passage, compare a parallel passage in the Critique of Practical Eeasou, p. 169-179 of the fourth edition, or p. 224-231 of Eosenkranz s edi tion.) It is yet all the more to be regretted that this is here not in its right place, partly because it is not found in the way which the exposition states, and therefore could be otherwise deduced than it is, partly because it does not fulfil the end for which it is there the solution of the sham antinomy. The intelligible character, the thing in itself, is inferred from the phenomenon by the inconsistent use of the category of causality beyond the sphere of all phenomena, which has already been suffi ciently condemned. In this case the will of man (which Kant entitles reason, most improperly, and with an un pardonable breach of all use of language) is set up as the thing in itself, with an appeal to an unconditioned ought, the categorical imperative, which is postulated without more ado.
Now, instead of all this, the plain open procedure would have been to start directly from the will, and prove it to be the in-itself of our own phenomenal being, recognised without any mediation; and then to give that exposition of the empirical and the intelligible character to explain how all actions, although necessitated by motives, yet, both by their author and by the disinterested judge, are necessarily and absolutely ascribed to the former himself and alone, as depending solely upon him, to whom therefore guilt and merit are attributed in respect of them. This alone was the straight path to the knowledge of that which is not phenomenon, and therefore will not be found by the help of the laws of the phenomenon, but is that which reveals itself through the phenomenon, becomes knowable, objec-
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tifies itself the will to live. It would then have had to be exhibited merely by analogy as the inner nature of every phenomenon. Then, however, it certainly could not have been said that in lifeless or even animal nature no faculty can be thought except as sensuously conditioned (p. 546; V. 574), which in Kant s language is simply saying that the explanation, according to the law of causality, exhausts the inner nature of these phenomena, and thus in their case, very inconsistently, the thing in itself disappears. Through the false position and the roundabout deduction according with it which the exposi tion of the thing in itself has received from Kant, the whole conception of it has also become falsified. For the will or the thing in itself, found through the investigation of an unconditioned cause, appears here related to the phenomenon as cause to effect. But this relation exists only within the phenomenal world, therefore presupposes it, and cannot connect the phenomenal world itself with what lies outside it, and is toto gencre different from it.
Further, the intended end, the solution of the third antinomy by the decision that both sides, each in a diffe rent sense, are right, is not reached at all. For neither the thesis nor the antithesis have anything to do with the thing in itself, but entirely with the phenomenon, the objective world, the world as idea. This it is, and abso lutely nothing else, of which the thesis tries to show, by means of the sophistry we have laid bare, that it contains unconditioned causes, and it is also this of which the antithesis rightly denies that it contains such causes. Therefore the whole exposition of the transcendental free dom of the will, so far as it is a thing in itself, which is given here in justification of the thesis, excellent as it is in itself, is yet here entirely a ^era/Sacri? eta a\\o <yevo$. For the transcendental freedom of the will which is ex pounded is by no means the unconditioned causality of a cause, which the thesis asserts, because it is of the essence of a cause that it must be a phenomenon, and not some-
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thing which lies beyond all phenomena and is toto genere different.
If what is spoken of is cause and effect, the relation of the will to the manifestation (or of the intelligible character to the empirical) must never be introduced, as happens here : for it is entirely different from causal re lation. However, here also, in this solution of the anti nomy, it is said with truth that the empirical character of man, like that of every other cause in nature, is unalterably determined, and therefore that his actions necessarily take place in accordance with the external influences; therefore also, in spite of all transcendental freedom (i.e., indepen dence of the will in itself of the laws of the connection of its manifestation), no man has the power of himself to begin a series of actions, which, however, was asserted by the thesis. Thus also freedom has no causality; for only the will is free, and it lies outside nature or the pheno menon, which is just its objectification, but does not stand in a causal relation to it, for this relation is only found within the sphere of the phenomenon, thus presupposes it, and cannot embrace the phenomenon itself and connect it with what is expressly not a phenomenon. The world itself can only be explained through the will (for it is the will itself, so far as it manifests itself), and not through causality. But in the world, causality is the sole principle of explanation, and everything happens simply according to the laws of nature. Thus the right lies entirely on the side of the antithesis, which sticks to the question in hand, and uses that principle of explanation which is valid with regard to it; therefore it needs no apology. The thesis, on the other hand, is supposed to be got out of the matter by an apology, which first passes over to some thing quite different from the question at issue, and then assumes a principle of explanation which is inapplicable to it.
The fourth conflict is, as has already been said, in its real meaning tautological with the third. In its solution
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Kant develops still more the untenable nature of the thesis; while for its truth, on the other hand, and its pretended consistency with the antithesis, he advances no reason, as conversely he is able to bring no reason against the anti thesis. The assumption of the thesis he introduces quite apologetically, and yet calls it himself (p. 562; V. 590) an arbitrary presupposition, the object of which might well in itself be impossible, and shows merely an utterly impotent endeavour to find a corner for it somewhere where it will be safe from the prevailing might of the antithesis, only to avoid disclosing the emptiness of the whole of his once-loved assertion of the necessary anti nomy in human reason.
Now follows the chapter on the transcendental ideal, which carries us back at once to the rigid Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. One imagines one is listening to Anselm of Canterbury himself. The ens realissimum, the essence of all realities, the content of all affirmative pro positions, appears, and indeed claims to be a necessary thought of the reason. I for rny part must confess that to my reason such a thought is impossible, and that I am not able to think anything definite in connection with the words which denote it.
Moreover, I do not doubt that Kant was compelled to write this extraordinary chapter, so unworthy of him, simply by his fondness for architectonic symmetry. The three principal objects of the Scholastic philosophy (which, as we have said, if understood in the wider sense, may be regarded as continuing down to Kant), the soul, the world, and God, are supposed to be deduced from the three pos sible major propositions of syllogisms, though it is plain that they have arisen, and can arise, simply and solely through the unconditioned application of the principle of sufficient reason. Kow, after the soul had been forced into the categorical judgment, and the hypothetical was
126 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
set apart for the world, there remained for the third Idea nothing but the disjunctive major. Fortunately there existed a previous work in this direction, the ens rcalissimum of the Scholastics, together with the onto- logical proof of the existence of God set up in a rudi mentary form by Anselm of Canterbury and then per fected by Descartes. This was joyfully made use of by Kant, with some reminiscence also of an earlier Latin work of his youth. However, the sacrifice which Kant makes to his love of architectonic symmetry in this chapter is exceedingly great. In defiance of all truth, what one must regard as the grotesque idea of an essence of all possible realities is made an essential and necessary thought of the reason. For the deduction of this Kant makes use of the false assertion that our knowledge of particular things arises from a progressive limitation of general conceptions; thus also of a most general concep tion of all which contains all reality in itself. In this he stands just as much in contradiction with his own teach ing as with the truth, for exactly the converse is the case. Our knowledge starts with the particular and is extended to the general, and all general conceptions arise by abstrac tion from real, particular things known by perception, and this can be carried on to the most general of all concep tions, which includes everything under it, but almost nothing in it. Thus Kant has here placed the procedure of our faculty of knowledge just upside down, and thus might well be accused of having given occasion to a philo sophical charletanism that has become famous in our day, which, instead of recognising that conceptions are thoughts abstracted from things, makes, on the contrary the conceptions first, and sees in things only concrete conceptions, thus bringing to market the world turned upside down as a philosophical buffoonery, which of course necessarily found great acceptance.
Even if we assume that every reason must, or at least can, attain to the conception of God, even without revela-
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tion, this clearly takes place only under the guidance of causality. This is so evident that it requires no proof. Therefore Chr. Wolf says (Oosmologia Generates, prcef., p. i) : Sane in theologia naturdli existentiam Numinis e principiis cosmologicis demonstramus. Contingentia uni- versi ct ordinis natures, una cum impossibilitate casus, sunt scala, per quam a mundo hoc adspectabili ad Dcum asccn- ditur. And, before him, Leibnitz said, in connection with the law of causality : Sans ce grand principe on nc saurait venir a la preuve de I existence de Dieu. On the other hand, the thought which is worked out in this chapter is so far from being essential and necessary to reason, that it is rather to be regarded as a veritable masterpiece of the monstrous productions of an age which, through strange circumstances, fell into the most
- o o *
singular aberrations and perversities, such as the age of the Scholastics was an age which is unparalleled in the history of the world, and can never return again. This Scholasticism, as it advanced to its final form, certainly derived the principal proof of the existence of God from the conception of the ens realissimum, and only then used the other proofs as accessory. This, however, is mere methodology, and proves nothing as to the origin of theology in the human mind. Kant has here taken the procedure of Scholasticism for that of reason a mistake which indeed he has made more than once. If it were true that according to the essential laws of reason the Idea of God proceeds from the disjunctive syllogism under the form of an Idea of the most real being, this Idea would also have existed in the philosophy of antiquity; but of the ens realissimum there is nowhere a trace in any of the ancient philosophers, although some of them certainly teach that there is a Creator of the world, yet only as the giver of form to the matter which exists without him, Sepiovp yos, a being whom they yet infer simply and solely in accordance with the law of causality. It is true that Sextus Empiricus (adv. Math., ix. 88) quotes an argu-
128 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
ment of Cleanthes, which some have held to be the ontological proof. This, however, it is not, but merely an inference from analogy; because experience teaches that upon earth one being is always better than another, and man, indeed, as the best, closes the series, but yet has many faults; therefore there must exist beings who are still better, and finally one being who is best of all ( apia-rov), and this would be God.
On the detailed refutation of speculative theology which now follows I have only briefly to remark that it, and in general the whole criticism of the three so-called Ideas of reason, thus the whole Dialectic of Pure Eeason, is indeed to a certain extent the goal and end of the whole work; yet this polemical part has not really an absolutely uni versal, permanent, and purely philosophical interest, such as is possessed by the preceding doctrinal part, i.e., the aesthetic and analytic; but rather a temporary and local interest, because it stands in a special relation to the leading points of the philosophy which prevailed in Europe up till the time of Kant, the complete overthrow of which was yet, to his immortal credit, achieved by him through this polemic. He has eliminated theism from philosophy; for in it, as a science and not a system of faith, only that can find a place which is either empirically given or estab lished by valid proofs. Naturally we only mean here the real seriously understood philosophy which is concerned with the truth, and nothing else; and by no means the jest of philosophy taught in the universities, in which, after Kant as before him, speculative theology plays the principal part, and where, also, after as before him, the soul appears without ceremony as a familiar person. For it is the philo sophy endowed with salaries and fees, and, indeed, also with titles of Hofrath, which, looking proudly down from its height, remains for forty years entirely unaware of the existence of little people like me, and would be thoroughly
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glad to be rid of the old Kant with his Critiques, that they might drink the health of Leibnitz with all their hearts. It is further to be remarked here, that as Kant was confessedly led to his doctrine of the a priori nature of the conception of causality by Hume s scepticism with regard to that conception, it may be that in the same way Kant s criticism of all speculative theology had its occasion in Hume s criticism of all popular theology, which he had given in his " Natural History of Religion," a book so well worth reading, and in the " Dialogues on Natural Religion." Indeed, it may be that Kant wished to a certain extent to supplement this. For the first-named work of Hume is really a critique of popular theology, the pitiable condi tion of which it seeks to show; while, on the other hand, it points to rational or speculative theology as the genuine, and that which is worthy of respect. But Kant now dis closes the groundlessness of the latter, and leaves, on the other hand, popular theology untouched, nay, even estab lishes it in a nobler form as a faith based upon moral feeling. This was afterwards distorted by the philoso- phasters into rational apprehensions, consciousness of God, or intellectual intuitions of the supersensible, of the divine, &c., &c.; while Kant, as he demolished old and revered errors, and knew the danger of doing so, rather wished through the moral theology merely to substitute a few weak temporary supports, so that the ruin might not fall on him, but that he might have time to escape.
Now, as regards the performance of the task, no critique of reason was necessary for the refutation of the ontological proof of the existence of God; for without presupposing the aesthetic and analytic, it is quite easy to make clear that that ontological proof is nothing but a subtle playing with conceptions which is quite powerless to produce con viction. There is a chapter in the "Organon " of Aristotle which suffices as fully for the refutation of the ontological proof as if it had been written intentionally with that purpose. It is the seventh chapter of the second book of
VOL. II. I
130 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
the " Analyt. Post" Among other things, it is expressly said there : " TO Se etvai OVK ovcna ovbevi," i.e., existentia nunquam ad essentiam rei pertinct.
The refutation of the cosmological proof is an applica tion to a given case of the doctrine of the Critique as expounded up to that point, and there is nothing to be said against it. The physico-theological proof is a mere amplification of the cosmological, which it presupposes, and it finds its full refutation only in the " Critique of Judgment." I refer the reader in this connection to the rubric, " Comparative Anatomy," in my work on the Will in Nature.
In the criticism of this proof Kant has only to do, as we have already said, with speculative theology, and limits himself to the School. If, on the contrary, he had had life and popular theology also in view, he would have been obliged to add a fourth proof to the three he has considered that proof which is really the effective one with the great mass of men, and which in Kant s technical language might best be called the keraunological. It is the proof which is founded upon the needy, impotent, and dependent condition of man as opposed to natural forces, which are infinitely superior, inscrutable, and for the most part threatening evil; to which is added man s natural inclination to personify everything, and finally the hope of effecting something by prayers and flattery, and even by gifts. In every human undertaking there is something which is not in our power and does not come within our calculations; the wish to win this for oneself is the origin of the gods. " Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor " is an old and true saying of Petronius. It is principally this proof which is criticised by Hume, who throughout appears as Kant s forerunner in the writings referred to above. But those whom Kant has placed in a position of permanent embarrassment by his criticism of speculative theology are the professors of philosophy. Salaried by Christian governments, they dare not give up the chief article of
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faith. 1 Now, how do these gentlemen help themselves? They simply declare that the existence of God is self- evident. Indeed! After the ancient world, at the expense of its conscience, had worked miracles to prove it, and the modern world, at the expense of its understanding, had brought into the field ontological, cosmological, and physico-theological proofs to these gentlemen it is self- evident. And from this self-evident God they then explain the world : that is their philosophy.
Till Kant came there was a real dilemma between materialism and theism, i.e., between the assumption that a blind chance, or that an intelligence working from with out in accordance with purposes and conceptions, had brought about the world, neque dabaiur tertium. There fore atheism and materialism were the same; hence the doubt whether there really could be an atheist, i.e., a man who really could attribute to blind chance the disposition of nature, so full of design, especially organised nature. See, for example, Bacon s Essays (sermones fideles), Essay 1 6, on Atheism. In the opinion of the great mass of men, and of the English, who in such things belong entirely to the great mass (the mob), this is still the case, even with their most celebrated men of learning. One has only to look at Owen s " Ostfologie Compare e," of 1855, preface, p. 11, 12, where he stands always before the old dilemma between Democritus and Epicurus on the one side, and an intelligence on the other, in which la con-
1 Kant said, " It is very absurd the late Professor Bachmann who, to expect enlightenment from rea- in the Jena Littcraturzcitung for son, and yet to prescribe to her July 1840, No. 126, so indiscreetly beforehand which side she must blurted out the maxim of all his necessarily take " ("Critique of Pure colleagues. However, it is worth Reason," p. 747; V. 775)- On the noticing, as regards the character- other hand, the following is the istics of the University philosophy, naive assertion of a professor of how here the truth, if it will not philosophy in our own time : " If a suit and adapt itself, is shown the philosophy denies the reality of the door without ceremony, with, " Be fundamental ideas of Christianity, off, truth! we cannot make use of it is either false, or, even if true, it you. Do we owe you anything? is yet useless." That is to say, for Do you pay us? Then be off!" professors of philosophy. It was
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naissance dun 6tre tel que I homme a exists avant que I homme Jit son apparition. All design must have pro ceeded from an intelligence; he has never even dreamt of doubting this. Yet in the lecture based upon this now modified preface, delivered in the Academic des Sciences on the 5th September 1853, he says, with childish naivete: "La iiUologie, ou la the"ologie scientiftque" (Comptes Rendus, Sept. 1853), that is for him precisely the same thing! Is anything in nature designed? then it is a work of inten tion, of reflection, of intelligence. Yet, certainly, what has such an Englishman and the Academic des Sciences to do with the " Critique of Judgment," or, indeed, with my book upon the Will in Nature? These gentlemen do not see so far below them. These illustres confreres disdain metaphysics and the philosophic allemande: they confine themselves to the old woman s philosophy. The validity of that disjunctive major, that dilemma between materialism and theism, rests, however, upon the assump tion that the present given world is the world of things in themselves; that consequently there is no other order of things than the empirical. But after the world and its order had through Kant become mere phenomenon, the laws of which rest principally upon the forms of our intellect, the existence and nature of things and of the world no longer required to be explained according to the analogy of the changes perceived or effected by us in the world; nor must that which we comprehend as means and end have necessarily arisen as the consequence of a similar knowledge Thus, inasmuch as Kant, through his impor tant distinction between phenomenon and thing in itself, withdrew the foundation from theism, he opened, on the other hand, the way to entirely different and more profound explanations of existence.
In the chapter on the ultimate aim of the natural dia lectic of reason it is asserted that the three transcendent Ideas are of value as regulative principles for the advance ment of the knowledge of nature. But Kant can barelv
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have been serious in making this assertion. At least its opposite, that these assumptions are restrictive and fatal to all investigation of nature, is to every natural philo sopher beyond doubt. To test this by an example, let any one consider whether the assumption of the soul as an immaterial, simple, thinking substance would have been necessarily advantageous or in the highest degree impeding to the truths which Cabanis has so beautifully expounded, or to the discoveries of Flourens, Marshall Hall, and Ch. Bell. Indeed Kant himself says (Prolegomena, -M), " The Ideas of the reason are opposed and hindering to the maxims of the rational knowlege of nature."
It is certainly not the least merit of Frederick the Great, that under his Government Kant could develop himself, and dared to publish the " Critique of Pure Eeason." Hardly under any other Government would a salaried professor have ventured such a thing. Kant was obliged to promise the immediate successor of the greac kins that he would write no more.
I might consider that I could dispense with the criticism of the ethical part of the Kantian philosophy here because I have given a detailed and thorough criticism of it twenty-two years later than the present work in the " Beiden Grundprollemcn der Ethik." However, what is here retained from the first edition, and for the sake of completeness must not be omitted, may serve as a suitable introduction to that later and much more thorough criti cism, to which in the main I therefore refer the reader.
On account of Kant s love of architectonic symmetry, the theoretical reason had also to have a pendant. The intcllectus pradicus of the Scholastics, which again springs from the vovs irpaKTUcos of Aristotle (De Anima, iii. 10, and Polit., vii. c. 14: o t*ev yap irpaKTiKos ecrrt \oyos, o Se 6Q)pr)TiKo<i), provides the word ready made. Yet here something quite different is denoted by it not as there,
134 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
the reason directed to technical skill. Here the practical reason appears as the source and origin of the undeniable ethical significance of human action, and of all virtue, all nobleness, and every attainable degree of holiness. All this accordingly should come from mere reason, and de mand nothing but this. To act rationally and to act vir tuously, nobly, holily, would be one and the same; and to act selfishly, wickedly, viciously, would be merely to act irrationally. However, all times and peoples and languages have distinguished the two, and held them to be quite different things; and so does every one even at the present day who knows nothing of the language of the new school, i.e., the whole world, with the exception of a small company of German savants. Every one but these last understands by virtuous conduct and a rational course of life two entirely different things. To say that the sublime founder of the Christian religion, whose life is presented to us as the pattern of all virtue, was the most rational of all men would be called a very unbecoming and even a blasphemous way of speaking; and almost as much so if it were said that His precepts contained all the best directions for a perfectly rational life. Further, that he who, in accordance with these precepts, instead of taking thought for his own future needs, always relieves the greater present wants of others, without further motive, nay, gives all his goods to the poor, in order then, desti tute of all means of subsistence, to go and preach to others also the virtue which he practises himself; this every one rightly honours; but who ventures to extol it as the highest pitch of reasonableness? And finally, who praises it as a rational deed that Arnold von Winkelried, with surpassing courage, clasped the hostile spears against his own body in order to gain victory and deliverance for his countrymen? On the other hand, if we see a man who from his youth upwards deliberates with exceptional foresight how he may procure for himself an easy compe tence, the means for the support of wife and children, a
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good name among men, outward honour and distinction, and in doing so never allows himself to be led astray or induced to lose sight of his end by the charm of present pleasures or the satisfaction of defying the arrogance of the powerful, or the desire of revenging insults and un deserved humiliations he has suffered, or the attractions of useless aesthetic or philosophical occupations of the mind, or travels in interesting lands, but with great consistency works towards his one end, who ventures to deny that such a philistine is in quite an extraordinary degree rational, even if he has made use of some means which are not praise worthy but are yet without danger? Nay, more, if a bad man, with deliberate shrewdness, through a well-thought- out plan attains to riches and honours, and even to thrones and crowns, and then with the acutest cunning gets the better of neighbouring states, overcomes them one by one, and now becomes a conqueror of the world, and in doing so is not led astray by any respect for right, any sense of humanity, but with sharp consistency tramples down and dashes to pieces everything that opposes his plan, without compassion plunges millions into misery of every kind, condemns millions to bleed and die, yet royally rewards and always protects his adherents and helpers, never forgetting anything, and thus reaches his end, who does not see that such a man must go to work in a most, rational manner? that, as a powerful understanding was needed to form the plans, their execution demanded the complete command of the reason, and indeed properly ot practical reason? Or are the precepts which the pru dent and consistent, the thoughtful and far-seeing Machia- velli prescribes to the prince irrational? 1
1 By the way, Machiavelli s prob- purely the political one how, if he so
lem was the solution of the question wills, he can carry it out. And the
how the prince, as a prince, was to solution of this problem he gives just
keep himself on the throne in spite of as one writes directions for playing
internal and external enemies. His chess, with which it would be folly
problem was thus by no means the to mix up the answer to the ques-
ethical problem whether a prince, as tion whether from an ethical point
a man, ought to will such things, but of view it is advisable to play chess
136 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
As wickedness is quite consistent with reason, and in deed only becomes really terrible in this conjunction, so, conversely, nobleness is sometimes joined with want of reason. To this may be attributed the action of Corio- lanus, who, after he had applied all his strength for years to the accomplishment of his revenge upon the Romans, when at length the time came, allowed himself to be softened by the prayers of the Senate and the tears of his mother and wife, gave up the revenge he had so long and so painfully prepared, and indeed, by thus bringing on himself the just anger of the Volscians, died for those very Eomans whose thanklessness he knew and desired so intensely to punish. Finally, for the sake of complete ness, it may be mentioned that reason may very well exist along with want of understanding. This is the case when a foolish maxim is chosen, but is followed out consistently. An example of this is afforded by the case of the Princess Isabella, daughter of Philip II., who vowed that she would not put on a clean chemise so long as Ostend remained unconquered, and kept her word through three years. In general all vows are of this class, whose origin is a want of insight as regards the law of causality, i.e., want of understanding; nevertheless it is rational to fulfil them if one is of such narrow understanding as to make them.
In agreement with what we have said, we see the writers who appeared just before Kant place the con science, as the seat of the moral impulses, in opposition to the reason. Thus Eousseau, in the fourth book of " Umile," says : " La raison nous trompe, mais la conscience ne trompe jamais;" and further on: "II est impossible d expliquer par les consciences de notre nature leprincipe imme diat de la con science indepcndant de la raison meme." Still further : " Mes sentimens naturds parlaient pour I inte ret commun, ma raison rapportait tout a moi. . . . On a beau ixniloir etablir la vertu
at all. To reproach Machiavelli not begin his instructions with a,
with the immorality of his writ- moral lecture against murder and
ing is just the same as to reproach slaughter. a fencing-master because he does
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par la raison seul, quelle solide base peut-on lui donner? " In the " Reveries du Promeneur," prom. 4 erne, he says : " Dans toutes les questions de morale difficilesje me suis toujours lien trouve" de les resoudre par le dictamen de la conscience, plutot que par les lumieres de la raison." Indeed Aristotle already says expressly (Eih. Magna, i. 5) that the virtues have their seat in the aNoyw p,opiw T??? ^1/^779 (in parte irra- tionali animi], and not in the \oyov e^ovrt (in parte rationali). In accordance with this, Stobseus says (Ed., ii., c. 7), speaking of the Peripatetics : " Trjv rjOiKyv aperrjv epi TO a\oyov /iepo<? yi yveadai TT?? "^f^S", Trpos TIJV Trapovcrav Oewpiav inreOevTO TTJV , TO ftev \OJIKOV e%ovcrav, TO 8 aNoyov. Kat irept, fiev TO \oyifcoi> Tffv KaNotcayaOiav ^i^veadav, icai Trjv (j)povr]- <riv, Kai Tfjv a^^ivoiav, /cat crotyiav, KCLI evp.a6eiav, Kai [jbvrifjLr)v, Kai Ta? o/iotof? -nepi 8e TO a\oyov, ( Kai SiKaioo-vvrjV, Kai av&petav, Kat Ta? aXXa? Ta? Ka\ovp. ej^a? apeTa?." (Ethicam virtutem circa partem animce ratione carentem vcrsari putant, cum duplicem, ad hanc disqitisitionem, animam ponant, ratione prccditam, et ea carentem. In parte vero ratione prcedita collocant inyenui- tatem, prudentiam, perspicacitatem, sapientiam, docilitatem, memoriam et reliqua; in parte vero ratione, destituta tem- perantiam,justitiam,fortitudinem, et reliquas virtutes, quas ethicas vocant.) And Cicero (De Nat. Deor., iii., c. 26-31) explains at length that reason is the necessary means, the tool, of all crime.
I have explained reason to be the faculty of framing concepts. It is this quite special class of general non- perceptible ideas, which are symbolised and fixed only by words, that distinguishes man from the brutes and gives him the pre-eminence upon earth. While the brute is the slave of the present, and knows only immediate sensible motives, and therefore when they present them selves to it is necessarily attracted or repelled by them, as iron is by the magnet, in man, on the contrary, de liberation has been introduced through the gift of reason.
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This enables him easily to survey as a whole his life and the course of the world, looking before and after; it makes him independent of the present, enables him to go to work deliberately, systematically, and with foresight, to do evil as well as to do good. But what he does he does with complete self-consciousness; he knows exactly how his will decides, what in each case he chooses, and what other choice was in the nature of the case possible; and from this self-conscious willing he comes to know himself and mirrors himself in his actions. In all these relations to the conduct of men reason is to be called practical; it is only theoretical so far as the objects with which it is concerned have no relation to the action of the thinker, but have purely a theoretical interest, which very few men are capable of feeling. What in this sense is called practical reason is very nearly what is signi fied by the Latin word prudentia, which, according to Cicero (De Nat. Deor. ii., 22), is a contraction of provi- dentia; while, on the other hand, ratio, if used of a faculty of the mind, signifies for the most part theoretical reason proper, though the ancients did not observe the distinction strictly. In nearly all men reason has an almost exclusively practical tendency; but if this also is abandoned thought loses the control of action, so that it is then said, " Scio meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor," or " Le matin je fais des projets, et le soirjefais des sottises." Thus the man does not allow his conduct to be guided by his thought, but by the impression of the moment, after the manner of the brute; and so he is called irrational (without thereby im puting to him moral turpitude), although he is not really wanting in reason, but in the power of applying it to his action; and one might to a certain extent say his reason is theoretical and not practical. He may at the same time be a really good man, like many a one who can never see any one in misfortune without helping him, even making sacrifices to do so, and yet leaves his debts unpaid. Such an irrational character is quite incapable of committing great
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crimes, because the systematic planning, the discrimina tion and self-control, which this always requires are quite impossible to him. Yet, on the other hand, he will hardly attain to a very high degree of virtue, for, however much inclined to good he may be by nature, those single vicious and wicked emotions to which every one is subject can not be wanting; and where reason does not manifest it self practically, and oppose to them unalterable maxims and firm principles, they must become deeds.
Finally, reason manifests itself very specially as practi cal in those exceedingly rational characters who on this account are called in ordinary life practical philosophers, and who are distinguished by an unusual equanimity in disagreeable as in pleasing circumstances, an equable disposition, and a determined perseverance in resolves once made. In fact, it is the predominance of reason in them, i.e., the more abstract than intuitive knowledge, and therefore the survey of life by means of conceptions, in general and as a whole, which has enabled them once for all to recognise the deception of the momentary impres sion, the fleeting nature of all things, the shortness of life, the emptiness of pleasures, the fickleness of fortune, and the great and little tricks of chance. Therefore nothing comes to them unexpectedly, and what they know in the abstract does not surprise nor disturb them when it meets them in the actual and in the particular case, though it does so in the case of those less reasonable characters upon whom the present, the perceptible, the actual, exerts such an influence that the cold, colourless conceptions are thrown quite into the background of consciousness, and forgetting principles and maxims, they are abandoned to emotions and passions of every kind. I have already explained at the end of the first book that in my opinion the ethics of Stoicism were simply a guide to a truly reasonable life, in this sense. Such a life is also re peatedly praised by Horace in very many passages. This is the significance of his nil admirari, and also of the
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Delphic Mri^ev ayav. To translate nil admirari "to admire nothing" is quite wrong. This Horatian rnaxim does not concern the theoretical so much as the practical, and its real meaning is : " Prize no object unconditionally. Do not fall in love with anything; do not believe that the possession of anything can give you happiness. Every intense longing for an object is only a delusive chimera, which one may just as well, and much more easily, get quit of by fuller knowledge as by attained possession." Cicero also uses admirari in this sense (De Divinatione, ii. 2). What Horace means is thus the aOa/j,/3ca and aKara jr Xr]^, also a6av/^acria, which Democritus before him prized as the highest good (see Clem. Alex. Strom., ii. 21, and cf. Strabo, i. p. 98 and 105). Such reasonableness of conduct has properly nothing to do with virtue and vice; but this practical use of reason is what gives man his pre-eminence over the brute, and only in this sense has it any meaning and is it permissible to speak of a dignity of man.
In all the cases given, and indeed in all conceivable cases, the distinction between rational and irrational action runs back to the question whether the motives are abstract conceptions or ideas of perception. Therefore the explanation which I have given of reason agrees exactly with the use of language at all times and among all peoples a circumstance which will not be regarded as merely accidental or arbitrary, but will be seen to arise from the distinction of which every man is conscious, of the different faculties of the mind, in accordance with which consciousness he speaks, though certainly he does not raise it to the distinctness of an abstract definition. Our ancestors did not make the words without attaching to them a definite meaning, in order, perhaps, that they might lie ready for philosophers who might possibly come centuries after and determine what ought to be thought in connection with them; but they denoted by them quite definite conceptions. Thus the words are no
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longer unclaimed, and to attribute to them an entirely dif ferent sense from that which they have hitherto had means to misuse them, means to introduce a licence in accordance with which every one might use any word in any sense he chose, and thus endless confusion would necessarily arise. Locke has already shown at length that most dis agreements in philosophy arise from a false use of words. For the sake of illustration just glance for a moment at the shameful misuse which philosophers destitute of thoughts make at the present day of the words substance, consciousness, truth, and many others. Moreover, the utterances and explanations concerning reason of all philo sophers of all ages, with the exception of the most modern, agree no less with my explanation of it than the concep tions which prevail among all nations of that prerogative of man. Observe what Plato, in the fourth book of the Republic, and in innumerable scattered passages, calls the \oyi/M)v, or \o<yioriKov TT?? ^u^?, what Cicero says (De Nat. Deor., iii. 2631), what Leibnitz and Locke say upon this in the passages already quoted in the first book. There would be no end to the quotations here if one sought to show how all philosophers before Kant have spoken of reason in general in my sense, although they did not know how to explain its nature with complete definiteness and distinct ness by reducing it to one point. What was understood by reason shortly before Kant s appearance is shown in general by two essays of Sulzer in the first volume of his miscellaneous philosophical writings, the one entitled " Analysis of the Conception of Reason," the other, " On the Reciprocal Influence of Reason and Language." If, on the other hand, we read how reason is spoken about in the most recent times, through the influence of the Kantian error, which after him increased like an ava lanche, we are obliged to assume that the whole of the wise men of antiquity, and also all philosophers before Kant, had absolutely no reason at all; for the immediate perceptions, intuitions, apprehensions, presentiments of the
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reason now discovered were as utterly unknown to them as the sixth sense of the bat is to us. And as far as I am concerned, I must confess that I also, in my weakness, can not comprehend or imagine that reason which directly perceives or apprehends, or has an intellectual intuition of the super-sensible, the absolute, together with long yarns that accompany it, in any other way than as the sixth sense of the bat. This, however, must be said in favour of the invention or discovery of such a reason, which at once directly perceives whatever you choose, that it is an incomparable expedient for withdrawing oneself from the affair in the easiest manner in the world, along with one s favourite ideas, in spite of all Kants, with their Critiques of Reason. The invention and the reception it has met with do honour to the age.
Thus, although what is essential in reason (TO Noyi/jiov, 77 <j}povr]ai$, ratio, raison, Vernuuft) was, on the whole and in general, rightly understood by all philosophers of all ages, though not sharply enough defined nor reduced to one point, yet it was not so clear to them what the understanding (you?, Siavoia, intellectus, esprit, Verstand) is. Therefore they often confuse it with reason, and just on this account they did not attain to a thoroughly complete, pure, and simple explanation of the nature of the latter. With the Christian philosophers the conception of reason received an entirely extraneous, subsidiary meaning through the opposition of it to revelation. Starting, then, from this, many are justly of opinion that the knowledge of the duty of virtue is possible from mere reason, i.e., without revelation. Indeed this aspect of the matter certainly had influence upon Kant s exposition and language. But this opposition is properly of positive, historical significance, and is there fore for philosophy a foreign element, from which it must keep itself free.
We might have expected that in his critiques of theo retical and practical reason Kant would have started with an exposition of the nature of reason in general, and, after
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he had thus defined the genus, would have gone on to the explanation of the two species, showing how one and the same reason manifests itself in two such different ways, and yet, hy retaining its principal characteristic, proves itself to be the same. But we find nothing of all this. I have already shown how inadequate, vacillating, and in consistent are the explanations of the faculty he is criti cising, which he gives here and there by the way in the " Critique of Pure Eeason." The practical reason appears in the " Critique of Pure Reason " without any introduction, and afterwards stands in the " Critique " specially devoted to itself as something already established. No further account of it is given, and the use of language of all times and peoples, which is treated with contempt, and the defini tions of the conception given by the greatest of earlier philosophers, dare not lift up their voices. In general, we may conclude from particular passages that Kant s opinion amounts to this : the knowledge of principles a priori is the essential characteristic of reason : since now the knowledge of the ethical significance of action is not of empirical origin, it also is an a priori principle, and accordingly proceeds from the reason, and therefore thus far the reason is practical. I have already spoken enough of the incorrectness of this explanation of reason. But, independently of this, how superficial it is, and what a want of thoroughness it shows, to make use here of the single quality of being independent of experience in order to combine the most heterogeneous things, while over looking their most essential and immeasurable difference in other respects. For, even assuming, though we do not admit it, that the knowledge of the ethical significance of action springs from an imperative lying in us, an uncon ditioned ought, yet how fundamentally different would such an imperative be from those universal forms of know ledge of which, in the " Critique of Pure Reason," Kant proves that we are conscious a priori, and by virtue of which consciousness we can assert beforehand an uncoil-
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ditioned must, valid for all experience possible for us. But the difference between this must, this necessary form of all objects which is already determined in the subject, and that ought of morality is so infinitely great and palpable that the mere fact that they agree in the one particular that neither of them is empirically known may indeed be made use of for the purpose of a witty comparison, but not as a philosophical justification for regarding their origin as the same.
Moreover, the birthplace of this child of practical reason, the absolute ought or the categorical imperative, is not in the " Critique of Practical Eeason," but in that of " Pure Eeason," p. 802; V. 830. The birth is violent, and is only accomplished by means of the forceps of a therefore, which stands boldly and audaciously, indeed one might say shamelessly, between two propositions which are utterly foreign to each other and have no connection, in order to combine them as reason and consequent. Thus, that not merely perceptible but also abstract motives determine us, is the proposition from which Kant starts, expressing it in the following manner : " Not merely what excites, i.e., what affects the senses directly, determines human will, but we have a power of overcoming the impressions made upon our sensuous appetitive faculty through ideas of that which is itself in a more remote manner useful or hurtful. These deliberations as to what is worthy of desire, with reference to our whole condition, i.e., as to what is good and useful, rest upon reason." (Perfectly right; would that he only always spoke so rationally of reason!) " Eeason therefore gives! also laws, which are imperatives, i.e., objective laws of freedom, and say what ought to take place, though perhaps it never does take place"! Thus, without further authentication, the cate gorical imperative comes into the world, in order to rule there with its unconditioned ought a sceptre of wooden iron. For in the conception " ought " there lies always and essentially the reference to threatened punishment, or
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promised reward, as a necessary condition, and cannot be separated from it without abolishing the conception itself and taking all meaning from it. Therefore an uncondi tioned ought is a contradictio in adj ecto. It was necessary to censure this mistake, closely as it is otherwise con nected with Kant s great service to ethics, which consists in this, that he has freed ethics from all principles of the world of experience, that is, from all direct or indirect doctrines of happiness, and has shown in a quite special manner that the kingdom of virtue is not of this world. This service is all the greater because all ancient philo sophers, with the single exception of Plato, thus the Peri patetics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans, sought by very different devices either to make virtue and happiness de pendent on each other in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, or to identify them in accordance with the principle of contradiction. This charge applies with equal force to all modern philosophers down to Kant. His merit in this respect is therefore very great; yet justice demands that we should also remember here first that his exposition and elaboration often does not correspond with the tendency and spirit of his ethics, and secondly that, even so, he is not really the first who separated virtue from all principles of happiness. For Plato, especially in the " Republic," the principal tendency of which is just this, expressly teaches that virtue is to be chosen for itself alone, even if unhappiness and ignominy are inevitably connected with it. Still more, however, Christianity preaches a perfectly unselfish virtue, which is practised not on account of the reward in a life after death, but quite disinterestedly from love to God, for works do not justify, but only faith, which accompanies virtue, so to speak, as its symptom, and therefore appears quite irre spective of reward and of its own accord. See Luther s " De Libertate Christiana" I will not take into account at all the Indians, in whose sacred books the hope of a re ward for our works is everywhere described as the way
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of darkness, which can never lead to blessedness. Kant s doctrine of virtue, however, we do not find so pure; or rather the exposition remains far behind the spirit of it, and indeed falls into inconsistency. In his highest good, which he afterwards discussed, we find virtue united to happiness. The ought originally so unconditioned does yet afterwards postulate one condition, in order to escape from the inner contradiction with which it is affected and with which it cannot live. Happiness in the highest good is not indeed really meant to be the motive for virtue; yet there it is, like a secret article, the existence of which reduces all the rest to a mere sham contract. It is not really the reward of virtue, but yet it is a voluntary gift for which virtue, after work accomplished, stealthily opens the hand. One may convince oneself of this from the " Critique of Practical Beason" (p. 223-266 of the fourth, or p. 264-295 of Eosenkranz s, edition). The whole of Kant s moral theology has also the same tendency, and just on this account morality really destroys itself through moral theology. For I repeat that all virtue which in any way is practised for the sake of a reward is based upon a prudent, methodical, far-seeing egoism.
The content of the absolute ought, the fundamental principle of the practical reason, is the famous : " So act that the maxim of your will might always be also valid as the principle of a universal legislation." This principle presents to him who desires a rule for his own will the task of seeking such a rule for the wills of all. Then the question arises how such a rule is to be found. Clearly, in order to discover the rule of my conduct, I ought not to have regard to myself alone, but to the sum of all in dividuals. Then, instead of my own well-being, the well- being of all without distinction becomes my aim. Yet the aim still always remains well-being. I find, then, that all can be equally well off only if each limits his own egoism by that of others. From this it certainly follows that I must injure no one, because, since this principle is
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assumed to be universal, I also will not be injured. This, however, is the sole ground on account of which I, who do not yet possess a moral principle, but am only seeking one, can wish this to be a universal law. But clearly in this way the desire of well-being, i.e., egoism, remains the source of this ethical principle. As the basis of politics it would be excellent, as the basis of ethics it is worthless. For he who seeks to establish a rule for the wills of all, as is demanded by that moral principle, necessarily stands in need of a rule himself; otherwise everything would be alike to him. But this rule can only be his own egoism, since it is only this that is affected by the conduct of others; and therefore it is only by means of this egoism, and with reference to it, that each one can have a will concerning the conduct of others, and that it is not a matter of indifference to him. Kant himself very naively intimates this (p. 123 of the "Critique of Practical Eeason; Eosenkranz s edition, p. 192), where he thus prosecutes the search for maxims for the will : " If every one regarded the need of others with complete indiffe- ence, and thou also didst belong to such an order of things, wouldst thou consent thereto? " Quam temere in nosmet legem sancimus iniquam I would be the rule of the consent inquired after. So also in the " Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals " (p. 56 of the third, and p. 50 of Eosenkranz s, edition) : " A will which resolved to assist no one in distress would contradict itself, for cases might arise in which it required the love and sympathy of others" &c. &c. This principle of ethics, which when light is thrown upon it is therefore nothing else than an indirect and disguised expression of the old, simple principle, " Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris," is related first and directly to passivity, suffering, and then only by means of this to action. Therefore, as we have said, it would be thoroughly serviceable as a guide for the constitution of the State, which aims at the prevention of the suffering of wrong, and also desires to procure for all and each the
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greatest sum of well-being. But in ethics, where the object of investigation is action as action, and in its direct signifi cance for the actor not its consequences, suffering, or its relation to others in this reference, I say, it is altogether inadmissible, because at bottom it really amounts to a principle of happiness, thus to egoism.
We cannot, therefore, share Kant s satisfaction that his principle of ethics is not a material one, i.e., one which sets up an object as a motive, but merely formal, whereby it corresponds symmetrically to the formal laws with which the " Critique of Pure Eeason " has made us familiar. Certainly it is, instead of a law, merely a formula for find ing such a law. But, in the first place, we had this formula already more briefly and clearly in the " Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri nefeceris; " and, secondly, the analysis of this formula shows that it is simply and solely the reference to one s own happiness that gives it content, and therefore it can only be serviceable to a rational egoism, to which also every legal constitution owes its origin.
Another mistake which, because it offends the feelings of every one, has often been condemned, and was satirised by Schiller in an epigram, is the pedantic rule that for an act to be really good and meritorious it must be done simply and solely out of respect for the known law and the conception of duty, and in accordance with a maxim known to the reason in dbstracto, and not from any inclination, not from benevolence felt towards others, not from tender-hearted compassion, sympathy, or emotion of the heart, which (according to the " Critique of Practical Eeason," p. 213; Eosenkranz s edition, p. 257) to right-thinking persons are indeed very burdensome, as confusing their deliberate maxims. The act must be performed unwillingly and with self-compulsion. Eemember that nevertheless the hope of reward is not allowed to enter, and estimate the great absurdity of the demand. But, what is saying more, this is directly opposed to the true spirit of virtue; not the
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act, but the willingness to do it, the love from which it proceeds, and without which it is a dead work, consti tutes its merit. Therefore Christianity rightly teaches that all outward works are worthless if they do not pro ceed from that genuine disposition which consists in true goodwill and pure love, and that what makes blessed and saves is not the works done (opera operata), but the faith, the genuine disposition, which is the gift of the Holy Ghost alone, and which the free, deliberative will, having only the law in view, does not produce. This demand of Kant s, that all virtuous conduct shall proceed from pure, deliberate respect for the law and in accordance with its abstract maxims, coldly and without inclination, nay, opposed to all inclination, is just the same thing as if he asserted that every work of art must be accomplished by a well-considered application of aesthetical rules. The one is just as perverse as the other. The question, already handled by Plato and Seneca, whether virtue can be taught, is to be answered in the negative. We must finally make up our minds to see, what indeed was the source of the Christian doctrine of election by grace, that as regards its chief characteristic and its inner nature, virtue, like genius, is to a certain extent inborn; and that just as little as all the professors of aesthetics could impart to any one the power of producing works of genius, i.e., genuine works of art, so little could all the professors of ethics and preachers of virtue transform an ignoble into a vir tuous and noble character, the impossibility of which is very much more apparent than that of turning lead into gold. The search for a system of ethics and a first prin ciple of the same, which would have practical influence and would actually transform and better the human race, is just like the search for the philosopher s stone. Yet I have spoken at length at the end of the fourth book of the possibility of an entire change of mind or conversion of man (new birth), not by means of abstract (ethics) but of intuitive knowledge (the work of grace). The contents
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of that book relieve me generally of the necessity of dwell ing longer upon this point.
That Kant by no means penetrated to the real signifi cance of the ethical content of actions is shown finally by his doctrine of the highest good as the necessary combina tion of virtue and happiness, a combination indeed in which virtue would be that which merits happiness. He is here involved in the logical fallacy that the conception of merit, which is here the measure or test, already pre supposes a theory of ethics as its own measure, and thus could not be deducible from it. It appeared in our fourth book that all genuine virtue, after it has attained to its highest grade, at last leads to a complete renunciation in which all willing finds an end. Happiness, on the other hand, is a satisfied wish; thus the two are essentially in capable of being combined. He who has been enlightened by my exposition requires no further explanation of the complete perverseness of this Kantian view of the highest good. And, independent of my positive exposition, I have no further negative exposition to give.
Kant s love of architectonic symmetry meets us also in the " Critique of Practical Eeason," for he has given it the shape of the " Critique of Pure Eeason," and has again introduced the same titles and forms with manifest inten tion, which becomes specially apparent in the table of the categories of freedom.
The " Philosophy of Law " is one of Kant s latest works, and is so poor that, although I entirely disagree with it, I think a polemic against it is superfluous, since of its own weakness it must die a natural death, just as if it were not the work of this great man, but the production of an ordinary mortal. Therefore, as regards the " Philosophy of Law," I give up the negative mode of procedure and refer to the positive, that is, to the short outline of it given in the fourth book. Just one or two general remarks on
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Kant s " Philosophy of Law " may be made here. The errors which I have condemned in considering the " Cri tique of Pure Eeason," as clinging to Kant throughout, appear in the " Philosophy of Law " in such excess that one often believes he is reading a satirical parody of the Kantian style, or at least that he is listening to a Kantian. Two principal errors, however, are these. He desires (and many have since then desired) to separate the Philosophy of Law sharply from ethics, and yet not to make the former dependent upon positive legislation, i.e., upon arbi trary sanction, but to let the conception of law exist for itself pure and a priori. But this is not possible; because conduct, apart from its ethical significance, and apart from the physical relation to others, and thereby from external sanction, does not admit even of the possibility of any third view. Consequently, when he says, " Legal obliga tion is that which can be enforced," this can is either to be understood physically, and then all law is positive and arbitrary, and again all arbitrariness that achieves its end is law; or the can is to be understood ethically, and we are again in the province of ethics. With Kant the conception of legal right hovers between heaven and earth, and has no ground on which to stand; with me it belongs to ethics. Secondly, his definition of the conception law is entirely negative, and thereby inadequate. 1 Legal right is that which is consistent with the compatibility of the respec tive freedom of individuals together, according to a general law." Freedom (here the empirical, i.e., physical, not the moral freedom of the will) signifies not being hindered or interfered with, and is thus a mere negation; compati bility, again, has exactly the same significance. Thus we remain with mere negations and obtain no positive concep tion, indeed do not learn at all, what is really being spoken about, unless we know it already from some other source.
1 Although the conception of legal planation of these conceptions must right is properly negative in opposi- not on this account be entirely nega tion to that of wrong, which is the tive. positive starting-point, yet the ex-
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In the course of the exposition the most perverse views afterwards develop themselves, such as that in the state of nature, i.e., outside the State, there is no right to pro perty at all, which really means that all right or law is positive, and involves that natural law is based upon positive law, instead of which the case ought to be reversed. Further, the founding of legal acquisition on possession; the ethical obligation to establish the civil constitution; the ground of the right of punishment, &c., &c., all of which, as I have said, I do not regard as worth a special refutation. However, these Kantian errors have exercised a very injurious influence. They have confused and ob scured truths long known and expressed, and have occa sioned strange theories and much writing and controversy. This certainly cannot last, and we see already how truth and sound reason again make way for themselves. Of the latter, the " Naturrecht " of J. C. F. Meister specially bears evidence, and is thus a contrast to many a preposterous theory, though I do not regard it as on this account a pattern of perfection.
On the " Critique of Judgment " also, after what has been said, I must be very short. We cannot but be sur prised that Kant, to whom art certainly was very foreign, and who to all appearance had little susceptibility for the beautiful, indeed probably never had the opportunity of seeing an important work of art, and who seems, finally, to have had no knowledge of Goethe, the only man of his century and nation who was fit to be placed by his side as his giant equal. it is, I say, surprising how, notwith standing all this, Kant was able to render a great and permanent service to the philosophical consideration of art and the beautiful. His merit lies in this, that much as men had reflected upon the beautiful and upon art, they had yet really always considered it only from the empirical point of view, and had investigated upon a basis
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of facts what quality distinguished the object of any kind which was called beautiful from other objects of the same kind. On this path they first arrived at quite special principles, and then at more general ones. They sought to separate true artistic beauty from false, and to discover marks of this genuineness, which could then serve again as rules. What gives pleasure as beautiful and what does not, what therefore is to be imitated, what is to be striven against, what is to be avoided, what rules, at least negative rules, are to be established, in short, what are the means of exciting aesthetic satisfaction, i.e., what are the conditions of this residing in the object this was almost exclusively the theme of all treatises upon art. This path was followed by Aristotle, and in the most re cent times we find it chosen by Home, Burke, Winckel- inann, Lessing, Herder, and many others. It is true that the universality of the sesthetical principles discovered finally led back to the subject, and it was observed that if the effect upon the subject were adequately known we would then also be able to determine a priori the causes of this which lie in the object, and thus alone this method of treatment could attain to the certainty of a science. This occasioned once and again psychological disquisitions. Specially however, Alexander Baumgarten produced with this intention a general aesthetic of all beauty, in which he started from the conception of the perfection of sensu ous knowledge, that is, of knowledge of perception. With him also, however, the subjective part is done with as soon as this conception has been established, and he passes on to the objective part and to the practical, which is con nected with it. But here also the merit was reserved for Kant of investigating seriously and profoundly the feeling itself, in consequence of which we call the object occasioning it beautiful, in order to discover, wherever it was possible, the constituent elements and conditions of it in our nature. His investigation, therefore, took an entirely subjective direction. This path was clearly the right one, for iu
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order to explain a phenomenon which is given in its effects, one must know accurately this effect itself, if one is to determine thoroughly the nature of the cause. Yet Kant s merit in this regard does not really extend much further than this, that he has indicated the right path, and by a provisional attempt has given an example of how, more or less, it is to be followed. For what he gave can not be regarded as objective truth and as a real gain. He gave the method for this investigation, he broke ground in the right direction, but otherwise he missed the mark.
In the " Critique of ^Esthetical Judgment " the observa tion first of all forces itself upon us that Kant retains the method which is peculiar to his whole philosophy, and which I have considered at length above I mean the method of starting from abstract knowledge in order to establish knowledge of perception, so that the former serves him, so to speak, as a camera obscura in which to receive and sur vey the latter. As in the " Critique of Pure Reason" the forms of judgment are supposed to unfold to him the knowledge of our whole world of perception, so in this " Critique of JEsthetical Judgment " he does not start from the beautiful itself, from the perceptible and imme diately beautiful, but from the judgment of the beautiful, the so-called, and very badly so-called, judgment of taste. This is his problem. His attention is especially aroused by the circumstance that such a judgment is clearly the expression of something that takes place in the subject, but yet is just as universally valid as if it concerned a quality of the object. It is this that struck him, not the beautiful itself. He starts always merely from the asser tions of others, from the judgment of the beautful, not from the beautiful itself. It is therefore as if he knew it simply from hearsay, not directly. A blind man of high understanding could almost in the same way make up a theory of colours from very accurate reports which he had heard concerning them. And really we can only venture to regard Kant s philosophemes concerning the beautiful as
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in almost the same position. Then we shall find that his theory is very ingenious indeed, that here and there telling and true observations are made; but his real solu tion of the problem is so very insufficient, remains so far below the dignity of the subject, that it can never occur to us to accept it as objective truth. Therefore I consider myself relieved from the necessity of refuting it; and here also I refer to the positive part of my work.
With regard to the form of his whole book, it is to be observed that it originated in the idea of finding in the teleological conception the key to the problem of the beautiful. This inspiration is deduced, which is always a matter of no difficulty, as we have learnt from Kant s suc cessors. Thus there now arises the strange combination of the knowledge of the beautiful with that of the teleology of natural bodies in one faculty of knowledge called judg ment, and the treatment of these two heterogeneous sub jects in one book. With these three powers of knowledge, reason, judgment, and understanding, a variety of sym metrical-architectonic amusements are afterwards under taken, the general inclination to which shows itself in many ways in this book; for example, in the forcible adaptation of the whole of it to the pattern of the " Critique of Pure Season," and very specially in the antinomy of the sesthetical judgment, which is dragged in by the hair. One might also extract a charge of great inconsistency from the fact that after it has been incessantly repeated in the " Critique of Pure Reason " that the understanding is the faculty of judgment, and after the forms of its judg ment have been made the foundation-stone of all philo sophy, a quite special faculty of judgment now appears, which is completely different from the former. For the rest, what I call the faculty of judgment, the capacity for translating knowledge of perception into abstract know ledge, and again of applying the latter correctly to the former, is explained in the positive part of my work.
By far the best part of the " Critique of ^Esthetical Judg-
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merit" is the theory of the sublime. It is incomparably more successful than that of the beautiful, and does not only give, as that does, the general method of investiga tion, but also a part of the right way to it so much so that even though it does not give the real solution of the problem, it yet touches very closely upon it.
In the " Critique of the Teleological Judgment," on ac count of the simplicity of the matter, we can recognise perhaps more than anywhere else Kant s rare talent of turning a thought this way and that way, and expressing it in a multitude of different ways, until out of it there grows a book. The whole book is intended to say this alone : although organised bodies necessarily appear to us as if they were constructed in accordance with a conceived design of an end which preceded them, yet we are not justified in assuming that this is objectively the case. For our intellect, to which things are given from without and indirectly, which thus never knows their inner nature through which they arise and exist, but merely their out ward side, cannot otherwise comprehend a certain quality peculiar to organised productions of nature than by analogy, for it compares it with the intentionally accom plished works of man, the nature of which is determined by a design and the conception of this design. This analogy is sufficient to enable us to comprehend the agreement of all the parts with the whole, and thus indeed to give us the clue to their investigation; but it must by no means on this account be made the actual ground of explanation of the origin and existence of such bodies. For the necessity of so conceiving them is of subjective origin. Somewhat in this way I would epitomise Kant s doctrine on this question. In its most important aspect he had expounded it already in the "Critique of Pure Eeason," p. 692-702; V., 720-730. But in the knowledge of this truth also we find David Hume to be Kant s worthy fore runner. He also had keenly controverted that assumption in the second part of his " Dialogues concerning Natural
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Religion." The difference between Hume s criticism of that assumption and Kant s is principally this, that Hume criticised it as an assumption based upon experience, while Kant, on the other hand, criticised it as an a priori assump tion. Both are right, and their expositions supplement each other. Indeed what is really essential in the Kantian doctrine on this point we find already expressed in the commentary of Simplicius on Aristotle s Physics : " 77 Se Tr\avr) yeyovev avrois CLTCO TOV rjyeicrdai, Travra ra eve/ca rov yivojAeva Kara Trpoaipecriv yeve&Oai KCLI \o r yia/j.ov ) ra Be (frvcrei /JLTJ oirrco? opav <yivo/jieva" {Error Us ortus est ex eo, quod credebant, omnia, quce propter finem aliquem fierent, ex proposito et ratiocinio fieri, dam videbant, naturce opera non ita fieri.) Schol. in Arist., ex edit. Berol., p. 354. Kant is perfectly right in the matter; and it was necessary that after it had been shown that the conception of cause and effect is inapplicable to the whole of nature in general, in respect of its existence, it should also be shown that in respect of its qualities it is not to be thought of as the effect of a cause guided by motives (designs). If we con sider the great plausibility of the physico-theological proof, which even Voltaire held to be irrefragable, it was clearly of the greatest importance to show that what is subjective in our comprehension, to which Kant had relegated space, time, and causality, extends also to our judgment of natural bodies; and accordingly the compulsion which we feel to think of them as having arisen as the result of pre meditation, according to designs, thus in such a way that the idea of them preceded their existence, is just as much of subjective origin as the perception of space, which presents itself so objectively, and that therefore it must not be set up as objective truth. Kant s exposition of the matter, apart fron its tedious prolixity and repetitions, is excel lent. He rightly asserts that we can never succeed in explaining the nature of organised bodies from merely mechanical causes, by which he understands the unde signed and regular effect of all the universal forces of
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nature. Yet I find here another flaw. He denies the possibility of such an explanation merely with regard to the teleology and apparent adaptation of organised bodies. But we find that even where there is no organisation the grounds of explanation which apply to one province of nature cannot be transferred to another, but forsake us as soon as we enter a new province, and new fundamental laws appear instead of them, the explanation of which is by no means to be expected from the laws of the former province. Thus in the province of the mechanical, properly so called, the laws of gravitation, cohesion, rigidity, fluidity, and elasticity prevail, which in themselves (apart from my explanation of all natural forces as lower grades of the objectification of will) exist as manifestations of forces which cannot be further explained, but themselves consti tute the principles of all further explanation, which merely consists in reduction to them. If we leave this province and come to the phenomena of chemistry, of electricity, magnetism, crystallisation, the former principles are ab solutely of no use, indeed the former laws are no longer valid, the former forces are overcome by others, and the phenomena take place in direct contradiction to them, according to new laws, which, just like the former ones, are original and inexplicable, i.e., cannot be reduced to more general ones. Thus, for example, no one will ever succeed in explaining even the dissolving of a salt in water in accordance with the laws proper to mechanics, much less the more complicated phenomena of chemistry. All this has already been explained at length in the second book of the present work. An exposition of this kind would, as it seems to me, have been of great use in the " Critique of the Teleological Judgment," and would have thrown much light upon what is said there. Such an exposition would have been especially favourable to his excellent remark that a more profound knowledge of the real being, of which the things of nature are the manifes tation, would recognise both in the mechanical (according
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to law) and the apparently intentional effects of nature one and the same ultimate principle, which might serve a3 the more general ground of explanation of them both. Such a principle I hope I have given by establishing the will as the real thing in itself; and in accordance with it generally in the second book and the supplements to it, but especially in my work " On the Will in Nature," the insight into the inner nature of the apparent design and of the harmony and agreement of the whole of nature has perhaps become clearer and deeper. Therefore I have nothing more to say about it here.
The reader whom this criticism of the Kantian philo sophy interests should not neglect to read the supplement to it which is given in the second essay of the first volume of my " Parerga and Paralipomena," under the title " Nock einige Erlauterungcn zur Kantischen Philosophic " (Some Further Explanations of the Kantian Philosophy). For it must be borne in mind that my writings, few as they are, were not composed all at once, but successively, in the course of a long life, and with long intervals between them. Accordingly, it must not be expected that all I have said upon one subject should stand together in one place.