Kant Sentence Examples
In earlier life he had been a zealous student of Kant and Hegel, and to the end he never ceased to cultivate the philosophic spirit; but he had little confidence in metaphysical systems, and sought rather to translate philosophy into the wisdom of life.
In 1890 appeared The Development of Theology since Kant, and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825, which was written for publication in England.
But the Cartesian theory, like the later speculations of Kant and Laplace, proposes to give a hypothetical explanation of the circumstances and motions which in the normal course of things led to the state of things required by the law of attraction.
It is important to notice that Baumgarten's first work preceded those of Burke, Diderot, and P. Andre, and that Kant had a great admiration for him.
Kant described it as "an irrefutable book."
AdvertisementAs Kant put it, this was "the proclamation of a great reform, which, however, will be slow in manifestation and in progress, and which will affect not only your people but others as well."
The moral interest, which is so decisive on this question in the case of Kant, dominates Bishop Butler also.
He quotes (p. 57) with approval Kant's words, "The death of the body may indeed be the end of the sensational use of our mind, but only the beginning of the intellectual use.
The application of "common sense" to the problem of substance supplied a more satisfactory analytic for him than the scepticism of Hume which reached him through a study of Kant.
Kant's distinction of " deist " and " theist " may be found in the Critique of Pure Reason, " Transcendental Dialectic," Book II.
AdvertisementIt is curious, but, unless for the study of Kant, unimportant.
C. Fraser's Gifford Lectures, or in earlier times in the writings of Christian Wolff, whose sciences, according to the slightly different nomenclature which Kant imposed on them, were " rational psychology," " rational cosmology," and " rational theology."
Kant swept away, so far as his influence extended, such " dogmatic metaphysics " and the old-fashioned theism which it constituted or included; but Kant himself introduced, in his own more sceptical yet also more moral type of theistic doctrine, a new trichotomy - God, Freedom, Immortality, the three " postulates " of the practical reason."
Two regions become prominent in the working out of intuitionalism, if still more prominent in the widely differing philosophy of Kant - the regions of mathematics and of morals.
Kant's point is ignored, that deductions from these " imaginary " figures apply to the " real " world of experience.
AdvertisementIt does so notably in Kant.
True, Kant refers often to the ideal of a " perceptive " or " intuitive understanding," whose thought would produce the whole of knowledge out of its native contents.
So far as a remedy for scepticism is found at all, Kant places it, not within theoretic knowledge, but in moral or " practical " experience.
The good man is the perfectly rational or perfect self-consistent man; and that is a full account of virtue, though Kant professes to re-interpret it still further in a much more positive sense as implying the service of humanity.
This portion of the ethical theory does curious service in Kant's doctrine of religion.
AdvertisementBut this strong assertion is greatly qualified when Kant recurs to what he considers the least discredited portion of our theoretical knowledge.
It must be carefully distinguished from Kant's " regulative," which refers to knowledge - regulative in contrast to constitutive of knowledge - not to practice.
In the Critique of Judgment, Kant restates his new type of theistic argument in a way which has had great subsequent influence.
Kant then has broken away from intuitionalism by substituting one system of necessity for the many necessary truths or given experiences from which intuitionalism takes its start.
But there are gaps in Kant's system - a imperfect gap between sensation and the sense-forms of time and space; a gap between sense-forms and thought; a gap between the lower but practicable processes of the Understanding and the higher but unrealizable ideas of Reason.
AdvertisementAnd thus Kant's idealism is incomplete.
If there arises a system of philosophy in which all truths are grasped in unity, and it is seen that the principles of things must be what they are, such a philosophy will give us in perfection the idealistic conception of reality and the idealistic guarantees of truth which Kant gave brokenly.
Kant had fewer isolated points of departure than intuitionalists; yet gaps and isolation recurred in Kant, and helped to make him the father of modern agnosticism.
Kant had substituted one great necessity, sprung from an ideal source.
But, having said this, Kant went on to repeat the sceptical suggestion.
His Philosophy of Nature - one of the least admired parts of his system - is the answer from his point of view to Kant's assertion that a " perceptive understanding " is for us impossible.
Hegel offers a supposed proof that Time and Space, Matter, Nature, are ascertainable and definable 2 This is Kant's positive refutation of Hume's scepticism.
Used by Kant sceptically of the limitations of reason, dialectic in Hegel becomes constructive; and scepticism itself becomes a stage in knowledge.
Again, these contrasted philosophies throw light upon the meaning of a posteriori and a priori in Kant and subsequent writers.
The element of givenness, dominant in empiricism, and partially surviving through intuitionalism even into Kant, is sublimated in Hegel's thinking.
The valid or scientific but metaphysically untrustworthy knowledge, to which Kant shut us up, was knowledge of a mechanical universe.
Over against this " valid " mechanism, in some truer but vaguer region, Kant placed free will; and so left things.
Quite a different view of necessity is the moral necessity pointed to by Kant's " Practical Reason."
One great change and only one since Kant's day has affected the outlook upon theistic problems - the increasing belief in evolution.
The Rational Psychology formulates immortality on the ground that the immaterial soul has no parts to suffer decay - the argument which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason " refutes" with special reference to the statement of it by Moses Mendelssohn.
But he is immortal as the man against whom Kant directed his tremendous battery 1 Human attributes magnified, or their weak points thought away.
On one side; another battery of Kant's was aimed against Hume.
We have already spoken of Kant's peculiar philosophical positions.
Kant puts together, as belonging to " Rational Theology," three arguments - he is critic of fond of triads, though they have not the significance for him which they came to have for Hegel.
Perhaps the attack on cause as used in the cosmological argument is independent of Kant's philosophical peculiarities.
A more entirely novel and more general principle of Kant's attack upon theism is the challenge of our right to build up the idea of God bit by bit out of different arguments.
Kant insists that they are incompatible with each 4 Part ii.
Kant takes for granted that we cannot sum up these imperfect conceptions in a wider reconciling truth.
It is no more than characteristic of Kant's whole speculative philosophy that he should' think the Ontological argument the one which comes nearest to st,-cess (yet the Ontological argument is held to prove - or rather to point out - not that God must exist, but that we think of him as necessary if we think of him as existing at all).
As a result of this, Kant is metaphysically a sort of pantheist.
On the other hand, Kant's religion is of a type which requires a sort of deistic God, standing outside the world and constraining it into moral paths, or standing outside our moral struggles and rewarding our goodness.
Kant hopes, with tolerable strength of conviction, that there may be a just God who will reward us.
Hegel inherits from Kant the three arguments, and takes them as stages in one developing process of argu- thought.
Later theists may be grouped according as their thought has been remoulded or not by the influences of Kant.
The distinguished after writers, whom we have to regard as repeating in essence pre-Kantian theories, generally know Kant, and frequently show traces of him in detail.
Empiricism is restated by Paley, who is Kant's younger contemporary as a man and also on the whole as a writer.
That is what Kant contended that the Design argument pointed to, and Mill, proceeding on the Design argument, claims nothing more for his conclusion.
Yet the correspondence between Mill's conclusion and what Kant had alleged to be implied in the underlying metaphysical position is very striking indeed.
Intuitionalism also has its restatements of theistic reasoning little modified by Kant.
In this way, the attributes are suggestively allotted among the four traditional proofs; 7 but we miss an explicit rebutting of Kant's hostile assumption, that it is incompetent for us to take the thought of God piecemeal.
Definite theism, bearing the mark of Kant's thought throughout, is found in Hermann Lotze.
He regards the Ontological argument strictly so called as having been exploded by Kant.
Obviously this writer is harder to focus than Kant or Hegel.
Besides the stream of tendency which flowed from Kant in the direction of idealism, two other streams emerged from him, often but not always blending.
And there was the positive ethical element in Kant's theism.
Later, the emergence of a great body of doctrine attributed to ' Stated and criticized by Kant.
If this tendency is to take effect, a certain part of Kant's rational scepticism must be accepted.
Herrmann's appeal to Kant's moral teaching is in close analogy to the more thoughtful forms of intuitionalist ethics.
It is probable that Leibnitz's notion of time and space, which approaches Kant's theory, led him to attach but little importance to the successive order of the world.
Man's mental faculties are viewed as related to his organization, and as developed under the pressure of the necessities of life.3 Kant.
Kant, like Leibnitz, seeks to reconcile the mechanical and teleological views of nature, only he assigns to these different spheres.
In his Naturgeschichte des Himmels, in which he anticipated the nebular theory afterwards more fully developed by Laplace, Kant sought to explain the genesis of the cosmos as a product of physical forces and laws.
So far as the evolution of the solar system is concerned, Kant held these mechanical causes as adequate.
Just as Kant thus sharply marks off the regions of the inorganic and the organic, so he sets man in strong opposition to the lower animals.
From this capability of natural development (which already involves a teleological idea) Kant distinguishes the power of moral self-development or selfliberation from the dominion of nature, the gradual realization of which constitutes human history or progress.
Thus Kant, though he appropriated and gave new form to the idea of human progress, conceived of this as wholly distinct from a natural (mechanical) process.
In this particular, as in his view of organic actions, Kant distinctly opposed the idea of evolution as one universal process swaying alike the physical and the moral world.
The evolution of mind (the positive pole) proceeds by 1 Kant calls the doctrine of the transmutation of species " a hazardous fancy of the reason."
Yet, as Strauss and others have shown, Kant's mind betrayed a decided leaning at times to a more mechanical conception of organic forms as related by descent.
Of the other German philosophers immediately following Kant, there is only one who calls for notice here, namely, Arthur Schopenhauer.
The problems of geography had been lightened by the destructive criticism of the French cartographer D'Anville (who had purged the map of the world of the last remnants of traditional fact unverified by modern observations) and rendered richer by the dawn of the new era of scientific travel, when Kant brought his logical powers to bear upon them.
Kant's lectures on physical geography were delivered in the university of Konigsberg from 1765 onwards.'
The evolutionary theory, more than hinted at in Kant's " Physical Geography," has, since the writings of Charles Darwin, become the unifying principle in geography.
While he thus created a new and more ethical " rationalism," Kant's many-sided influence, alike in philosophy and in theology, worked to further issues.
Further, while the genius of Aquinas was constructive, that of Duns Scotus was destructive; Aquinas was a philosopher, Duns a critic. The latter has been said to stand to the former in the relation of Kant to Leibnitz.
Like Kant, too, Reid finds in space the source of a necessity which sense, as sense, cannot give (Hamilton's Reid, p. 323).
And, if Kant was overridden by a love of symmetry, Reid's indifference to form and system is an even more dangerous defect.
The relativism or phenomenalism which Hamilton afterwards adopted from Kant and sought to engraft upon Scottish philosophy is wholly absent from the original Scottish doctrine.
Kant, though pessimistic as regards the actual man, is optimistic regarding his moral capacity.
His publications include Philosophy of Kant (1878); Critical Philosophy of Kant (1889); Religion and Social Philosophy of Comte (1885); Essays on Literature and Philosophy (1892); Evolution of Religion (Gifford Lectures, 1891-1892); Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers (1904); and he is represented in this encyclopaedia by the article on Cartesianism.
The Philosophical Society died out before 1874, when Harris founded in St Louis a Kant Club, which lived for fifteen years.
His principal work in this line, Theorie de la morale, is little more than a somewhat patronizing reproduction of Kant.
Admitting Kant's hypothesis that by inner sense we are conscious of mental states only, he holds that this consciousness constitutes a knowledge of the "thing-in-itself" - which Kant denies.
With Kant, reason (Vernunft) is the power of synthesizing into unity, by means of comprehensive principles, the concepts provided by the intellect (Verstand).
It is curious that Laplace, while bestowing more attention than they deserved on the crude conjectures of Buffon, seems to have been unaware that he had been, to some extent, anticipated by Kant, who had put forward in 1755, in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, a true though defective nebular cosmogony.
Meanwhile the astronomical theories of development of the solar system from a gaseous condition to its present form, put forward by Kant and by Laplace, had impressed men's minds with the conception of a general movement of spontaneous progress or development in all nature.
Thus he carried on the narrative of orderly development from the point at which it was left by Kant and Laplace - explaining by reference to the ascertained laws of physics and chemistry the configuration of the earth, its mountains and seas, its igneous and its stratified rocks, just as the astronomers had explained by those same laws the evolution of the sun and planets from diffused gaseous matter of high temperature.
In the German Mercury he published, in the years 1786-87, his Briefe fiber die Kantische Philosophie, which were most important in making Kant known to a wider circle of readers.
Reinhold lays greater emphasis than Kant upon the unity and activity of consciousness.
On his father's transference to Berlin, as director of the mint, the boy was sent to the Joachimsthal gymnasium there; his brilliant talents, however, did not develop until later, when at the university of Konigsberg he fell under the influence of Kant.
There he came under the influence of Kant, who was just then passing from physical to metaphysical problems. Without becoming a disciple of Kant, young Herder was deeply stimulated to fresh critical inquiry by that thinker's revolutionary ideas in philosophy.
To Kant's lectures and conversations he further owed something of his large interest in cosmological and anthropological problems. Among the writers whom he most carefully read were Plato, Hume, Shaftesbury, Leibnitz, Diderot and Rousseau.
It thus stands in sharp contrast to the anthropology of Kant, which opposes human development conceived as the gradual manifestation of a growing faculty of rational free will to the operations of physical nature.
It is generally admitted that he had no accurate knowledge either of Spinoza, whose monism he advocated, or of Kant, whose critical philosophy he so fiercely attacked.
With respect to his attacks on the critical philosophy in the Metakritik (1799), it is easy to understand how his concrete mind, ever alive to the unity of things, instinctively rebelled against that analytic separation of the mental processes which Kant attempted.
In the Kalligone (1800), work directed against Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft, Herder argues for the close connexion of the beautiful and the good.
He has, indeed, described in graphic terms the greatest of the more superficial changes he underwent; how he had " carried into logical and ethical problems the maxims and postulates of physical knowledge," and had moved within the narrow lines drawn by the philosophical instructions of the class-room " interpreting human phenomena by the analogy of external nature "; how he served in willing captivity " the ` empirical ' and ` necessarian ' mode of thought," even though " shocked " by the dogmatism and acrid humours " of certain distinguished representatives "; 1 and how in a period of " second education " at Berlin, " mainly under the admirable guidance of Professor Trendelenburg," he experienced " a new intellectual birth" which " was essentially the gift of fresh conceptions, the unsealing of hidden openings of self-consciousness, with unmeasured corridors and sacred halls behind; and, once gained, was more or less available throughout the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from the pages of Kant and even Hegel."
In the first part Spencer's argument rests on Mansel's Limits of Religious Thought and Hamilton's" philosophy of the conditioned "(and so ultimately on Kant), and tries to show that alike in scientific and religious thought the ultimate terms are" inconceivable "(not by him distinguished from" unimaginable ").
He was also a great physicist and had arrived at the nebular hypothesis theory of the formation of the planets and the sun long before Kant and Laplace.
Immanuel Kant was struck by them in 1763, but in 1765, after further inquiries, concluded that two of them had "no other foundation than common report (gemeine Sage)."
Schubert, he published an edition of the works of Kant, to which he appended a history of the Kantian doctrine.
The Sophists and the Sceptics, Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans took up the question, and from the time of Locke and Kant it has been prominent in modern philosophy.
His criticism of Wolff, which is generally based on sound sense, had much influence upon Kant at the time when his system was forming; and his ethical doctrines are mentioned with respect in the Kritik of Practical Reason.
His writings consisted of short articles, of which many appeared in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th ed.) and in Mind, a volume on Kant and another on Fichte.
At the time of his death he was writing a History of Psychology, and had promised a work on Kant and the Modern Naturalists.
In the midst of this work occurred the most important event of his life, his introduction to the philosophy of Kant.
Fichte's Letters of this period attest the influence exercised on him by the study of Kant.
He rightly felt that the reception of Kant's doctrines was impeded by their phraseology.
The situation proved unsuitable; the lady, as Kuno Fischer says, "required greater submission and better French" than Fichte could yield, and after a fortnight's stay Fichte set out for Konigsberg to see Kant.
He resolved to bring himself before Kant's notice by submitting to him a work in which the principles of the Kantian philosophy should be applied.
Outsiders, not unnaturally, ascribed the work to Kant.
The Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung went so far as to say that no one who had read a line of Kant's writings could fail to recognize the eminent author of this new work.
Kant himself corrected the mistake, at the same time highly commending the work.
To Kant the fundamental condition was given in the synthetical unity of consciousness.
But by Kant there was no attempt made to show that the said special conditions were necessary from the very nature of consciousness itself.
Moreover, while Kant in a quite similar manner pointed out that intuition had special conditions, space and time, he did not show any link of connexion between these and the primitive conditions of pure cognition.
So strongly was this doctrine emphasized by Kant, that he seemed to refer the matter of knowledge to the action upon us of a non-ego or Ding-an-sich, absolutely beyond consciousness.
While these hints towards a completely intelligible account of cognition were given by Kant, they were not reduced to system, and from the way in which the elements of cognition were related, could not be so reduced.
The peculiar position in which Kant had left the theory of cognition was assailed from many different sides and by many writers, specially by Schultze (Aenesidemus) and Maimon.
While, however, ancient philosophy may be said to have been unilinear, modern philosophy had a twofold origin, and till the time of Kant may be said to have pursued two independent courses.
It was these paradoxes that Kant sought to rebut by a more thoroughgoing criticism of the basis of knowledge the substance of which is summed up in his celebrated Refuta tion of Idealism,' wherein he sought to undermine Hume's scepticism by carrying it one step further and demonstrating that not only is all knowledge of self or object excluded, but the consciousness of any series of impressions and ideas is itself impossible except in relation to some external permanent and universally accepted world of objects.
But Kant's refutation of subjective idealism and his vindication of the place of the object can be fully understood only.
But Leibnitz also anticipated Kant in seeking to correct the empirical point of view of the English philosophers.
The extremity to which philosophy had been brought by empiricism on the one hand and formalism on the other was Kant's opportunity.
In spite of the defects of Kant's statement - to which it is necessary to return - the place of the concepts and ideals of the mind and the synthetic organizing 1 Kritik d.
But the fact that we have already in part realized the ideal and that the degree in which we have realized it is the degree in which we may regard our experience as trustworthy, is proof that the ideal is no mere idea as Kant taught, but the very substance of reality.
The " Logic " of Hegel is merely the continuation of Kant's " Deduction " of the categories and ideas of the reason which has generally been recognized as the soberest of attempts to set forth the presuppositions which underlie all experience.
Hence, whatever we begin by saying, we must ultimately say ` mind ' " (Caird, Kant, 1.443) While the form in which these doctrines were stated proved fatal to them in the country of their birth, they took deep root in the next generation in English philosophy.
Whatever is to be said of ancient Idealism, the modern doctrine may be said notably in Kant to have been in the main a vindication of the subjective factor in knowledge.
The assertion of this principle by Kant was, we have seen, the corner-stone of idealistic philosophy in general, underlying as it does the conception of a permanent subject not less than that of a permanent object.
It was, as we have seen, this conception of thought as essentially synthetic for which Kant paved the way in his polemic against the formalism of his continental predecessors.
A new shade of condemnation for dogmas as things merely assumed comes to be noticeable here, especially in Kant.
Later, in his movement towards Positivism, he strongly repudiates Kant's separation of phenomenon from noumenon, and affirms that our intellect is capable of grasping the whole reality.
Dr Smith contributed articles on Calvin, Kant, Pantheism, Miracles, Reformed Churches, Schelling and Hegel to the American Cyclopaedia, and contributed to McClintock and Strong's Cyclopaedia; and was editor of the American Theological Review (1859 sqq.), both in its original form and after it became the American Presbyterian and Theological Review and, later, the Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review.
Kant claimed to solve these contradictions by saying, that in no case is the contradiction real, however really it has been intended by the opposing partisans, or must appear to the mind without critical enlightenment.
It is wrong, therefore, to impute to Kant, as is often done, the view that human reason is, on ultimate subjects, at war with itself, in the sense of being impelled by equally strong arguments towards alternatives contradictory of each other.
In philosophy he followed Reinhard in ethics and the monadology of Leibnitz, though he was also influenced by Kant.
Masaryk, who, as a counterpoise to German speculation and the intellectualism of Herbart, emphasized the critical study of English philosophy, notably Hume, Spencer and Mill, and the French Comte; at the same time he fully appreciated the value of Kant in epistemology.
The remarks made above would not apply to the coherent system of idealism which may be evolved from Kant's writings, and which many would consider alone to deserve the name of Kantianism or Criticism.
The serious thinker will always repeat the words of Kant that, in itself, scepticism is " not a permanent resting-place for human reason."
He indicates the distinction, developed more fully by Thomasius and Kant, between the legal and the moral qualities of action.
His powers as an original thinker were not equal to his learning and his literary gifts, as was shown in his opposition to the philosophy of Kant.
Meanwhile a much more important influence had begun to operate on him, arising out of his study of Kant and Fichte.
Animated with this new conception Schelling made his hurried rush to Naturphilosophie, and with the aid of Kant and of fragmentary knowledge of contemporary scientific movements, threw off in quick succession the Ideen, the Weltseele, and the Erster Entwurf.
He devoted himself to criticism and explanation of the doctrine of Kant, and in 1793 published the Erlduternder Auszug aus Kants kritischen Schriften, which has been widely used as a compendium of Kantian doctrine.
He endeavoured to explain away certain of the contradictions which are found in Kant's system by saying that much of the language is used in a popular sense for the sake of intelligibility, e.g.
Beck maintains that the real meaning of Kant's theory is idealism; that of objects outside the domain of consciousness, knowledge is impossible, and hence that nothing positive remains when we have removed the subjective element.
In Kant's Analogien der Erfahrung (1876) he keenly criticized Kant's transcendentalism, and in his chief work Idealismus and Positivismus (3 vols., 1879-1884), he drew a clear contrast between Platonism, from which he derived transcendentalism, and positivism, of which he considered Protagoras the founder.
In neither, however, are they a grammatical classification of words by their structure; and in neither are they a psychological classification of notions or general conceptions (voi uara), such as they afterwards became in Kant's Critique and the post-Kantian idealism.
In the course of his intellectual development, he came successively under the influence of Kant, Schelling and Hegel, and on account of the different phases through which he passed he was called the Talleyrand of German thought.
In Germany, for example, Eugen Diihring (q.v.) was a realist, whose intention is to prove against Kant a knowledge of the thing in itself by attributing time, space and categories generally to the real world.
As to the origin of knowledge, Kant's position is that sense, outer and inner, affected by things in themselves, receives mere sensations or sensible ideas (Vorstellungen) as the matter which sense itself places in the a priori forms of space and time; that thereupon understanding, by means of the synthetic unity of apperception, " I think " - an act of spontaneity beyond sense, in all consciousness one and the same, and combining all my ideas as mine in one universal consciousness - and under a priori categories, or fundamental notions, such as substance and attribute, cause and effect, &c., unites groups of sensations or sensible ideas into objects and events, e.g.
Known nature is a mental construction in part, according to Kant.
This third position isarelic of ancient metaphysical realism; although it must be remembered that Kant does not go to the length of Descartes and Locke, who supposed that from mere ideas we could know bodies and souls, but suggests that beneath the phenomena of outer and inner sense the thing in itself may not be heterogeneous (ungleichartig).
The fourth position is the coping-stone of Kant's metaphysics.
Kant first deduced that from the experience of mental phenomena all logical use of reason is limited to mental phenomena, and then maintained that to explain moral responsibility practical reason postulates the existence of real noumena.
Nevertheless, in his own mind Kant's whole speculative and practical philosophy was meant to form one system.
Fichte now set himself in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) to make transcendental idealism into a system of metaphysical idealism without Kant's inconsistencies and relics of realism.
In order to prove this novel conclusion he started afresh from the Cartesian " I think " in the Kantian form of the synthetic unity of apperception acting by a priori categories; but instead of allowing, with all previous metaphysicians, that the Ego passively receives sensations from something different, and not contenting himself with Kant's view that the Ego, by synthetically combining the matter of sensations with a priori forms, partially constructs objects, and therefore Nature as we know it, he boldly asserted that the Ego, in its synthetic unity, entirely constructs things; that its act of spontaneity is not mere synthesis of passive sensations, but construction of sensations into an object within itself; and that therefore understanding makes as well as shapes Nature.
Hence he united theoretical and practical reason, which Kant had separated, and both with will, which Kant had distinguished; for he held that the Ego, in positing the non-Ego, posits both its own limit and its own means to the end, duty, by its activity of thinking which requires will.
Fichte thus transformed the transcendental idealism of Kant by identifying the thing with the object, and by interpreting noumenon, not in Kant's sense of something which speculative reason conceives and practical reason postulates to exist in accordance with the idea, but in the new meaning of a thought, a product of reason.
Kant had said that the synthetic unity " I think " is in all consciousness one and the same, meaning that I am always present to all my ideas.
According to Kant, the ob j ective is valid for all consciousnesses; according to Fichte it is valid for one consciousness.
Thus the complete metaphysical idealism of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre formed out of the incomplete metaphysical idealism of Kant's Kritik, is the theor y on its epistemological side that the Ego posits the non-Ego as a thing in itself, and yet as only a thing existing for it as its own noumenon, and on its metaphysical side that in consequence all reality is the Ego and its own determinations, which are objective, or valid for all, as determinations, not of you or of me, but of the consciousness common to all of us, the pure or absolute Ego.
Berkeley and Hume produced the English idealism of Mill and Spencer, with their successors, and occasioned the German idealism of Kant.
Kant's a priori synthesis of sensations into experience lies at the root of all German idealism.
Meanwhile, through holding with Kant that man is not God, but a free spirit, whose destiny it is to use his intelligence as a means to his duty, he is still the resort of many who vindicate man's independence, freedom, conscience, and power of using nature for his moral purposes, e.g.
Kant and Fichte together became the most potent philosophic influences on European thought in the 19th century, because their emphasis was on man.
Kant half asserted, and Fichte wholly, that Nature is man's own construction.
The noumenal idealists of Germany assumed, like all psychological idealists, the unproved hypothesis that there is no sense of body, but there is a sense of sensations; and they usually accepted Kant's point, that to get from such sensations to knowledge there is a synthesis contributing mental elements beyond the mental data of sense.
They saw also the logic of Kant's deduction, that all we can know from such mental data and mental categories must also be mental.
They rightly revolted against the inconsistencies of Kant's third and fourth positions about the existence of unknown but postulated things in themselves, hidden from theoretical, but revealed to practical, reason.
Kant had attributed to God, in distinction from man's understanding, an intellectual intuition of things.
This new noumenal idealism began, like the preceding, by combining psycho l0 ical idealism with the transcendentalism of Kant and Fichte.
In Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung Schopenhauer accepted Kant's position that the world as phenomenal is idea (Vorstellung); but he added that the world as noumenal is will (Wille).
He got the hint of a noumenal will from Kant; but in regarding the noumenal as knowable, because mental, as well as in the emphasis he laid on the activity of will, he resembled Fichte.
He really accepted, like Kant, the hypothesis of a sense of sensations which led to the Kantian conclusion that the Nature we know in time and space is mere sensible appearances in us.
Agreeing, then, with Kant that primary qualities are as mental as secondary, he agreed also with Kant that all the Nature we know as a system of bodies moving in time and space is sensible phenomena.
But while he was in fundamental agreement with the first two positions of Kant, he differed from the third; he did not believe that the causes of sensible phenomena can be unknown things in themselves.
When the later reaction to Kant arose against both Hegelianism and materialism, the nearly contemporary appearance of Fechner's Psychophysics began to attract experimental psychologists by its real as well as its apparent exactness, and both psychologists and metaphysicians by its novel way of putting the relations between the physical and the psychical in man and in the world.
The originality of Paulsen consists in trying to supply an epistemological ecplanation of the metaphysics of Fechner, by reconciling him with Kant and Schopenhauer.
He admits, indeed, Kant's hypothesis that by inner sense we are conscious only of mental states, but he contends that this very consciousness is a knowledge of a thing in itself.
He agrees with Fechner and Wundt that there is no substantial soul, and that soul is nothing but the mental states, or rather their unity--thus identifying it with Kant's synthetic unity.
So far it is in general agreement not only with Hume, but also with Kant in his first two positions.
Thus they were thrown back on the limits of human knowledge prescribed by Kant, but purged of the unknown thing in itself by Fichte.
Now, Kant and his followers start from this second and narrower meaning, and usually narrow it still more by assuming that what appears to the senses is as mental as the sensation, being undistinguishable from it or from the idea of it, and that an appearance is a mental idea(Vorstellung) of sense; and then they conclude that we can know by inference nothing but such mental appearances, actual and possible, and therefore nothing beyond sensory experience.
Hence the doctrine of Kant, that Nature as known to science is phenomena, means one thing in Kantism and another thing in science.
Cohen his more important Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, which led Lange to modify his interpretation of Kant in the second edition of his own book.
Lange to some extent modified the transcendentalism of Kant's theory of the origin of knowledge.
A priori forms, according to Kant, are contributions of the mental powers of sense, understanding, and reason; but, according to Lange, they are rooted in " the physico-psychical organization."
This modification was the beginning of a gradual lessening of the antithesis of a priori to a posteriori, until at last the a priori forms of Kant have been transmuted into " auxiliary conceptions," or " postulates of experience."
Yes, rejoins Lange, but Kant has proved that material are merely mental phenomena; so that the more the materialist proves his case the more surely he is playing into the hands of the idealist - an answer which would be complete if it did not turn on the equivocation of the word " phenomenon," which in science means any positive fact, and not a mere appearance, much less a mental appearance, to sense and sensory experience.
But his ardent love of consistency led him far away from Kant in the end; for he proceeded consistently from the assumption, that whatever we think beyond mental phenomena is ideal, to the logical conclusion that in practical matters our moral responsibility cannot prove the reality of a noumenal freedom, because, as on Kant's assumption we know ourselves from inner sense only as phenomena, we can prove only our phenomenal freedom.
Our reflection is that there is a great difference between the essence and the consistency of Kant's philosophy.
Its essence, as stated by Kant, was to reduce the logical use of reason to mental phenomena of experience in speculation, in order to extend the practical use of reason to the real noumena, or things in themselves, required for morality.
He accepts the Kantian positions that unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori synthesis, and that therefore all that natural science knows about matter moving in space is merely phenomena of outer sense; and he agrees with Kant that from these data we could not infer things in themselves by reason.
He rightly relies on the numerous passages, neglected by Lange, in which Kant regards things in themselves as neither phenomena nor ideas, but things existing beyond both.
But his main reliance is on the passage in the Kritik, where Kant, speaking of the Cartesian difficulty of communication between body and soul, suggests that, however body and soul appear to be different in the phenomena of outer and inner sense, what lies as thing in itself at the basis of the phenomena of both may perhaps be not so heterogeneous (ungleichartig) after all.
In supposing a direct perception of such a nondescript thing, he shows to what straits idealists are driven in the endeavour to supplement Kant's limitation of knowledge to phenomena by some sort of knowledge of things.
For what does it matter to metaphysics whether by association sensations suggest ideas, and so give rise to ideas of substance and causation a posteriori, or synthetic unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori notions of substance and causation into objects which are merely mental phenomena of experience, when it is at once allowed by the followers of Hume and Kant alike that reason in any logical use has no power of inferring things beyond the experience of the reasoner?
He tells us how from his youth he pursued physical and psychological studies, how at the age of fifteen he read Kant's Prolegomena, and later rejected the thing in itself, and came to the conclusion that the world with his ego is one mass of sensations.
Within the limits of these supposed sensory elements he accords more than many psychologists do to sense; because, following the nativists, Johannes Muller and Hering, he includes sensations of time and space, which, however, are not to be regarded as " pure intuitions " in the style of Kant.
He refers to Hume as recognizing no causality but only a customary and habitual succession, but adds that Kant rightly recognizes that mere observation cannot teach the necessity of the conjunction.
But in reality his theory is neither Hume's theory of association nor Kant's of an a priori notion of understanding under which a given case is subsumed.
This view, however, is held in different forms; and two opposite forms have arisen in Germany, " immanent philosophy " and " empirio-criticism," the former nearer to Kant, the latter to Hume.
While in this identification he follows Fichte, in other respects he is more like Kant.
It opposes " pure experience " to " pure reason," while it agrees with Kant's limitation of knowledge to experience.
Again he agrees with the reaction both to Hume and to Kant in limiting knowledge to mental phenomena, and has affinities with Mach as well as with Lange.
His main sympathies are with the Neo-Kantians, and especially with Lange in modifying the a priori, and in extending the power of reason beyond phenomena to an ideal world; and yet the cry of his phenomenalism is not " back to Kant," but " beyond Kant."
At the same time, in spite of his sympathy with the whole development of idealism since Kant, which leads him to reject the thing in itself, to modify a priorism, and to stop at transcendent " ideals," without postulates of practical reason, he nevertheless has so much sympathy with Kant's Kritik as on its theories of sense and understanding to build up a system of phenomenalism, according to which knowledge begins and ends with ideas, and finally on its theory of pure reason to accord to reason a power of logically forming an " ideal " of God as ground of the moral " ideal " of humanity - though without any power of logically inferring any corresponding reality.
In detail, to express this supposed inner will of thinking, he borrows from Leibnitz and Kant the term " apperception," but in a sense of his own.
Kant further insisted that this apperception, " I think," is an act of spontaneity, distinct from sense, necessary to regarding all my ideas as mine, and to combining them in a synthetic unity of apperception; which act Fichte afterwards developed into an active construction of all knowledge, requiring will directed to the end of duty.
Wundt, in consequence, thinking with Kant that apperception is a spontaneous activity, and with Fichte that this activity requires will, and indeed that all activity is will, infers that apperception is inner will.
According to him, then, attention, even involuntary attention, requires inner will; and all the functions imputed by Hume to association, as well as those imputed to understanding by Kant, require apperception, and therefore inner will.
But he does not agree with Hume that mind is nothing but sensations, ideas, and associations, but with Kant, that there are higher combinations.
In his logic, and especially in his epistemology, Wundt appears as a mediator between Hume and Kant, but with more leaning to the latter.
He accepts on the whole the system of synthetic understanding which Kant superimposed on mere association.
Yet he will not proceed to the length of Kant's transcendentalism.
Between Hume's a posteriori and Kant's a priori hypothesis he proposes a logical theory of the origin of notions beyond experience.
That sense only gives to experience coexistences and sequences of appearances, as Hume said and Kant allowed, is also Wundt's startingpoint.
Not, says Wundt, by association, as Hume said, but by thinking; not, however, by a priori thinking, as Kant said, but by logical thinking, by applying the logical principle of ground and consequent (which Leibnitz had called the principle of sufficient reason) as a causal law to empirical appearances.
But as with Kant, so with Wundt, this world will be only the richer, not the wider, for these notions of understanding; because they are only contributed to the original experience, and, being mentally contributed, only the more surely confine knowledge to experience of mental phenomena.
Reason, according to Wundt, is like pure reason according to Kant; except that Wundt, receiving Kantism through NeoKantism, thinks that reason arrives at " ideals " not a priori, but by the logical process of ground and consequent, and, having abolished the thing in itself, will not follow Kant in his inconsequent passage from pure to practical reason in order to postulate a reality corresponding to " ideals " beyond experience.
To understand phenomenal idealism in Germany is to discover what a narrow world is to be known from the transcendental idealism of Kant shorn of Kant's inconsistencies.
Other and wider German philosophies gradually followed that of Kant to England.
Coleridge (1772-1834) not only called attention to Kant's distinction between understanding and reason, but also introduced his countrymen to the noumenal idealism of Schelling.
Taken for granted the Kantian hypothesis of a sense of sensations requiring synthesis by understanding, and the Kantian conclusion that Nature as known consists of phenomena united by categories as objects of experience, Green argued, in accordance with Kant's first position, that knowledge, in order to unite the manifold of sensations by relations into related phenomena, requires unifying intelligence, or what Kant called synthetic unity of apperception, which cannot itself be sensation, because it arranges sensations; and he argued, in accordance with Kant's second position, that therefore Nature itself as known requires unifying intelligence to constitute the relations of its phenomena, and to make it a connected world of experience.
From this fact of unity of Nature and of everything in Nature, combined with the two previous positions accepted, not from Nature, but from Kant, Green proceeded to argue, altogether beyond Kant, that Nature, being one, and also requiring unifying intelligence, requires one intelligence, an eternal intelligence, a single spiritual principle, prior to, and the condition of, our individual knowledge.
But it is not a Kantian view; and it is necessary to correct two confusions of Kant and Hegel, which have been iYnported with Hegelianism by Green and Caird.
Green, on the other hand, in deducing his own conclusion that the world is, or is a system of, one eternal intelligence, incautiously put it forward as " what may be called broadly the Kantian view " (Prolegomena, § 36), and added that he follows Kant " in maintaining that a single active conscious principle, by whatever name it be called, is necessary to constitute such a world, as the condition under which alone phenomena, i.e.
He admitted, however, that Kant also asserted, beyond this single universe of a single principle, a world of unknowable things in themselves, which is a Kantian not a Hegelian world.
Kant, then, as interpreted by English Hegelians, already believed, before Hegel, that there is one intelligence common to all individuals, and that a noumenon is a thought of this common intelligence, " an ideal of reason "; so that Kant was trying to be a Hegelian, holding that the world has no being beyond the thoughts of one intelligence.
But history repeats itself; and these same two interpretations of Kant had already been made in the lifetime of Kant by Fichte, in the two Introductions to the " Wissenschaftslehre," which he published in his Philosophical Journal in 1797.
After this letter it cannot be doubted that Kant not only differed wholly from Fichte, both about the synthetic unity of apperception and about the thing in itself, but also is to be construed literally throughout.
Consequently, Kant's explanation of the unity of a thing is that there is always one thing in itself causing in us many phenomena, which as understood by us are objectively valid for all our consciousnesses.
What Kant never said and what his whole philosophy prevented his saying, was that a single thing is a single thought of a single consciousness; either of men, as in Fichte's philosophy, or of God and man, as in Hegel's.
The passage from Kant to Hegel attempted by Green, and the harmony of Kant and Hegel attempted by Green and Caird, are unhistorical, and have caused much confusion of thought.
Lastly, while he agrees with Kant about a priori categories, he differs about the knowledge to be got out of them.
Kant, applying them only to sensations, concluded that we can know nothing beyond by their means.
Bradley, however, having satisfied himself, like Spinoza, by an abuse of the word " independent," that " the finite is self-discrepant," goes on to ask what the one Real, the absolute, is; and, as he passed from Herbart to Spinoza, so now he passes from Spinoza to Kant.
Lewes (q.v.), starting from the phenomenalism of Hume, fell under the spell of Kant and his successors, and produced a compromise between G.H.Lewes.
Kant, taking it in the mistaken meaning of Locke, converted it into the a priori category of the permanent substrate beneath the changes of phenomena, and even went so far as to separate it from the thing in itself, as substantia phenomenon from noumenon.
When it had thus lost every vestige of its true meaning, Kant's successors naturally began to speak of things as being distinct without being substances.
In Germany, since the victory of Kant over Wolff, realism has always been in difficulties, which we can appreciate when we reflect that the Germans by preference apply the term " realism " to the paradoxes of Herbart (1776-1841), who, in order to avoid supposed contradictions, supposed that bodies are not substances, but show (Schein), while " reals" are simple substances, each with a simple quality, and all preserving themselves against disturbance by one another, whether physically or psychologically, but not known to be either material or spiritual because we do not know the simple quality in which the nature of the real consists.
Trendelenburg (1802-1872), a formidable opponent of Hegel, tried to surmount Kant's transcendental idealism by supposing that motion, and therefore time, space and the categories, though a priori, are common to thought and being.
He essayed to answer Locke by Kant, and Kant by Reid, Maine de Biran and Schelling.
Jules Lachelier (born 1832) agreed with Ravaisson that beauty is the last word of things, but, under the influence of Kant and his successors, put his idealism rather in the form that all is thought.
Hamilton went still further; he tried to combine the oil of Reid with the water of Kant; and converting.
Like Kant, he supposes that experience is concerned with sensations, distinguishes matter and form in sense, identifies time and space, eternal time and infinite space, with the formal element, and substitutes 'synthesis of sensations of touch and sight for association and inference, as the origin of our knowing such a solid material object as a bell.
Although he does not agree with Kant that either the formal element in sense or the synthesis of sensations is a priori, yet in very Kantian fashion, through not distinguishing between operation and object, he holds that, in synthetically combining sensations of touch and sight, we not only have a complex perception of a solid body, but also know this " object thought of " as itself the complex of these sensations objectified.
Not so; like Kant himself, Hodgson supposes something beyond; not, however, an unknown thing in itself causing sensations, but a condition, or sine qua non, of their existence, without being a cause of their nature.
James Martineau (q.v.) in A Study of Religion (1888), like Shadworth Hodgson, started from Kant, and tried to found on Martineau.
Yet Martineau adopted, as his view of the limits of human intelligence, that Kant was right in making space and time a priori forms of sense, but wrong in limiting them to sensations.
But in order to make space a form of external things, Martineau had to take the external in space, by which Kant meant one sensation out of another, in the very different meaning of the self here and the not-self there.
He facilitated this awkward transition by adding to Kant's a priori forms of space and time an " a priori form of alternative causality," or, as he also called it, " an intuition of causality involved in the elementary exercise of perception," which is the key to his whole philosophy.
One cannot but feel regret at seeing the Reformed Churches blown about by every wind of doctrine, and catching at straws now from Kant, now from Hegel, and now from Lotze, or at home from Green, Caird, Martineau, Balfour and Ward in succession, without ever having considered the basis of their faith; while the Roman Catholics are making every effort to ground a Universal Church on a sane system of metaphysics.
The theory he propounds is closely allied to that of Cudworth, but is interesting mainly in comparison with the subsequent theories of Kant.
This ethical value is perceived by reason or understanding (which, unlike Kant, he does not distinguish), which intuitively recognizes fitness or congruity between actions, agents and total circumstances.
In this conclusion he is in close agreement with Kant; reason is the arbiter, and right is (1) not a matter of the emotions and (2) not relative to imperfect human nature.
The attack made by David Hume on the causal relation led directly to the new rationalism of Kant, who argued that it was wrong to regard thought as mere analysis.
This spirit was exhibited on the philosophical side by Kant who in his Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793) set forth his doctrine of rational morality (Vernunftglauben) as the only true religion.
The principle with which he starts and from which follows his well-known distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, a distinction which Kant appears to have thought identical with his distinction between analytical and synthetical judgments, is comparatively simple.
If taken in isolation this passage might appear sufficient justification for Kant's view that, according to Hume, geometrical judgments are analytical and therefore perfect.
It is because Kant alone perceived the full significance of the change required in order to meet the difficulties of the empirical theory that we regard his system as the only sequel to that of Hume.
William Hamilton, was mainly due to Aristotle, Kant and Reid.
While denying all knowledge of the supersensuous, Mansel deviated from Kant in contending that cognition of the ego as it really is is itself a fact of experience.
He survived into the era of Kant, Goethe and Schiller, but he was not of it, and it would have been unreasonable to expect that he should in old age pass beyond the limits of his own epoch.
Buffon, in a cautious, tentative fashion, suggested rather than stated the mutability of species and the influence of the forces of nature in moulding organisms. Immanuel Kant, in his Theory of the Heavens (1755), foreshadowed a theory of the development of unformed matter into the highest types of animals and plants, and suggested that the gradations of structure revealed by comparative anatomy pointed to the existence of blood relationship of all organisms, due to derivation from a common ancestor.
In the summer of 1790 he had lectured in Jena on the aesthetics of tragedy, and in the following year he studied carefully Kant's treatise on aesthetics, Kritik der Urteilskraft, which had just appeared and appealed powerfully to Schiller's mind.
Ober Anmut and Wiirde, published in 1793, was a further contribution to the elucidation and widening of Kant's theories; and in the eloquent Briefe fiber die cisthetische Erziehung des9Menschen (1795), Schiller proceeded to apply his new standpoint to the problems of social and individual life.
His whole conception of life and character had deepened since Don Carlos, and under the influence of Kant's philosophy the drama became the embodiment of ethical problems that are essentially modern.
His most important treatise, the Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft (2nd ed., 1828-1831), was an attempt to give a new foundation of psychological analysis to the critical theory of Kant.
Fries's point of view in philosophy may be described as a modified Kantianism, an attempt to reconcile the criticism of Kant and Jacobi's philosophy of belief.
With Kant he regarded Kritik, or the critical investigation of the faculty of knowledge, as the essential preliminary to philosophy.
But he differed from Kant both as regards the foundation for this criticism and as regards the metaphysical results yielded by it.
Kant's analysis of knowledge had disclosed the a priori element as the necessary complement of the isolated a posteriori facts of experience.
But it did not seem to Fries that Kant had with sufficient accuracy examined the mode in which we arrive at knowledge of this a priori element.
A second point in which Fries differed from Kant is the view taken as to the relation between immediate and mediate cognitions.
In this view of reason Fries approximates to Jacobi rather than to Kant.
Kant still further narrowed the meaning to include only self-evident (intuitive) synthetic propositions, i.e.
Under the impulse given by Lessing and Kant he turned to the original records of Christianity, and attempted to construe for himself the real significance of Christ.
He does not free himself from the current theology either by rational moralizing like Kant, or by bold speculative synthesis like Fichte and Schelling.
Both of them were intent on forcing the theologians into the daylight, and grudged them any aid they might expect from Kant's postulation of God and immortality to crown the edifice of ethics.
Here, as in contemporaneous criticisms of Kant's ethical writings, Hegel aims at correcting the abstract discussion of a topic by treating it in its systematic interconnexions.
An end had already come to the brilliant epoch at Jena, when the romantic poets, Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels made it the headquarters of their fantastic mysticism, and Fichte turned the results of Kant into the banner of revolutionary ideas.
Schelling was the main philosophical lion of the time; and in some quarters Hegel was spoken of as a new champion summoned to help him in his struggle with the more prosaic continuators of Kant.
In the beginning of the Encyklopadie he discusses the defects of dogmatism, empiricism, the philosophies of Kant and Jacobi.
It carried out Kant's doctrine of the categories as a priori synthetic principles, but removed the limitation by which Kant denied them any constitutive value except in alliance with experience.
Nor are they restricted to the small number which Kant obtained by manipulating the current subdivision of judgments.
The merit of Hegel is to have indicated and to a large extent displayed the filiation and mutual limitation of our forms of thought; to have arranged them in the order of their comparative capacity to give a satisfactory expression to truth in the totality of its relations; and to have broken down the partition which in Kant separated the formal logic from the transcendental analytic, as well as the general disruption between logic and metaphysic. It must at the same time be admitted that much of the work of weaving the terms of thought, the categories, into a system has a hypothetical and tentative character, and that Hegel has rather pointed out the path which logic must follow, viz.
Kant he by no means ignored, and under Schiller's guidance he learned much from him; but of the younger thinkers, only Schelling, whose mystic nature-philosophy was a development of Spinoza's ideas, touched a sympathetic chord in his nature.
See Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopeidie; Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, pp. 89 ff.
Kant has a special use of the term for that part of the Metaphysic of Nature which considers motion and rest as predicates of a judgment about things.
By this critical scepticism Maimon takes up a position intermediate between Kant and Hume.
The main argument of the Transcendentalphilosophie not only drew from Kant, who saw it in MS., the remark that Maimon alone of his all critics had mastered the true meaning of his philosophy, but also directed the path of most subsequent criticism.
From 1801 to 1804 he was professor of philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, after which he succeeded Kant in the chair of logic and metaphysics at the university of Konigsberg.
In language, which he appears to regard as somehow acquired, he finds a solution for the problems of reason which Kant had discussed in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
Kant, he confessed, he could not understand.
He saw the necessity of going back to Kant in the sense of demanding a critical reconsideration of the epistemological problems which Kant had made but a partially successful attempt to solve.
In the first place, it tends to take up an intermediate position between the extremes of Kant and Hegel.
It would make no difference to the form of induction, if, as Kant thought, the notion of causality is a priori; for even Kant thought that it is already contained in experience.
But whether Kant be right or wrong, Wundt and his school are decidedly wrong in supposing " supplementary notions which are not contained in experience itself, but are gained by a process of logical treatment of this experience "; as if our behalf in causality could be neither a posteriori nor a priori, but beyond experience wake up in a hypothetical major premise of induction.
But it will be said that Kant has proved that real truth, in the sense of the " agreement of knowledge with the object," is unattainable, because we could compare knowledge with the object only by knowing both.
Sigwart, indeed, adopting Kant's argument, concludes that we must be satisfied with consistency among the thoughts which presuppose an existent; this, too, is the reason why he thinks that induction is reduction, on the theory that we can show the necessary consequence of the given particular, but that truth of fact is unattainable.
If we add to this logic of " idea," judgment and inference, a doctrine of categories in the modern sense of the word which makes the Theaetetus, in which it first occurs, a forerunner of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we have clearly a very significant contribution to logic even in technical regard.
So long as the relation of the nominal to the real essence has no other background than Locke's doctrine of perception, the conclusion that what Kant afterwards calls analytical judgments a priori and synthetic judgments a posteriori exhaust the field follows inevitably, with its corollary, which Locke himself has the courage to draw, that the natural sciences are in strictness impossible.
After Mill means after Kant and Hegel and Herbart, and it means after the emergence of evolutionary naturalism.
Leibnitz's treatment of the primary principles among truths of reason as identities, and his examples drawn inter alia from the " first principles " of mathematics, influenced Kant by antagonism.
In recognizing, further, that the relation of an actual individual fact to its sufficient ground was not reducible to identity, he set a problem diversely treated by Kant and Herbart.
Kant's Logic. Herbart's admitted allegiance, however, was Kantian with the qualification, at a relatively advanced stage of his thinking, that it was " of the year 1828 " - that is, after controversy had brought out implications of Kant's teaching not wholly contemplated by Kant himself.
Yet it is not a single and unambiguous logical movement that derives from Kant.
Kant's lesson was variously understood.
Grounds for a variety of developments are to be found in the imperfect harmonization of the rationalistic heritage from the Wolffian tradition which still dominates Kant's pure general logic with the manifest epistemological intention of his transcendental theory.
Kant's treatment of technical logic was wholly traditional, and in itself is almost negligible.
With this traditional body of doctrine Kant was, save for matters of minor detail, quite content.
Unless the doctrine of Kant's " transcendental logic " must be held to supply a point of view from which a logical development of quite another kind is inevitable, Kant's mantle, so far as logic is concerned, must be regarded as having fallen upon the formal logicians.
The clue to the discovery of transcendental conditions Kant finds in the existence of judgments, most manifest in mathematics and in the pure science of nature, which are certain, yet not trifling, necessary and yet not reducible to identities, synthetic therefore and a priori, and so accounted for neither by Locke nor by Leibnitz.
Kant's mode of conceiving the activity of thought in the constitution of objects and of their connexion in experience 4 Loc. cit., p.
Wolff's general logic, " the best," said Kant, " that was thought to lie open to an interpretation in conformity with the spirit of his logic, in the sense that the form and the content in knowledge are not merely distinguishable func- Form of Lions within an organic whole, but either separable, or Matter t.
There is too much textual warrant for this interpretation of Kant's meaning.