||||
Igan
•=-*
！=~~~==
==--~--~
•===<！--*
！=<！--~--~
•=-*
--◄-
•=<！--*
！=--~--~
«==~：：~~=+>
=====æ•-
•=-->
−−−−−）-
•-
！==~：-
=æ•=s~=-
•-
•-，
e-s--~，
~*-*
==~~~~）->
！=--~~~~）;
--◄-►
•-s
！=====~：=≡
--◄-►
•-
！=<！--~~~~）;
•=+==~：=≡->
==--~s->
！= <！--*
•->
3
University of Vlic
90.15 OO
A 3
ſe
∞∞∞
| 8
， ， ， ** **
{
º ſº k， ſ ºsaſ * *
; ： : ： ： :
? ！！ ！！ *! 8
Mae ſw. -r-ſ-ſ º 28%，
ſºſſºrºrººaei，
st ： ， ** ** by :q： ***
5. csſ
ſ g. ?!*ſ a r ≤ . . . . ”á · Ľ
y q ſºn tº ºrº ****** ... ►„...º, ， ） » :& ſae. į vivº， º
$ $ 33， ！
*: ſu uſº į.
* , ， ，; * · · · -
agrț¢ © ®-ſºº
ſ tiº， sºº º
ºpe， ſºnº r
ſix ' ** ***
& ！ ... sº
... g （ſ. r* * * *[…]
،§ . , , ， !tº ： * & * &, ！،: … • • • ¶…
• • • • • • ► º ſi ſi¿sº ºsºșišķſ,º）;yº; wſi sº ººº :
« * * *$（'#'）
، ،
º sº»” .
& g & * & * & * *
ſſſſſſſſſſſſſ
， , ， ** ** **
ſ.· ſ. ºſº ſº * **€.'.
Mae'n ºſ g.， ſiiſ tº wºſſºſº¿?ſaeſt-ſae！· |-w：ſae;ººº）
3 （ （ （ （ （ （ ºººººººººººººº.ț¢ £ſae
） {
∞ ºp e ſº ººº * * *
‚ ’ .
ºfae º
ſº º , ، ، ، ، ، ، ، ،§
;...at : 1 · · · · ·,≤ t . pº ș#3
Cºſ’ （ſe ſ
،º asset， ſººgºſº
· · · · · · r af; … .ſº · :）)
ſzor ！！ :）， wnae
, , ， ， ， .gwrs • ce: ſae
œ ·- w ºſ∞ .«， ſºº§§
：* * * .
！∞s：=r}
№t！！！sae，
№ſaeºſaeff **** ? ::
*********
y - ſ.
s tº $ ！ » （ ）
g * * * * *
£

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
ſ||fi||ITTIIIII
fiſiſiiſiiiiiiiiiii
3. -：-
ŒIL
<！--<！= ）， ， ， ， ， ， ， ， ººº ！！ ！！ ！！ ！= ~~~~ ~~~~ • • • • • • • WS: ±
[[
ſaeº.
¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡iiiiiii
[]
\!
º
•* •
ſáİſ;
Amos,
:***
gºua:RSPEninsulatº
¡
NANé
: Tº
Tºllnirut
Tilluminiſtrillºutºnºlulultillinºiſſºlillºtilliºttlit.
sº º – º ºſ º as a a º ºr wºº as a sº sº º sº a º º sº a º ºr a º ºs º º ºs º ºs º ºs º ºs º a º an as a tº a “s as a º ºſº º sº as a dº
º
Eº-








































A
CRITIQUE OF KANT.
BY
KUNO FISCHER,
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG.
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
BY
W. S. HOUGH.
A UTHOR/SED EA GLISH EDITIOAV.
L ON DO N :
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN, LOWREY & CO.,
PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
1888.

Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.

FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE
OR the New Edition of the fifth volume of my History of
Modern Philosophy, which comprises Fichte and his
forerunners, I have written, as an “Introduction to Post-
Kantian Philosophy,” a Critique of Kant, which I herewith
publish separately. The first four chapters are entirely
new ; the fifth gives in revised form the substance of the
first chapter of the original volume on Fichte.
I formerly thought it right, as well as suited to the plan of
my work, to add a short critique of the Kantian philosophy
to the history of the development of post-Kantian philosophy,
—which in all its branches grows out of a criticism of the
former, and to reserve an exhaustive critique till the close
of the whole, when the reader will have become acquainted
with all the standpoints which attempt a solution of the
Kantian problems, and which have thus exercised an in-
fluence upon the Kantian epoch. And I still hold this view,
which is in keeping with the historic method. But I also
wish my work to serve the needs of the immediate present,
and I have thought that a comprehensive and thorough
criticism of Kant's doctrines, which should be guided by a
correct conception of his whole system, might prove espe-
iv. Author's Preface.
cially & propos at this time, and contribute something towards
correcting the many errors about Kant which are spread
abroad in the literature of the day.
On a number of critical questions relating to Kant's chief
work, which I was obliged to investigate at the close of the
third volume of my History of Modern Philosophy, my views
have met with some opposition at the hands of competent
critics. For that reason, if for no other, I felt it incumbent
upon me again to take up those questions, and to carry
out the criticism there begun in the comprehensive manner
at which I have aimed in the present work.
KUNO FISCHER.
HEIDELBERG, 1883.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
ROFESSOR FISCHER'S monumental work on The
History of Modern Philosophy" has been until a recent
date wholly inaccessible to English readers. I have there-
fore thought that his Critique of Kant,f which gives the
main results of the two volumes on Kant in the “History,”
together with the Author's criticism of the Kantian doctrines,
would be acceptable in English dress, not only as a valuable
and suggestive Essay on Kant, but as affording an Intro-
duction to the point of view and method of Professor
Fischer's exposition of Modern Philosophy.
The distinguishing feature of the Critique of Kant is its
* K. Fischer : Geschächte der moderneſe Philosophie, 6 Bóle, München. Fr.
Bassermann. An English version of the first volume on Descartes and A'is
School has appeared within this year. It is earnestly to be hoped that a work
which would render such important service to philosophical culture in England
and America, as the translation of Professor Fischer's entire “History,” may
be carried forward to completion. Meanwhile, the present fragment, translated
nearly two years ago, before this larger undertaking was made known, may
not be valueless. Certainly it is the hope of the translator that it may stimulate
not a few to a study of the larger work.
f K. Fischer : Āritik der Áantischen Philosophie, München, Fr. Bassermann,
1883. As Prof. Fischer tells us in his Preface, this work, besides being pub-
lished separately, also appears as part of the fifth volume of the “History.”
/)
vi Translator's Preface.
comprehension of Kant's whole philosophy. “Exposition of
Kant,” or “Criticism of Kant,” too often means exposition
or criticism of the Critique of Pure Reason. Professor
Fischer everywhere emphasizes the importance of basing
all criticism of Kant upon the whole of his philosophy.
“In criticising the Kantian philosophy,” he tells us (p. 146),
“we should always remember that it by no means issued
from the Critique of Pure Reason as a finished system, but
that, on the contrary, it continued to develop, and reached
results which were not involved in that work, which do
not accord with its fundamental principles, and cannot be
adjusted to them by any attempt at artificial symmetries,”
etc. Again, he says (p. I 56), “If we now compare the
foundation of the Kantian criticism with its completion, or
the Critique of Pure Reason with the Critique of Judgment,
it clearly appears how the work has progressed and been
transformed under the hands of the philosopher. Neither
the doctrine of phenomena, nor that of things-in-themselves,
has remained the same,” etc. We are familiar with the
great transition which Kant's philosophic thinking under-
went when he turned his back upon the old metaphysics,
but it has not always been made sufficiently prominent that
his mental attitude underwent important changes, and made
important advances, even after entering upon the Critical
period. It is the merit of Kuno Fischer to have emphasized
and illustrated so forcibly and fully this development in the
(Critical) philosophy of Kant; and it is this, if we mistake
not, which especially commends his Critique to the attention
of philosophical students, and entitles it to be considered
Translator's Preface. vii
as in some real sense a contribution to the criticism of
Kant.
It is also believed that the Critique will be found a valu-
able General Introduction to the study of Kant. Professor
Fischer's lucid and vigorous style is well-known, and perhaps
nowhere are these qualities better displayed than in the
concise yet comprehensive statement of this epitome. It is
thought that the clear exposition of “Transcendental Ideal-
ism,” and the masterly discussion of the “Thing-in-itself”
—that bugbear of the Kantian Philosophy—will prove
especially helpful.
The translation has aimed to be exact, and has sought
to retain something of the manner of the original. The
notoriously troublesome word Vorstellung has been uniformly
rendered “idea,” this rendering being, perhaps, on the whole,
the most satisfactory. The more nearly equivalent word,
“presentation,” is coming into general use in psychological
discussions, but besides being often unwieldy, its application
is too restricted to meet the more general use of Vorstellung
in the present work. The verb vorzustellen has generally
been rendered “to conceive” or “mentally represent.” The
verbal noun Vorstellen, as in “Gesetze unseres Vorstellens,”
has been uniformly rendered “thought.” In such connec-
tions, this word is used by Professor Fischer as compre-
hending perception and understanding, i.e., as designating
all finite thought, or, all thought conditioned by space and
time, and hence, from the Critical point of view, as being
co-extensive with theoretical, or scientific, or knowing
reason. The reader will please carefully distinguish idea
viii Translator's Preface.
(Vorstellung) from Idea (Idee), which also frequently occurs.
It is thought that no especial apology is needed for the
retention of the word Aufklärung. In quoting from Kant,
Professor Fischer has made use of Hartenstein's first edition
(Leipzig, Leop. Voss. I838).
I am indebted to Dr. W. T. Harris for the kind per-
mission to republish this Critique from the Journal of Specu-
lative Philosophy, where it first appeared. With the
exception of a few unimportant omissions, and a number
of verbal changes, it appears here unaltered.
PARIS, Aug. 31st, 1887.
C O N T ENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE KA/VTIA/W PHILOSOPHY AS DOCTRINE OF
RIWOWLEDGE.
PAGE
I. THE DOCTRINE OF PHENOMENA. TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 2
I. The Origin of Phenomena.
2. The Ideality of Phenomena.
II. OBJECTIONS TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC . tº . IO .
1. First Objection : The Relative Validity of Geometrical Axioms.
2. Second Objection : The Uncritical View of the World,
/
III. THE DOCTRINE OF THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES : g © , 2O
I. The Sensuousness of Pure Reason,
2. The Thing-in-itself.
CHAPTER II.
THE KAAWTIA/V PHILOSOPHY AS poctriNE OF FREEDOM.
I. KANTIAN REALISM AND IDEALISM- : *- :- - -.' . . . . . • 35
II. THE THING-IN-ITSELF As WILL . . . . . . . . . . . 36
I. Intelligible Causality. . * * * * * * * *
2. The Moral Order of the World. . . . .
Y. Contents.
PAGE
III. THE EXOCTRINE OF GOD AND IMMORTALITY . ſº & , 4O
1. Kantian Theism.
2. The Kantian Doctrine of Immortality.
CHAPTER III.
THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY AS DOCTRIZVE OF DEVELOP-
MENT.
I, KANT'S FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS . iº * º e . 63
II. THE WORLD VIEWED AS AN HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT . 67
1. The Natural Development.
2. The Intellectual Development.
3. The Social Development and the Development of Culture.
4. The Moral and Religious Development.
III. THE TELEOLOGICAL VIEW OF THE WORLD . tº ſº . 75
1. The World-development as Phenomenon.
2. The World-development as Teleological Phenomenon,
3. The World-development as Manifestation of Thing-in-itself.
CHAPTER IV.
EXAMINATION OF KANT'S FU/WDAMENTAL DOCTRIZVES.
I. EXAMINATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF KNOWLEDGE . º . 95
1. The Contradiction in the Critique of Pure Reason.
2. The Origin of the Contradiction.
3. The Second Refutation of Idealism. Kant vs. Jacobi.
4. Review of Objections.
II. EXAMINATION OF THE DOCTRINES OF FREEDOM AND DEVELOP-
MENT . & gº § e ſº * $ & * . I2 I
1. Schopenhauer's Critique of the Kantian Philosophy.
2. The Correspondence between the Doctrines of Knowledge
and Freedom.
3. The Contradiction in the Doctrine of Freedom.
4. The Contradiction between the Doctrines of Knowledge and
Development.
.*
Contents. xi
PAGE
III. EXAMINATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF PHENOMENA AND THINGS-
IN-THEMSELVES . . º g e º e o . I 33
I. The Knowableness of Human Reason.
2. The Knowableness of Natural Ends in Man and of Blind
Intelligence.
3. The Knowableness of Life and of Beauty.
4. The Knowableness of Things-in-themselves.
CHAPTER V.
THE PROBLEMS AND LINES OF DEVELOPMENT OF POST-
KANTIA/V PHILOSOPHY,
I. THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF POST-KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY 16o
1. The Metaphysical Problem.
2. The Problem of Knowledge.
II. THE LINES OF DEVELOPMENT OF POST-KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY 169
1. The Re-establishment of the Doctrine of Knowledge.
2. The Threefold Antithesis: Fries, Herbart, and Schopen-
hauer. --
III. THE COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT OF POST-KANTIAN PHILO-
SOPHY . e e º e e e © $ º . I79
I. Metaphysical Idealism.
2. The Threefold Advance: Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel.
3. The Order of Post-Kantian Systems.
CHAPTER I.
THAE AAAW 77AAW PAZZZO.SOPA. Y.A.S DOCTRA NE OF KAVO WZZZ)GAE.
N undertaking a criticism of the Kantian philosophy, it
will be necessary, first of all, to review briefly its fundamental
principles, in order to correct any false or distorted view which
might destroy the conception of the system. For we can justly
criticise only what we have rightly understood. And from a
critical knowledge of the system there follows the establishment
of those new problems contained in it, which determine the
course of the development of post-Kantian philosophy. We
shall proceed, therefore, from the characterization of the
Kantian doctrines to their criticism, and then deduce the pro-
blems which have led to their transformation and development.
The Kantian philosophy as a whole unites in itself three
fundamental features, which must be rightly conceived, and
rightly combined, if we are to appreciate the full peculiarity of
this philosophy which swayed the last century: they are Doctrine
of Knowledge, Doctrine of Freedom, and Doctrine of Development.
Its new doctrine of knowledge conditions its new doctrine of
I
2 Critique of Kant.
freedom, and both of these condition its new doctrine of develop-
ment. These themes are arranged in the order in which they
follow one another in the course of the Critical investigation.
The first problem, and that which determines all the funda-
mental questions of the Kantian inquiry, is concerned with the
origin of human knowledge. There is no simpler expression
with which to designate Kant's fundamental problem, and at the
same time the criterion which guided him in its solution. It
also furnishes us the best means of keeping our bearings in
reference to the nature and method of his system. That this
problem was never fairly recognised, not to, say solved, before
Kant, we have shown in our characterization of the epoch of
Critical philosophy and the pre-Kantian standpoints sufficiently
in detail to be able to refer the reader to that earlier dis-
cussion."
I. THE DocTRINE OF PHENOMENA. TRANSCENDENTAL
IDEALISM.
1. The Origin of Phenomena.
If light is to be thrown upon the origin of human knowledge,
those conditions must be investigated which precede it, which,
consequently, must be contained in the faculties of our intel-
* Vide Fischer : Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, vol. iii., pp. 3–38.
Doctrine of Knowledge. 3
lectual nature, but which are not yet knowledge itself. The
philosophers before Kant, some with full intention, others with
complete self-deception, presupposed these conditions, and thus
treated the explanation of human knowledge dogmatically. They
consequently failed of the solution, and in the very matter of
importance attained nothing. Hence the problem had to be
restated, and so taken that the factors or conditions of know-
ledge were sought by a new investigation of human reason along
that path which Kant called critical or transcendental. Know-
ledge is unexplained as long as its origin remains obscure
This obvious proposition is valid not only in reference to
knowledge, but also in reference to every object of knowledge;
for to know an object means as much as to understand its
origination. Hence there can be no talk about a knowledge of
objects as long as their origin remains unknown.) The inquiry
concerning the origin of human knowledge necessarily coincides,
therefore, with that concerning the origin of our objects of know-
ledge, or of things knowable to us. All our objects of knowledge
are, and must be, phenomena, which we represent to ourselves in
thought; nor does it here come immediately into question
whether the nature of things reveals itself in phenomena ade-
quately, or inadequately, or not at all. The inquiry concerning
the origin of our objects of knowledge is accordingly identical
4. Critique of Kant.
with that concerning the origin of phenomena, or of the
phenomenal world, i.e., those phenomena which appear to the
human reason as such, or which we all conceive and experience
in a common way. The content of these phenomena is our
world of sense. That we have and conceive such a common
world of sense may be regarded as an established and uncon-
troverted fact;(and this common world would be impossible if
we were not compelled to conceive things in a common manner,
or according to the same laws. The inquiry concerning the
origin of human knowledge is thus seen, as soon as it is taken
up seriously and thoroughly, to involve the inquiry concerning ,
the origin of the sense-world, or of that idea of the world
common to us all. The problem of knowledge cannot be recast,
and the conditions involved in its process investigated, without
stating the question in the manner just developed. Just as
we can rightly contemplate the stellar world only after we
have won that point of view from which the situation and
motion of our own earth become apparent, so we can rightly
apprehend and estimate the world of sense only when we
have attained an insight into the standpoint and activity
of our knowing reason. The Critical or Transcendental point
of view in philosophy corresponds to the Copernican in
astronomy.
Doctrine of Knowledge. 5
.--
CIf we ourselves create an object, its origination is as intelligi-
ble to us as our own activity, and the object itself is consequently
completely knowable) If, on the other hand, there is that con-
tained in the object which has and retains the character of
Something given, something which we cannot produce, or which
cannot be reduced to our creative activity, then our knowledge
will come at this point upon an impenetrable barrier. (The
objects of our knowledge are, therefore, just as far completely
knowable as they are our products, i.e., just as far as we are
capable of creating them and of making the process of this
creation clear to our consciousness; only so far does the know-
ableness of things extend) Accordingly, the inquiry concerning
the origin of our knowledge and its objects, the sum-total of
which constitutes our common world of sense, is more exactly
to be taken, so that under the term “origin” shall be under-
stood creation by the factors or capacities of our reason. If our
world of sense is the product of our reason, it is also the com-
pletely intelligible object of our reason ; it is this object only so
far as it is this product. “For one thoroughly comprehends
only what one can himself completely produce according to
notions.” "
* Kant: Kritić der Urtheiſskraft, $68. (Werke, vol. vi., p. 258.) Cf.
Fischer : Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, vol. iv., p. 483.
6 Critique of Kant.
2. The Ideality of Phenomena.
Now Kant has shown that there is an element in all our pheno-
mena which has and retains the character of something given—
namely, our impressions or sensations. These, however, as such,
are not yet objects or phenomena, but only the material out of
which objects and phenomena arise in accordance with the laws
of our thought, or(through the form-giving power of our percep-
tion and understanding.) Thus the sense-world originates from
the material of our impressions, which are so formed and com-
bined, in accordance with the necessary and involuntarily
fulfilled laws of our thought, that we all conceive the same
natural order of things. (t he laws of thought are the funda-
mental forms of perception and understanding—Space, time,
*
and the categories.) The involuntary or unconscious fulfilment
J
of these laws takes place through the imagination, while the
knowledge of them is a matter of critical inquiry.
(since the laws of thought make phenomena and experience,
they must precede the latter, and are, therefore, not given
empirically and a posteriori, but a priori, or transcendentally;
they are the forms, the sensations on the contrary, the stuff or
matter, of phenomena. This matter is received by our reason;
it is given to it, not produced by it; therefore it is not a priori,
Doctrine of Knowledge. 7
but a posteriori. Yet we may not say that our impressions are
given a posteriori or empirically. This inexact and incorrect
expression utterly confounds the Kantian doctrine. What we
draw from experience, or what is given by experience—this is
a posteriori or empirical. Kant expressly teaches: “That which
is borrowed merely from experience is known only a posteriori
or empirically.” ". Now, it appears that since impressions con-
stitute the matter of all phenomena and experience, they belong
to the conditions and elements of experience, hence are con-
tained in it, but not produced by it; they do not result from
experience, but experience from them. That is empirical which
is given to us through experience. Sensations are the material
of experience, and are, therefore, given for it, not produced by
it. Kant explicitly says: “Perception which is related to an
object through sensation is empirical.” An empirical object
presupposes sensation. Although this relation is self-evident,
it is still very necessary to enforce the correct conception of it,
since we are so often compelled to hear: Kant taught that the
form of our knowledge is given a priori, the matter a posteriori
or empirically. If so, then Kant must have contradictorily
taught that the matter for experience is given by experience
* Kant: Åritié der reinen Vernunft. Introd. III., Note. (Werke, vol. ii.,
p. 39.)
* Id. Zºransc. Asth., § I (p. 59, et seq.).
8 Critique of Kant.
Then he has not explained experience, but, like his predecessors,
presupposed it; then the ground of sensations must be sought
in experience; then the thing-in-itself lies hidden in pheno-
mena; then the Kantian philosophy is turned completely upside
down. -
Since our sense-world consists only in phenomena, it is
throughout phenomenal. Since the matter of all phenomena con-
sists in sensations, their form in perceptions and notions, the
elements of the same are through and through subjective ; both
their material and formal constituents are contained in our
knowing reason, and have the character of ideas (the word is .
taken in the broadest sense). Hence all our phenomena are
ideas; they consist in being conceived, and are throughout
ideal. This doctrine of the ideality of all phenomena, and of
their origination from our sense states and forms of reason, is
called 7%anscendental Idealism.
All phenomena are in time ; objective phenomena are also in
space. If they contained anything which was independent of
our ideas, and which was nevertheless in space and time, the
latter could not be the fundamental forms of our ideas, hence
not pure perceptions. Since, now, space and time are pure
perceptions and nothing real in themselves, everything in space
and time must be through and through ideal. (The being
*º-ºr
Doctrine of Knowledge. 9
of all objects in space and time consists in their being
conceived.) From the Kantian doctrine of space and time
there follows, therefore, the doctrine of the ideality of all
phenomena: the Transcendenſal Zsthetic founds that Transcen-
dental idealism which characterizes Kant’s entire doctrine of
knowledge.
SBecause space and time are the forms of perception of our
reason, the pure magnitudes of space and time, and hence—
since there are no other magnitudes—pure magnitudes in general,
are the products of the perceptive or constructive activity of our
reason, and as such they are completely knowable.) The doctrine
of magnitudes or pure mathematics has, therefore, before all
other theoretical sciences, the character of a perfectly evident
and purely rational knowledge. It was this fact which led
Rant to declare, “that in each of the natural sciences
precisely as much exact science can be found as there is
mathematics.” "
A refutation of the Transcendental AEsthetic would affect the
whole doctrine of Transcendental idealism, and thereby the
entire basis and character of the Kantian doctrine of knowledge,
and the Critical philosophy in general. But a false interpreta-
* Kant: Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der AWaturwissenschaft. Preface.
(Werke, vol. viii., p. 444.)
IO Critique of Kant.
tion is no refutation. We have now to concern ourselves with
views which mistake the sense of the Kantian doctrine and
thus attack it with arguments which necessarily prove ineffec-
tual.
II. OBJECTIONS TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC.
To the Kantian doctrine of space and time, as the two funda-
mental forms of perception of our reason, two objections present
themselves, one calling in question the underived or a priori
(transcendental) character of these two ideas, the other their
anthropological character. The first denies the unconditional
validity of mathematical, and especially geometrical, axioms,
and makes the idea of space dependent upon empirical con-
ditions; the second denies the anthropological origin and
character of these fundamental perceptions, in order to be free
to maintain their cosmological and universal validity. It will
suffice, in order to meet these objections, to set the sense of
Kant's doctrine in a clear light.
1. First Objection: The Relative Validity of Geometrical
Axioms.
Rant by no means teaches the unconditional validity of geo-
metrical axioms, but one entirely dependent upon our idea of
Doctrine of Knowledge. I I
space. Why we have this, and not some other perception of
space; why our reason in general is constituted as it is, and not
otherwise, these questions Kant leaves, it is true, not untouched
and uninvestigated, but yet unsolved; indeed, he explicitly
declares them to be incapable of solution. According to his
doctrine, we may regard the 'constitution of human reason, and
the perception of space it involves, as a primitive fact, but may
not characterize this fact as empirical, since experience is the
product of reason, not its condition.
If there were beings possessing perception of space of only
two dimensions, this perception would be for them a primitive
fact, and in consequence they would just as necessarily be
destitute of the ideas of solids, as we must necessarily possess
those ideas. If it be true of plane surfaces, that a straight line
is the shortest distance between two points in the surface, that
between these two points there is only one such line, that two
straight lines cannot inclose space, etc., these propositions are
not nullified by the fact that they do not hold good respecting
the connection of two points upon the surface of a sphere, as,
e.g., the extremities of a diameter. That a definite perception
of space is the luminous ground of knowledge from which certain
insights follow, which under this presupposition are now and for
ever, i.e., apodictically, valid—this was the fact which arrested
I 2 Critique of Kant.
the attention of Kant, and which he was only able to explain by
regarding the original ground of all our ideas of space—space
itself—as an underived form of our thought, or as a fundamental
perception of our reason.
The validity of our mathematical insights is, therefore, according
to the explicit teaching of our philosopher, by no means uncon-
ditioned, but, on the contrary, absolutely dependent upon our
perception of space and time. But under this presupposition it
is apodictic in a way which no other sort of knowledge is. The
character of knowledge changes with the change of its con-
ditions. If we should substitute for our discursive understanding
an intuitive one, and for our sensuous perception an intellectual
perception, knowledge would no longer follow the way of ex-
perience, but see and penetrate everything at a glance.” If we
should substitute for our external perception of space, i.e., the
perception of space of three dimensions, some other, the character
and compass of our mathematical ideas would change accordingly,
but not the apodictical certitude of judgments based upon the
corresponding construction and perceptive insight. This point
contains the fact which at Once characterizes and explains the
nature of mathematics. Hence those objections which found
* Cf. infra, pp. 20-26.
Doctrine of Knowledge. I3
upon another perception of space some other sort of geometry
and its axioms are so little calculated to refute Kant's doctrine
that they much more may and should appeal to it.
If it can be proved that 2 × 2 is not in all cases equal to 4,
that in our perception of a plane surface a straight line does not
in all instances describe the shortest distance between two
points, etc., then for the first time is Kant’s doctrine refuted.
To him pure mathematics seemed the only science in which
knowing and creating, thought and object, were one and the
same. Because pure magnitudes are constructions, or the pro-
ducts of perception, he regarded space and time as the percep-
tions of reason, or as the perceptive activity of reason itself.
Because our notions of magnitude presuppose the perceptive or
sensible knowledge of magnitude, he regarded space and time
as the fundamental forms of sense, not of understanding.
Even if these objections, which seek to base themselves upon
the empirical origin of geometry, were stronger than they are,
they would still prove ineffectual against the doctrine of the
ideality of all phenomena, since they refer only to space, not to
time. If time is a pure idea, or a form of perception, phenomena
in time can contain nothing independent of all ideas. Now, all
phenomena are in time, the objective as well as the subjective.
But if objective phenomena are ideas, then space, since it con-
I4. Critique of Kant.
tains all objective phenomena, can be nothing real in itself, but
only the fundamental form of our external perception. The
transcendental ideality of time establishes the ideality of all
phenomena, even that of objective phenomena, hence also that of
Space.
2. Second Objection : The Uncritical View of the World.
|
The objections which our common consciousness opposes to
the systems of great thinkers are in their eyes generally the most
insignificant of all, yet because of the constant obstruction they
offer to the comprehension and diffusion of their views, they
always prove themselves the most potent; for, like our feelings
and sensations, they are not to be silenced with reasons, and are,
as Schiller says in Wallenstein, “like the women who always come
back to their first word when one has preached reason for
hours.” Such an inflexible and uncritical way of thinking has
always found the most fault, among all the doctrines of Kant,
with the Transcendental Asthetic, since it maintains that space
and time are mere perceptions of human reason, and nothing
apart from the latter. Accordingly, as it seems, space and time
must first appear in the world with our reason, hence with the :
existence of man, and can therefore neither exist before him,
nor endure after him. Now, we are obliged to conceive the
Doctrine of Knowledge. I5
human race as having originated and as perishable, and yet we
cannot possibly conceive the universe, which contains in itself
the conditions of the origin as well as the destruction of the
earth and its inhabitants, without space and time. It seems
highly absurd, therefore, to seek to confine these two funda-
mental conditions of all natural existence to the organization
and limits of human reason. Kant himself, indeed, before
introducing his new doctrine of the ideality of space and time,
taught the mechanical origin and development of the cosmos,
and the natural history of the heavens, and of the earth and its
organic life. But with this view of the world as an historical
development the idealistic doctrine of space and time appears
to stand in the most open opposition. Surely Kant could not
have been sensible of this contradiction, since he has nowhere
made it the subject of especial discussion and explanation.
Meanwhile the natural consciousness, which, with its ideas of
space and time, finds the Kantian perfectly unintelligible, is not
disabused of its objections. But Kant's doctrine of space and
time is the foundation of his doctrine of knowledge, and the way
to his doctrine of freedom. Nothing, therefore, would remain
of the Critical philosophy if this doctrine be rejected.
In fact, there is no contradiction between Kant's view of the
world as a natural development in time and his Critique of Pure
I6 Critique of Kant.
Reason. In the first place, both have different subjects of inquiry:
that of the first is the explanation of the world, that of the second
the explanation of knowledge. The problem of the explanation
of the world is : How did the world in which we live originate
according to natural and mechanical laws P. The problem of the
Critique is: How did this our explanation of the world originate
according to the laws of our reason and thought P. There the
question is regarding the phenomena of nature, here regarding
the knowableness of the same. These phenomena would not be
phenomena, i.e., they would not appear to us, if they were not
intelligible and knowable. The entire fact of our idea of the
world would not exist, if natural objects were inconceivable or con-
tained anything inconceivable. And this would necessarily be the
case, if the elements of which they consisted were not deter-
mined by the character and conditions of our thought. Their
matter is determined by the manifold of our impressions, which
we receive by means of sense, and consequently regard as given ;
these impressions are the matter of phenomena. Their form is
determined by the laws of our thought, which we regard as pure
forms of reason. and the content of which Kant called pure
reason; these laws constitute the form of phenomena. Pheno-
mena, therefore, are through and through ideas. Phenomena,
objects of experience, and the progressive Science of Experience,
Doctrine of Knowledge. 17
are all created from the matter of our sensations in accordance
with the rational laws of our thought, the latter having partly
the character of constitutive, partly that of regulative, principles.
These laws determine the world of phenomena, because they
constitute it. They are, therefore, within the realm of pheno-
mena, world-conditions or world-principles. But their meaning is
entirely mistaken when only an anthropological or psychological
validity is ascribed to them. They cannot be established by
psychology, because they first make psychology itself possible.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is no anthropological inves-
tigation.
And here those objections which our unscientific view of the
world oppose to the Critical philosopher and his doctrine of
space and time refute themselves. Space and time are the laws
of perception imposed by our reason, and as such they determine
the entire world of sense, because they first make it in general
possible. Their cosmical or universal validity—which the
natural sense so rightly demands and holds fast—is therefore so
far from being disproved by the Critique of Pure Reason that it
is, the rather, thereby first really established. At the same time,
however, this validity is limited in such a way that there may
still be something independent of space and time, while the
common consciousness, uncritical and thoughtless as it is, regards
2
I8 Critique of Kant.
space as the huge box, and time as the vast stream, in which
everything that is must be contained.
Man, as a natural individual, or as anthropology regards him,
belongs to the phenomena of nature, and is a part of the world of
sense. He is the result of a definite stage in the world's history
—a stage which forms a link in the chain of cosmic changes, and
which presupposes a succession of earlier stages. That the
origin and development of man must be regarded and investi-
gated as natural, historical facts, Kant was so far from denying
that he rather proposed to himself that thesis; and he demon-
strated by his criticism of reason, and more especially by his
doctrine of space and time, that its necessity follows from the
conditions of our knowledge. Natural, historical man is, there-
fore, by no means the sole proprietor of space and time; they
are not dependent upon him, but he, like all phenomena in
general, is conditioned by them. When space and time are
called the pure perceptions of human reason, it is important to
distinguish the sense in which this word is taken; it denotes
man as the knowing subject, not as one of the objects of know-
ledge. As the subject of all knowledge—so far as we are
capable of investigating the latter—our reason is the con-
dition of all objects in general, or of the entire world of
sense, in which in the course of time the natural human
Doctrine of Knowledge. I9
race appears and develops itself in successive stages, each of
which necessarily implies a preceding and a succeeding
stage. For all phenomena are in time; each has its time-
duration, before and after which there is time, since they
all originate and pass away, with the single exception of
matter, which persists. But the knowing subject is not
in time, but time in it, for time is the fundamental form of
sensuous thought.
If, on the other hand, space and time be regarded, with
Schopenhauer, as the forms of perception of our intellect, and
at the same time be declared to be animal functions of the
brain, then there arises for the first time that absurdity which
obviously describes a circulus wifiosus—viz., space and time are
made dependent upon a condition, which, like the animal
organism and the stages of nature and animal life preceding it,
is itself only possible under the conditions of space and time.
If the latter are, as Schopenhauer teaches, the “principium
individuationis,” i.e., the ground of all multiplicity and diversity,
then they cannot possibly be, as, notwithstanding, Schopen-
hauer also teaches, the products or functions of individual
organisms. Nor was Schopenhauer ever able successfully to
explain away or to solve this erroneous circle, grounded as it is
in a fundamental feature of his doctrine.
2O Critique of Kant.
III. THE DOCTRINE OF THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES.
1. The Sensuousness of Pure Reason.
The knowing subject is not in space and time, but these in
it; hence the entire world in space and time is pure pheno-
menon or idea ; it is through and through phenomenal and
ideal. This doctrine constitutes the Transcendental Idealism,
which founds and characterizes the Kantian doctrine of
knowledge. If, now, in the knowing subject there was nothing
given, but, on the contrary, everything was created by it,
the world of phenomena would be entirely its product; its
notions would be immediate perceptions, its faculty of know-
ledge would consist in perceptive thought, i.e., in an intuitive
understanding, or in an intellectual perception, to which every-
thing it creates appears at once as object or thing. Then
knowing and creating would be completely identical, then there
would be no difference between sense and understanding,
perception and thought, objects and notions, phenomena and
things-in-themselves.
Such a faculty of knowledge is not in itself impossible or
inconceivable, but it is not the one we possess; (ours does not
create things, but develops itself and its objects) Kant taught
repeatedly, and indeed always, with the utmost explicitness,
Doctrine of Knowledge. 2 I
that our understanding is discursive, not intuitive, our perception
sensuous, not intellectual. Accordingly he carefully distinguished
between sense and understanding, and explained human know-
ledge in such a way that (it is from the matter of impressions
and sensations, which have and retain the character of some-
thing given, that we produce phenomena, and the knowledge of
phenomena, or experience.)
Intuitive understanding is creative, and therefore divine; but
human understanding is not intuitive ; nor is it pure subject, for
to the character of human reason, as Kant investigates it in his
Critique, there belongs sensuousness, i.e., the capacity of re-
ceiving, and being sensible of, impressions, or of being affected
by a manifold. Sense must not be identified with the organs of
sense, which are its medium, nor with the definite sensations
they convey, since these belong to the constitution of the human
body. Yet our sensations as such presuppose a faculty of
sense or receptivity, which enables us to be affected by a variety
of impressions, and without which the matter of knowledge
would fail, i.e., knowledge would remain empty, hence in general
not exist at all. (This sensuousness Kant ascribes to pure reason,
since it is not, in the first place, a question of the sort of
affections or the quality of impressions, but only of the capacity
itself of receiving something given.S Our reason must form and
22 Critique of Kant.
work up the given material, according to the laws of its percep-
tion and thought, into phenomena, experience, and empirical
knowledge.
Our knowing reason would be creative, hence divine, if it
were not sensuous, i.e., capable of being affected by impressions,
which it must receive, and which it can only combine and
systematize. It is therefore not generative of the matter of
knowledge, but merely form-giving, not creative, but architectonic.
Since it does not make the matter of knowledge, but only
receives it, it is receptive, and in this respect not original, but
dependent. And the entire organization of its knowing faculty
is conditioned by its sensuousness. Sense is one faculty, under-
standing another; this is receptive of material, that form-giving
and productive; this is passive, that active ; this receives im-
pressions, that creates notions. Hence our perceptive faculty
is not intellectual, but sensuous, our understanding not intuitive,
but discursive, i.e., it is obliged to take up its perceptions one
by one, and proceed by connecting part with part, comparing .
perception with perception, and by uniting these to pass from
perceptions to notions and judgments. Consequently the objects
of our knowing reason are not entirely its own products; they
are constructed out of matter and form ; the former is given to
it, the latter is given or added by it. Our knowledge of things.
Doctrine of Knowledge. 23
(objects), therefore, consists in a gradual experience; it is not
complete in an instant, but originates and develops itself. We
are obliged to think objects in succession, and hence alse in co-
existence; since nothing would persist in a mere succession, thus
also nothing could be thought. Space and time are therefore
the fundamental conditions, or, since nothing can be thought
without them, the fundamental forms, of our thought ; they are,
since every perception must be combined part by part, the
fundamental forms of perception, and since our perceptive
faculty is not intellectual, but sensuous, the fundamental forms
of sense: in short, they are the fundamental perceptions of our
Tea,SOI).
With a creative or divine reason, knowing and creating, idea
and thing, must be one and the same. It could be conditioned
by neither space nor time. Our reason is distinguished from
the divine by its sensuousness; with it, space and time are the
necessary forms of all thought and of all knowledge. We our-
selves are the only sensuous-rational beings which we know.
Hence sensuous reason is for us equivalent to human reason.
And thus, since sense belongs to the pure reason which Kant
investigated in his Critique, it was called by him—although the
only reason knowable to us—human reason. Now sense, as the
capacity of receiving material, is of a dependent and derived
24. Critique of Kant.
nature. And this must be true of the entire organization and
constitution of our knowing reason, since without sensuousness
it would be an entirely different one from what it is."
Let us hear Kant himself. Quite at the beginning of the
Transcendental Afºsthetic, he says: “The capacity of receiving
ideas in the manner in which we are affected by objects I call
sºns. By means of sense, therefore, objects are given to us,
and it alone furnishes us perceptions; objects are thought, how-
ever, by the understanding, and it is from the latter that motions
arise.” “The action of an object upon the faculty of repre-
sentation—that is, so far as we are affected by it—is sensation.
Perception which is related to an object through sensation is
empirical. (The indeterminate object of an empirical perception
I call phenomenon. That in phenomena which corresponds to
sensation I call the matter of phenomena; that, however, which
makes it possible that the manifold of phenomena be disposed
in certain relations I call the form of the same. Since that
whereby sensations can alone be ordered, and set in definite
form cannot itself again be sensation,” So, although the matter
* On the discursive and intuitive understanding, Cf. Fischer : Gesch. d. 1z.
Philos., vol. iv., pp. 494--498.
* Kant reads Emg/indung (sensation) here, not Ærscheinung (phenomenon),
as given in the text of Prof. Fischer. Also in the following quotation, begin-
ning “It is not necessary,” etc., the edition of Benno Erdmann has been
Doctrine of Knowledge. 25
of all phenomena is indeed, given only d posteriori, the form of
the same must, on the contrary, already lie à priori as an entirety
in the mind, and, consequently, must be capable of being con-
sidered wholly apart from sensation.” ". At the close of the
Transcendental &sthetic, Kant says: “It is not necessary, either,
that we limit perception in space and time to human sensibility.
It may be that all finite thinking beings are necessarily like man
in this respect (although that cannot be determined), yet it would
not cease, even on account of this universality, to be sense, be-
cause it is a derived (intuitus derivatus), not an original (intuitus
originarius), hence not an intellectual, perception. Such a
perception seems, on the ground just brought forward, to
belong only to the Primitive Being, not, however, to a being
dependent as well in its existence as in its perception, which
latter determines the relation of its existence to given ob-
jects. This last observation in our AEsthetic theory, how-
ever, must be regarded merely as an explanation, not as any-
thing fundamental.””
followed, instead of reading in the affirmative (It is necessary) with the edition
from which Prof. Fischer quotes (Vid. Preface. Hartenstein in his second
edition also makes the correction), as the sense certainly requires this reading.—
TR. .*
* Kant : Kritik d. 7. Vermunſt. Transc. AElementarlehre, Part I., § 1. (Werke,
vol. ii., pp. 59, 60.)
* Ibid.: $81, (vol. iii, p. 86, et seq.)
26 Critique of Kant.
2. The Thing-in-itself.
Our knowing reason is accordingly not creative in reference
to the matter of all phenomena and knowledge, but merely
receptive. It receives this matter in virtue of its sensuousness;
hence the latter is dependent and conditioned. And here arises
the necessary inquiry concerning the origin of our impressions
or sensations. Since these are the material which our faculties
of knowledge mould and form, they cannot themselves proceed
from the latter, but are rather the necessary conditions by which
these faculties are aroused and set into activity. And, since
A v. XXX2 v. *s-,
they constitute the matter of all phenomena, we cannot derive
them from phenomena, without falling into the erroneous circle
of first deducing phenomena from impressions, and then im-
pressions from phenomena. Indeed, they can in no way
originate from the world of sense, since the world of sense first
arises from them. From this it appears that the origin of our
sensations is not itself a phenomenon, and hence does not con-
stitute a knowable object. It is the subject of necessary inquiry,
but not that of knowledge. It is something which precedes and
underlies all experience, but which itself can never be felt, con-
ceived, nor experienced. This unknown and unknowable object
is that transcendental X which the Kantian doctrine must neces-
Doctrine of Knowledge. 27
sarily have met with in the course of its inquiry beyond, or, more
exactly, within the limits of human reason.
There must be something which causes the impressions we
receive, something which underlies our sensibility, and there-
with the whole constitution of our knowing reason, something
therefore which also underlies all phenomena and the entire
sense-world. But precisely on this account it cannot itself be
anything sensible, cannot be a phenomenon, cannot be an
object of knowledge. This “supersensible substratum ” Kant
calls Thing-in-itself, designating thereby that transcendental X
which the Critique of Pure Reason introduces, and which it sees
itself, on the grounds pointed out, obliged to introduce into its
calculation. It is called thing-in-itself in distinction from all
phenomena. If our reason were not sensuous, but divine, not
receptive, but creative, then its ideas would be things them-
selves, then there would be no difference between phenomena
and things-in-themselves. Since, however, it is sensuous, space
and time are the fundamental forms of its perception, its objects
of knowledge are phenomena, and these merely ideas, hence
not things-in-themselves. Consequently, in the Critical investi-
gation of reason, we must distinguish between phenomena and
things-in-themselves with the utmost precision, regarding every
attempt to unite the two as the cause of irremediable confusion.
28 Critique of Kant.
Now, because the objects which relate themselves to the
thing-in-itself, or the relations which the latter sustains, are so
numerous and so unlike, we see why the thing-in-itself appears
in Kant's teaching in so many and different connections. For
it is the supersensible substratum at once of our sensibility and
of the whole constitution of our knowing reason; hence it is the
hidden ground of all phenomena, the objective as well as the
subjective, and therefore the substratum of the entire sense.
world. In reference to sense, which is merely receptive of the
matter of knowledge, it appears as the matter-giving principle,
or as the cause of our sensations. In reference to the constitu-
tion of our knowing reason in general, it is represented as the
hidden ground of our mode of perception and thought, i.e., as
the cause of our perceiving and thinking, and mentally repre-
senting to ourselves objective and subjective phenomena. Since
phenomena are in space and time, and hence consist throughout
in external relations, the thing-in-itself is called, in distinction
therefrom, “the inner, that which belongs to objects in them-
selves,”—an expression which needs careful attention, lest the
radically false impression be received that the thing-in-itself lies
hidden somewhere in phenomena. The meaning is rather, that
the thing-in-itself is not external, not related to another, hence
not in space and time at all. Since all phenomena are empirical
Doctrine of Knowledge. 29
objects, the thing-in-itself is called in distinction therefrom “fhe
transcendental object.” Since all phenomena are ideas, and not
objects external to and independent of thought, the thing-in-
itself is called “ the true correlate of our ideas.” And, since
phenomena alone are objects of knowledge, the thing-in-itself
denotes the bounds of our knowledge, or “the limiting motion of
our understanding.” In all these manifold meanings we see no
self-transforming Proteus, but one and the same thing, which
the philosopher is obliged to exhibit from different points of
view according to the various relations which it sustains.
Let us take Kant's own words. He says in the doctrine of
space: “The transcendental notion of phenomena in space is
a reminder of the Critical philosophy that in general nothing
which is perceived in space is a thing-in-itself, nor space a form
of things, which might be in itself in Some way peculiar to them,
but that objects in themselves are for us, indeed, unknown, and
what we call external objects are nothing other than pure ideas
of our sense, the form of which is space, the true correlate of
which, however, i.e., the thing-in-itself, is not thereby known,
nor can be known ; and for the latter no quest, likewise, is made
in experience.” + “For the substantiation of this theory of the
* Kant : Ār. d, r. Vernunſ. Zr. Æsth. § 3. (Werke, vol. ii., p. 68, seq.)
3O Critique of Kant.
ideality of external as well as internal sense, hence of all objects
of sense as pure phenomena, the observation may be of especial
service, that everything in our knowledge which belongs to
perception contains nothing except mere relations—namely, the
places in a perception (extension), change of place (motion),
and the laws according to which this change of place is deter-
mined (moving forces). What, however, is present in a place,
or what beyond the change of place is occasioned in the things
themselves, is not thereby given. Now, a thing-in-itself is not
known through mere relations. Hence it is to be carefully
noted that, since nothing save pure ideas of relation are given
to us through external sense, this also can contain in its idea
only the relation of an object to the subject, and not the inner
nature, that which belongs to the object in itself. With internal
perception the conditions are the same.””
The substratum of our external and internal perception is also
that of our external and internal phenomena, that of the consti-
tution of our knowing reason in general, and of our sensibility
and understanding ; hence it is the ground of our spatial ideas
as well as of our thought. Kant says: “That something which
underlies objective phenomena, and which so affects our sense
* Kant: Kr. d, r. Vernunft. Tr, Æsth. § 8. (p. 83).
Doctrine of Knowledge. 3I
that it receives the ideas of space, matter, form, etc —this some-
thing, regarded as noumenon (or, better, as transcendental
object), might also be at the same time the subject of thought
although, through the mode in which our sensibility is thereby
affected, we receive no perception of idea, will, etc., but only
of space and its determinations. This something, however, is
not extended, not impenetrable, not composite, since all these
predicates belong only to sense and its perceptions, so far as we
are affected by such (otherwise unknown) objects.” 1
That we mentally represent objective and subjective pheno-
mena, that we have sensibility and understanding, that we per-
ceive and think—herein consists the organization of our knowing
reason. We discover that, but not why, our reason is constituted
as it is, and not otherwise. To take Kant’s own words again :
“The notorious question concerning the community of thought
and extension would consequently, if everything imaginary be ex-
cluded, amount to the following: How is external perception—
namely, that of space (a filling of the same, form and motion)
—in a thinking subject in general possible % But this question it is
impossible to answer. And this gap in our knowledge can
never be filled, but only in so far characterised, that external
* Kant : K?, d. r. Vernunft. Tr. Dialektik : Krit, 2 Paralog, (p. 667).
32 Critique of Kant.
phenomena be ascribed to a transcendental object which is the
cause of this sort of ideas—an object, however, which we by no
means know, and of which we can never obtain a notion. In
all the problems that may arise in the field of experience, we
treat these phenomena as objects in themselves, without troub-
ling ourselves about the original ground of their possibility (as
phenomena). If, however, we go beyond the limits of experi-
ence, the notion of a transcendental object becomes necessary.”
The philosopher Eberhard, in Halle, who held that after the
Leibnitzian doctrine of knowledge Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason was unnecessary and Superfluous, made the criticism upon
the latter that it was not able to explain the matter of sense—
namely, sensations—without things-in-themselves. “Choose
which we will,” he says, “we come upon things-in-themselves.”
Rant invalidates this stricture by at once admitting and correct-
ing it. He replies: “Now that is precisely the constant assertion
of Criticism; only it does not set the ground of the matter of
sensuous ideas anew in things, as objects of sense, but in some-
thing supersensible, something which lies aſ the basis of sense,
and of which we can have no knowledge. Criticism says:
‘Objects, as things-in-themselves, give the matter for empirical
* Kant : Kr. d. 7. Vermunſt. Betrachtung über d. Summe d. reinen Seelen-
lehre. (Werke, vol. ii., p. 696, seq.)
Doctrine of Knowledge. 33
perceptions (they contain the ground for determining the
representative faculty according to its sensuousness), but they
are not that matter.’”
In order to a just estimate and criticism of the Kantian philos-
ophy, it is of vital importance that the doctrine of the thing-in-
itself be understood in its origin and development as well as in
its scope. It too commonly happens that it is falsely and one-
sidedly taken, as when things-in-themselves are referred merely
to the objects of knowledge or phenomena, and transferred to
them, as if they were contained in them, like the kernel in the
shell, only that they remain hidden from us as sentient beings.
The Empiricists, who, like Bacon and Locke, granted the validity
of no other than sensible knowledge, declared things-in-them-
selves to be unknowable, while the Rationalists, as Descartes
and Leibnitz, held sense to be confused understanding; clear
and distinct thinking, on the contrary, to be the true form of
knowledge, and therefore things-in-themselves to be the true
objects of knowledge. Then thing-in-themselves and phe-
nomena are the same objects; when perceived, they are things
as they appear to us; when clearly and distinctly thought,
* Wide Kant : Ceber eine AEmtdeckung mach der alle neue Árifié der
Vernunft durch eine àltere entbehrlich gemacht werden soll (1790). Werke, vol.
iii., p. 352.
*. ºf
3
34 Critique of Kant.
on the contrary, they are things as they are in themselves. The
same thing is, therefore, according to the way in which it is
apprehended—whether by sense or by understanding, whether
obscurely or distinctly—phenomenon or thing-in-itself. In
precisely this confusion Kant saw the fundamental error of the
Dogmatic philosophy, and especially that of its metaphysics.
According to him, both the above notions are to be absolutely
distinguished. The thing-in-itself is the supersensible substratum
of phenomena, because it is that of our knowing reason, because it
is that of our sensibility, which has, but does not create, sensa-
tions, and receives impressions, which can be caused neither by
itself nor by one of its objects.
CHAPTER II.
7 HAE KAAV77AAV PHZZO.SOPAZY AS DOC 7"RZAVE OF APRAEAEADOM.
I. KANTIAN REALISM AND IDEALISM.
T is not our purpose at this point to inquire whether the fun-
damental doctrines of Kant accord or discord with one
another, whether, and in how far, they are uncontroverted, or
indeed recognized as incontrovertible. We desire here simply
to fix in mind that the recognition of the reality of things-in-
themselves, and of their distinction from phenomena, is an
e essential part of those doctrines. This recognition is related to
the doctrine of the ideality of phenomena, as the thing-in-itself
to the latter, and it thus forms in the doctrinal edifice of Kant
at once the substructure and the necessary completion of
Transcendental idealism. To deny or misapprehend the reality
Of things-in-themselves and their distinction from phenomena
means to shake the foundations of the Critical philosophy.
When the reality of things-in-themselves is indeed affirmed, but
yet they are not properly distinguished from phenomena, there
arises that confusion of both which constitutes the character
36 Critique of Kant.
and fundamental error of the Dogmatic philosophy. If there
were merely things-in-themselves, and no phenomena, all know-
ledge would be impossible. If there were merely phenomena
and no things-in-themselves, the sense-world we conceive would
be a dream—a dream common to us all, to be sure, and harmonious
in itself, but yet a purely subjective image without actual ground
or consistence. The knowableness of the world consists in its
ideality, i.e., in its being through and through capable of repre-
sentation in thought, and in its being so represented. This
characteristic the Critical philosophy, as Transcendental idealism,
teaches and establishes. The reality of the world consists in
that which underlies all phenomena—since it underlies all ideas
and all faculties of thought—and which is designated by the
Critique as “thing-in-itself.” In this sense the doctrine of phe-
nomena may be called the Kantian Idealism, the doctrine of
things-in-themselves the Kantian Realism.
II. THE THING-IN-ITSELF AS WILL.
1. Intelligible Causality.
Kant regards things-in-themselves as the supersensible sub-
| stratum of our knowing reason and sense-world, as the matter-
giving principle, or as the cause of our sensations. He ascribes
to them, accordingly, a causality which is to be taken in an
Doctrine of Freedom. 37
entirely different sense from that category of cause which
determines the succession of phenomena in time, and thereby
both renders our experience possible and creates it, but which
also, precisely on that account, has validity only within
the latter. This notion is a rule of the understanding, which
may be applied only to phenomena, hence not to things-in-
themselves. Kant knew this, and taught it. We must not
assume that such a thinker has entangled himself in his own
doctrines in so clumsy and apparent a manner as composedly
to apply to things-in-themselves the very same notion which he
had shown to be invalid for them. Kant distinguishes two sorts
of causality, which are inherently and essentially unlike: “the
conditioned or sensible,” and “the unconditioned or intelligi-
ble.” The former is valid only for phenomena, the succession
of which in time is determined and constituted by it alone; the
latter is not valid for phenomena, and is independent of all
time. Now, things-in-themselves are timeless and causal;
hence their causality is the unconditioned and intelligible,
which, according to Kant’s doctrine, consists in Freedom or in
pure will; and this constitutes the moral principle of the world.
2. The Moral Order of the World.
There is still another world than the sensible and temporal
38 Critique of Kant.
world, namely, an intelligible world, which is completely,
independent of the former—a world which must not be thought
of and sought after as a heavenly world of spirits existing
somewhere beyond our common experience, yet of necessity still
in space and time—this would be the way to Swedenborg's
Mysticism—but one which we recognize as the moral world, that
in which the laws of freedom find their recognition and fulfil-
ment. The intelligible world is the World as Will, the sensible
world is the World as Idea (Vorstellung); the former is related to
the latter as thing-in-itself to phenomena; in other words, it is
the thing-in-itself, and lies at the basis of the sense-world; hence
it is independent of the latter, while this is dependent upon it.
But just as the sensible world is related to the intelligible, so our
faculty of knowledge must be related to the will, or, what is the
same thing, our theoretical to our practical reason ; the latter is
independent of the former, while the former is dependent
upon the latter. Herewith is that relation determined which
Kant called the “Primacy of Practical Reason.” He saw himself
obliged to hold the reality and causality of things-in-themselves,
and to identify the latter, as intelligible causality, with freedom
or pure will, and thus to teach the primacy of practical reason.
In other words, the true or real principle of the world is, accord-
ing to Kant, not knowing reason, but will.
Doctrine of Freedom. 39
The goal of our will is, according to the law of freedom, the
purity of volition. This goal is to be striven for and attained ;
the endeavour finds its expression in the purification of the will,
which constitutes the real foundation-theme of the moral world.
Since, now, without the sense-world no sensuous motives or
appetites could be operative in us, hence no material of purifica-
tion given, it becomes clear that the entire sense-world,
unobstructed as to its own laws, constitutes a necessary member
and an integral part of the moral world; that it is compassed
and swayed by the latter; and that the laws of nature are
subordinate to the laws of freedom, although they are thereby in
no way suspended or annulled. As thus understood, our
sensible life acquires a moral meaning, and becomes a moral
phenomenon, in which a definite disposition, i.e., the will in a
definite state of purity or impurity, reveals and manifests itself.
The constancy of this disposition makes our moral conduct seem
necessitated, i.e., to be the consequence of our given empirical
character. But since it is the disposition, or tendency of the will,
which appears in our empirical character and forms its principle,
the latter must be a phenomenon of will, or a willed phenomenon,
i.e., a phenomenon of the intelligible character or of freedom.
Here we see how Kant's doctrine of intelligible and empirical
character necessarily follows from his doctrine of freedom and
4O Critique of Kant.
purification. (w ithout the ideality of time and space there is no
possibility of a sense-world, but also no possibility of feedom)
Without a sense-world and freedom there is no necessity for the
purification of the will, no moral phenomena of a sensible and
empirical sort, hence no empirical character as a manifestation of
the intelligible, and no community of freedom and necessity in
the conduct and characters of men. Because Kant first made this
unity of freedom and necessity intelligible, Schopenhauer was led
to call it “the greatest of all the contributions of human thought.”
And since the way to this insight could be won only through the
doctrine of space and time, the same writer extolled the Tram-.
scendental Asthetic and the doctrine of intelligible and empirical
character as “the two diamonds in the crown of Kantian fame.”
III. THE DOCTRINE OF GOD AND IMMORTALITY.
1. Kantian Theism.
The Idea and recognition of the moral order of the world
involves the question regarding the original ground of the same,
as also that regarding the attainability of its highest end,
namely, the purity of the will. The moral author of the world is
God, and the purity of the will, or moral perfection, is not to be
attainable in a temporal, but only in an eternal life, i.e., through
the immortality of the soul. According to Kant, the Ideas of
Doctrine of Freedom. 4. I
Freedom, God, and Immortality go hand in hand. In the
Critique of Pure Reason they are merely Ideas (Ideen), but in
the Critique of Practical Reason they have the value of realities;
and, indeed, it is only through the reality of freedom and the
moral order of the world that the other two Ideas also are
realized or made morally certain. It is utterly impossible, from
the point of view of the world of sense, to comprehend and
demonstrate the existence of freedom, God, and immortality.
Indeed, all proofs directed to that end with the means furnished
by our theoretical reason must necessarily fail. Critical inquiry
reveals the fact that these objects are incapable of demonstra
tion, while at the same time it leaves the question of their
reality untouched. Now, the doctrine of the ideality of time
and space, and of the sense-world, has already established the
possibility of freedom. But since time is purely our idea, we
can distinguish ourselves from it, and must do so. There is,
then, something in us which is independent of all time; this
timeless something is freedom; and as it is the only condition
under which the fact of our moral self-consciousness and the
activity of the moral law within us can take place, not only the
possibility, but the actuality of freedom is to be affirmed. The
moral order of the world consists in the fulfilment of the laws of
freedom. Without this moral order they would remain empty;
42 Critique of Kant.
they would not be laws, and freedom itself would be a mere
fancy. There follows, from the moral order of the world, to
which the sensible must be subordinate, the reality of the moral
ground of the world (God), and the attainability of the moral
end of the world, which includes in itself the perfection of the
will, and therefore immortality. These are the so-called moral
arguments with which Kant sought to demonstrate, through
freedom, the primacy of practical reason and the necessary
fulfilment of its postulates—the existence of God and the
immortality of the soul.
These moral proofs have won for Kant many adherents, on
account of their religious importance and the ease with which
they are comprehended; but, owing to their apparent inconsis-
tency with the results of the first Critique, they have found
antagonists as well, who have made them the subject now of
honest criticism, now of ridicule. It has been asserted that
Kant sought in the Critique of Practical Reason, but with weak
arguments, to raise up again as a makeshift for weak souls what
he had already destroyed, and with conclusive argument, in the
Critique of Pure Reason. Among the writers on the Critical
philosophy, Schopenhauer, in particular, is the representative Of
this view, and the most pronounced opponent of Kantian
theism.
Doctrine of Freedom. 43
The doctrine of freedom and the absolute supremacy of the
moral order of the world, or the doctrine of the primacy of prac-
tical reason, rests with Kant upon firm ground. The moral
proof for the existence of God stands or falls with this doctrine.
Regarding the theoretical demonstrability of God’s existence,
Kant held different views at different stages of his philosophical
inquiry. In his pre-Critical period he sought to restate these
proofs and give them new cogency; in the Critique of Pure
A'eason he not only denied, but refuted them, or demonstrated
their impossibility; and in the Critique of Practical Reason, as
well as in that of Teleological /udgment, he neither abandons nor
modifies this last position, but, in perfect agreement with it,
deduces—using the well-known and evident arguments—from
the necessity of the moral order of the world, the necessity of
the moral ground of the world, or the existence of God.
Accordingly, in what concerns the question of the demonstrability
of the divine existence, we find no contradiction in the different
views of Kant, but a logically consistent advance. But, however
differently he may have thought on this point—namely, the
knowableness of God—there was not a moment in the course of
the development of his philosophical convictions when he
denied, or even only doubted, the reality of God. And there is
still a second and a third point which remained unquestionably
44 Critique of Kant.
certain to him, and even at the time of his most sceptical
tendency, when he ridiculed Swedenborg's dreams of a spirit-
world and of our intercourse with it : I mean his conviction
that morality is independent of every sort of scientific knowledge,
as well as of every doubt that may shake the latter; and that
the spiritual world - as well as spiritual intercourse consists
merely in a moral community, or in the moral order of the
world."
2. The Kantian Doctrine of Immortality.
On the other hand, the way in which the summum bonum is
conceived in the Critique of Practical Reason—the notion of it
being produced with the aid of the Ideas of God and immor-
tality—involves a series of difficult and doubtful considerations.
And it will be advisable, in order to gain a correct apprehension
of the matter, that we take up our criticism of this doctrine of
Kant's along with its characterization. For, since the Critical
philosophy sees itself necessitated from the standpoint of its
entirely new view of the world to affirm immortality, it is all-
important that this affirmation be properly understood.
The summum bonum is recognised by Kant as the unification
of virtue and happiness, as that state of blessedness which is
"Cf. K. Fischer : Gesch. d, n. Philos., vol. iii., pp. 229, 230, 252-254, 264, 265.
Doctrine of Freedom. 45
merited by our worthiness, and appointed us by the justice of
God. It is because the purity of the will must be attained, and
yet cannot be attained in this our present life, that the Critique
of Practical Reason postulates a future life, i.e., the continuance
and permanence of our personal existence, or the immortality of
the soul. We will test this conception of the matter exactly
according to the canons which the Critical philosophy prescribes
for us.
In the first place, it is not at all clear why purity of disposi-
tion should be absolutely unattainable during our earthly exist-
ence. In reality, Kant has himself contradicted this assertion
in his doctrine of religion. For he there exempts from these
conditions not merely the ideal Saviour, but the historical
person Jesus, expressly declaring that His example would not
be practical and effectual if this purity should be either denied
Him or ascribed to Him as a supernatural, miraculous power."
Hence the proposition that the goal of our moral perfection can
be attained only in a future and eternal life does not stand proof.
This objection aside, it is further not evident in what respect
the permanence of our existence is to help the matter. Perma-
nence, like duration in general, is a time-determination, and as
"Cf. K. Fischer: Gesch, d. m. Philos., vol. iv., pp. 309, 3IO, 321, 322.
46 Critique of Kant.
such it falls within time and the sense-world. If, now, moral
perfection is not attainable in the present sense-world, owing to
the temporal and sensible nature of our existence, then it will
remain unattainable in the future sense-world, since the condi-
tions of its impossibility are in no way removed. The eternal life
must be distinguished from the temporal : even endless existence
is not to be regarded as eternal life. And it is much to be re-
gretted that Kant in his doctrine of immortality did not make
this distinction. He demands “an existence and personality of
the same rational being enduring to infinity.”
But if immortality is recognised as continued existence or
/uture life, we must ask: How can our personality still continue
within time and the sense-world after our bodily existence has
ceased ? By a second earthly birth (transmigration of Souls),
or by removal to another, perhaps less dense, planet, as Jupiter,
for example—what Kant himself in earlier life held to be
possible 1–or by wandering through the starry heavens, or how
else P. Such questions present themselves, and yet they admit of
no answer, or only a fanciful one; so that the doctrine of the
immortality of the Soul, considered as a lasting duration of our
personal existence in time and in the sense-world, is degraded
* Cf. Fischer: Gesch. d. m. Philos., vol. iii., p. 148.
Doctrine of Freedom. 47
from a postulate of practical reason to an object of imagination
and phantasy.
According to the demands of practical reason, our worthiness
is to be the cause of our happiness, our purity that of our salva-
tion. If we have attained the first we have merited the second,
and receive it from the hand of God. N ow, we fail to see what
sort of happiness that does not follow of itself from purity is
still to be added. Self-denial is complete, all motives of self-
love and self-seeking are subdued, and thus all the evils which
make us unhappy have vanished. The pangs of an evil con-
science have given place to the peace of a good one. If this
blessedness still lacks anything, it can only be the fulness of
outward goods, as compensation for the outward evils suffered—
it seeming, perhaps, that after achieving the heaven of a good
conscience we ought also, speaking in figure, to revel in
Abraham’s bosom 1 It is not clear with what right Kant, who
in his doctrine of morals maintained and emphatically insisted
upon the most rigid and even painful separation of morality and
happiness, now demands, in order to the production of the
summum bonum, the necessary unification of the two under the
constant presupposition of their fundamentally different origin.
Morality follows from the pure will, striving for happiness from
the empirical will or self-love, which desires everything that pro-
48 Critique of Kant.
motes its well-being. Is, then, striving for future and eternal
happiness less eudaemonistic, less covetous and selfish, than
striving for present happiness? Kant's teaching says: Seek thou
before everything purity of disposition, and happiness shall fall
to thee of itself in virtue of divine justice. Thou shalt not desire
and demand happiness, but thou mayst indeed hope for it. As
though this hope were not, too, a silent expectancy, covetousness,
and requisition l With such a hope we are much like the polite
servants, who demand nothing, even assure you they will take
nothing, yet at the same time furtively open the hand.
All these weak points in the Kantian doctrine of immortality,
as they present themselves to us in the postulates of practical
reason, may be traced to one fundamental error. The trpátov
peºčos lies in the fact that divine justice is apprehended after the
standard of femporal justice, and made to consist in refribution.
Accordingly, the disproportion between virtue and happiness in
our present life demands an equalization which can and should
be first realised in a future state. Kant established penal justice,
the administration of which belongs to the power of the State,
on the notion of the necessity of retribution. On the same
notion he now founds a reward-dispensing justice, the perfect
and infallible administration of which is only possible through
God, and first exercised in the life beyond. He thus degrades
Doctrine of Freedom. 49
eternal life to a future life, immortality to a mere permanence of
personality, makes purity tantamount to a goal which is absolutely
unattainable in the present, and the moral life to a series of
states of perfection with which the states of recompense go hand
in hand. Following this view, it must be demanded, as Emil
Arnoldt has already aptly remarked," that the degree of happiness
be adapted and proportioned to the moral quality of our will,
hence that the impurity of the will be accompanied with the
corresponding punishments. And, as a will not completely
purified has still the character of impurity, divine justice would
be compelled to exercise its office of retribution in the other
world chiefly by inflicting greater or less penalties, which would
be appointed us according to the greater or less degree of our
impurity. In this way we find ourselves in the midst of the
labyrinth of the Platonic doctrines of immortality and retribution,
while following the threads of the Kantian.
It is further not evident why, in our present life, the justice of
God as granting rewards, and, in the future life, as inflicting
penalties, should in each case cease or be suspended which we
are led to infer, since Kant scarcely mentions the latter in his
doctrine of immortality. Why are, the countless inequalities
* E. Arnoldt : Ueber Aant's Zdeen vom hāchsten Guł. (Königsberg, 1874),
pp. 7-I3.
4.
50 Critique of Kant.
between virtue and happiness permitted even in this world—if
they actually are, indeed, the inequalities which they seem to us
to be 2 If they are not, as the omnipresence and justice of God
compel us to believe, then even those conditions disappear under
which divine justice is to assume first in a future life the office
and character of an equalizing retribution.
Rant wanted to harmonize his new doctrine of freedom with
the old doctrine of immortality and of retribution in a future
world, and he sought to do this by recognizing and defending
the latter as a necessary postulate of the former. This attempt
must necessarily have failed, and, indeed, have been frustrated
by the principles of the Critical philosophy itself. If the activity
of God remains for us an unsearchable mystery, as Kant taught
and must have taught, then he could not consistently have
attempted to unveil the mode of activity of the divine justice, and
have sought to determine it according to a standard that is
subject to the conditions of time. And even saying nothing of
the fact that he unjustifiably apprehended this mode of activity
as retribution, and permitted it to appear as something compre-
hensible, he still was not justified in representing this divine
retribution as inoperative in the present temporal state, and as
first to be looked for in the future life.
Our aim is to judge the Kantian doctrine of immortality
Doctrine of Freedom. 5 I
according to the fundamental canons of the Critical philosophy,
and we desire, therefore, to amend it in agreement with them,
not to reject it altogether. For we certainly appreciate that the
new doctrine of freedom radically changes the doctrine of
immortality also, and that the latter enters through Tran-
scendental Idealism a new stadium of affirmation. Now, the
apprehension as well as the determination of the problem of
immortality depends upon the question whether we, with all
that constitutes our being, are in time and space, or these in us.
If time and space are the all-comprehensive, fundamental
conditions of all existence, so that nothing can be independent
of them, then it is matter alone which persists, while its forms
change; then all particular things must originate and pass away;
then no single being, no individual, hence also no person, can
perpetually endure; on the contrary, each one has a definite
duration in time which is so bound up with his being that the
limits of this duration are the insurmountable limits of personal
existence. Under this presupposition, according to which time
and space are things, or determinations of things-in-themselves,
there remains nothing further for us than either, in agreement
with the above assumption, to deny every sort of individual (per-
sonal) immortality, or, in contradiction to it, to affirm and
conceive of the latter in a wholly fanciful manner, merely to
52 Critique of Kant.
satisfy certain needs of the inner nature. All origination and
decay take place in time, and are only possible in time. What-
ever is wholly independent of time, or has the character of time-
less being, can neither originate nor pass away: this alone is
efernal. Since, now, time as such is no thing-in-itself, but only
the necessary form of thought, all things in time are ideas or
phenomena, which depend for their existence upon a being to
whom they appear, or who conceives and knows them. This
being, however, since it constitutes the condition of all phe-
nomena, is itself no phenomenon ; it is not in time, but time in
it; hence it is independent of all time—i.e., timeless, or effernal.
It is impossible that certain phenomena should originate, and
then, instead of passing away, continue to exist ad infinitum. It
is just as impossible that certain phenomena should pass away,
and yet, instead of actually perishing, continue to exist in time
and the sense-world in some secret manner. Yet this is the way
in which the immortality of the human soul is commonly
conceived—namely, the perishableness of human existence in
time is at once affirmed and denied, and death thus regarded in
reality as a mere formality.
The true notion of immortality coincides with that of etermity.
Such immortality the Critical philosophy affirms and establishes
through its new doctrines of time and space, of the ideality of our
Doctrine of Freedom. 53
sense-world, and of the reality of that supersensible substratum
which lies at the basis of our theoretical reason and its phe-
nomena, and which Kant called “thing-in-itself,” and exhibited
as the principle of the moral order of the world. Now, just as
all objects of sense are throughout phenomenal so also our sense-
life has the character of a pure phenomenon; and just as the
entire sense-world is the manifestation of the intelligible or moral
order of the world, so the empirical character of man is the
manifestation of his intelligible character; that is temporal and
transitory, this timeless and eternal. The eternity of our intelli-
gible being must, like freedom, be affirmed, although immortality,
as thus truly apprehended, cannot be represented to the mind,
or drawn in the imagination, since to conceive it, or to fashion
it pictorially, means to make it temporal and therewith to deny
it altogether. Since without sensuous ideas there are no know-
able objects, the immortality of the soul can never be theoretically
demonstrated. But since all sensuous ideas stand under the
condition of time, which is itself merely the form of our thought,
our being is timeless or eternal, and the immortality of the soul
can never be refuted; all proofs directed against the doctrine are
just as futile as the theoretical arguments for it. On either side,
the reality of time, and what is really tantamount to the mortality
of our being, are first falsely assumed : and then the one, in
54 Critique of Kant.
order to establish the immortality of the soul, demonstrates its
immateriality and indestructibility, while the other, in order to
refute the same proposition, proves the Soul’s materiality and
perishability. Invalid proofs may be confuted by showing their
impossibility, but they cannot be nullified by demonstrating the
opposite position with proofs which are equally invalid. Hence
opponents are not to be driven out of the field by demonstrations
of immortality. But one may, indeed, and without overstepping
the bounds of a proper use of reason, oppose to them an hypothesis
which they cannot refute, and which itself makes no claim to be
theoretically demonstrable. “The Doctrine of Methods” in the
Critique of Pure Reason contains, in its section on the “Discipline
of Pure Reason in reference to Hypotheses,” a most noteworthy
and characteristic passage, in which Kant commends to his
adherents the doctrine of immortality in just such an hypothetical
form, in order that they may make use of it in opposing their
antagonists. “If, then,” he says, “as opposing itself to the
assumed (in any but a speculative connection) nature of the soul,
as being something immaterial and not subject to bodily trans-
formations, you should meet with the difficulty of the argument,
that experience, nevertheless, seems to show that both the
increased capacity and the derangement of our mental powers
are merely different modifications of our organs, you can weaken
Doctrine of Freedom. 55
the force of this proof by assuming that our bodies are nothing
but the fundamental phenomenon, to which as condition the entire
faculty of sense, and herewith all thought, refers itself in the
present state (life). The separation from the body would
then be the end of this sensible use of your faculty of know-
ledge, and the beginning of the intellectual. The body would
consequently not be the cause of thought, but merely an imped-
ing condition of it, and hence to be regarded, indeed, as a
furthering of sensible and animal life, but yet just in such mea-
sure as also a hindrance to pure, spiritual life. Thus the de-
pendence of the animal life upon the bodily constitution proves
nothing as to the dependence of the mental life upon the state of
our organs. But you might go even farther and trace out some
new query, which has been as yet either unsuggested or not
sufficiently pursued. The fortuity of generation, for example—
depending, as it does, with man as well as with the non-rational
creatures, upon circumstance, and even upon Sustenance, upon
the conduct of life, its humours and caprices, and often indeed
upon vice—throws a great difficulty in the way of the notion of
the lasting existence of a creature whose life began under such
trifling and contingent circumstances. This difficulty, however,
has little to do with the question of the permanence (here upon
earth) of the whole race, since the contingency in individual
56 Critique of Kant.
cases is nevertheless on that account subject to general rule.
But to expect in reference to every individual such a far-reaching
effect from so insignificant conditions seems certainly question-
able. But in opposition to this query you could offer a
transcendental hypothesis, that all life is strictly speaking only
intelligible; that it is not subject to time-mutations; that it
neither has a beginning in birth, nor will find an end in death ;
that this life is nothing but a pure phenomenon– i.e., a sensuous idea
of the pure, spiritual life; that the entire sense-world is merely
an image, which hovers before us on account of our present
faculty of knowledge, and which, like a dream, has no objective
reality in itself; that if we were to perceive ourselves and things
as they are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual
natures, our only true intercourse with which neither began at
birth, nor will cease with the death of the body (as mere phe-
nomenon). Now, although we do not know the least thing of
all this which we here offer as a defence against our opponents,
nor even maintain it in earnest—it is all by no means an Idea of
the reason, but merely a notion thought out' as a weapon of
defence—we are, nevertheless, proceeding in strict accordance
with reason, since we only show the opponent, who thinks to
have exhausted all the possibilities of the matter by erroneously
declaring that the want of its empirical conditions is a proof of
Doctrine of Freedom. 57
the perfect impossibility of what is believed by us, that he
can just as little span, by the mere laws of experience, the
entire field of possible things considered in themselves, as we
outside of experience can achieve anything in a well-founded
way for our reason. Whoever resorts to such hypothetical
remedies for the assumptions of an over-confident disputant
must not be held responsible for them, as if they were his own
real opinions. He abandons them as soon as he has silenced
the dogmatic presumption of his antagonist. For, however
modest and moderate it certainly is, when one merely objects
to or disagrees with the views of another, it always becomes,
just as soon as one would have his objections recognized as
proofs of the opposite, a no less arrogant and presuming claim
than-if he had made a direct attack upon the position of the
affirmative party.” "
It will not be difficult to determine in this hypothesis regard-
ing immortality what is to be ascribed to the theoretical mode of
conception and the method of Kant, and what to be regarded
as his own most inward conviction. Conviction it plainly is—
based upon the new doctrine of the ideality of time and the
sense-world—that our sense-life has the character of a mere
* Kant : Ā7, d. r. Vermunſt. Methodenlehre, Part I, sec. 3. (Werke, vol. ii.
pp. 583-585.) Cf. Fischer : Gesch, d. 7a, Philos., vol. iii., pp. 530, 531.
58 Critique of Kant.
phenomenon, and that our intelligible being is independent of all
time, hence timeless and free, eternal and immortal. If the
Sense-world were nothing but a dream that floated before us, or
a scene which we contemplated like a theatrical performance,
then it is self-evident that we should survive this passive state
of imagination ; for the end of the dream is not that of the
dreamer, nor the end of the play that of the spectator. But the
matter is not so simple. We are not only perceptive of the
sense-world, but active in it; not merely spectators in the world's
theatre, but actors as well. In other words, the world has no
place for spectators but the stage; this is the scene where we
live, and act, where we appear as performers, and at the same
time contemplate and recognize our own performance. Here,
accordingly, actor and spectator are in so far one that, when the
looker-on ceases to be a performer, he also ceases to be a
looker-on. With our existence in the world of sense, our con-
templation of things, and even the appearance of things, vanishes.
( With our sense-life our sensuous thought perishes) and together
with it that knowledge the fundamental forms of which are space
and time. Corresponding to our timeless being there is the
state of timeless knowing, or of that intellectual perception
which has immediate knowledge of the inner nature of things.
It is this organ of knowledge which Kant means when, in the
Doctrine of Freedom. 59
passage cited above, he sanctions the assertion that “our body
is nothing but the fundamental phenomenon, to which, as con-
dition, the entire faculty of sense, and herewith all thinking,
relates itself in the present state; ” that “the separation from
the body is the end of the sensible use of our faculty of know-
ledge and the beginning of the intellectual; ” and that “If we
were to perceive ourselves and things as they are, we should
See ourselves in a world of spiritual natures.” If, now, timeless
knowing can belong, as Kant elsewhere teaches," only to the
Primitive Being, then the end of our sensible existence is to be
regarded as a return to God, and our eternal or purely spiritual
life as a life in God. With sensuous thought all sensuous
appetites must have disappeared, and thereby that need of
purification, on account of which Kant in his practical doctrine
of immortality demanded the endless duration of our personal
existence. Then purity would not constitute the problem and
goal, but the condition and character of immortal life. Schopen-
hauer rejects, along with the Kantian theism, the doctrine of im-
mortality which is expounded in the Critique of Practical Reason,
as coinciding with the doctrine of retribution. He affirms the
immortality of our being on the ground of the Transcendental
* Cf. supra, The Thing-in-itself.
6O Critique of Kant.
Æsthetic. He says: “Did one wish to demand, as has so often
happened, the permanence of individual consciousness, in order
to couple with it reward or punishment in a future world, it
would in fact be only a question of the compatibility of virtue
and selfishness. But these two will never embrace each other ;
they are diametrical opposites.” “The adequate answer to the
question of the permanence of the individual after death lies in
Kant's great doctrine of the ideality of time, which proves itself
just here especially fruitful, since, by a thoroughly theoretical,
yet well elucidated insight, it makes compensation for dogmas,
which lead on the one hand as well as on the other to absur-
dities, and thus at a stroke does away with the most prolific of all
metaphysical questions. Beginning, end, permanence, are notions
which borrow their significance solely from time, and conse-
quently are valid only under the presupposition of the latter.
But time has no absolute existence, nor is it the sort or mode of
being perse of things, but merely the form of our knowledge of our
own existence and of that of all things; and precisely on that ac-
count it is very incomplete, and limited to mere phenomena.”
Since, now, it is absolutely impossible for our reason as at
present constituted to form for itself an idea of the state of
* A. Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. ii., fifth edition,
p. 564. Cf. his Parezga zazed Paralºpomena, vol. ii., fourth edition, § 137.
Doctrine of Freedom. 6 I
timeless being and knowing, we must conclude that we cannot
know anything in the least of the life after death. It is desirable
to note, therefore, that Kant expressly declares that this hypo-
thesis is not intended to defend the dogma of immortality, but
only to combat the opponents of the dogma. Yet it remains
very noteworthy that Kant chose, as best illustrating the
“hypotheses of pure reason " which he permitted and justified
for polemical use, precisely this doctrine—the doctrine, namely,
which exhibits our present existence as a mere phenomenon or
sensuous idea of our eternal and intelligible life. If we compare
the Kantian doctrine of immortality as expressed in this hypo-
thesis of pure reason with the same doctrine as a postulate of
the practical reason, we see that eternal life is there conceived
as timeless, superSensible, and purely spiritual ; here, on the
contrary, as temporal, hence sensible, and needing purification;
there it is regarded as completion, which we are to conceive as
a life in God; here, on the other hand, as an endless process
of moral purification, subject to divine retribution. According
to the first conception, our eternal life is independent of time
and space. What is called the state of the soul after death is,
for our present faculty of knowledge, mysterium magnum. And
“the tiresome query: When # Where 3 and How 2° is herewith
forever silenced, since it is now senseless and absurd, seeking
62 Critique of Kant.
W.
timeless and spaceless existence in time and space. But, accord-
ing to the second conception, the soul is to continue its existence
after death, is to experience a series of progressive states of
purification, hence is to live on in time and the sense-world;
at a definite period of time it must leave the body, seek a new
place of abode, take on a new form of life; and since all this
can only take place in space and time, in the every-day world
about us, might it not seem that, with ordinary sagacity, we
ought to be able to detect its hidden way P The knowledge that
the great Beyond must ever remain an unfathomable mystery to
us is now no longer our possession, and we stand helpless, like
Mephistopheles before the corpse of Faust:
“Und wenn ich Tag und Stunden mich zerplage,
Wann P Wie? und Woº das ist die leidige Frage.”
“And though I fret and worry till I'm weary,
When? How P and Where? remains the ſatal query.”
—TAYLOR'S 7%anslation.
CHAPTER III.
THE AAAW 7/4 MW AH//ZOSOAA/V AS DOCTRZAVE OF
ANA. WAZZOAMAEAV7.
I. KANT'S FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMs.
HE fact that we conceive a common world of sense is the
first problem ; its solution constituted the theme of the
Kantian doctrine of knowledge. If this world of sense were not
completely phenomenal, i.e., conceivable and conceived, that
fact would necessarily have been recognized as inexplicable.
Objects of sense are appearances or phenomena. In order to
explain the latter, three questions have to be answered, which
virtually involve Kant's fundamental problems. Firstly, there
must be a subject, to which anything objective could in general
appear, and without which no sort of phenomenon would be
possible. The question is: Who (what) is the knowing subject P
Secondly, there must be an essence, which constitutes the ground
of phenomena, and of the knowing subject itself, provided the
latter does not create out of itself the things it conceives. In
64 t Critique of Kant.
this case the knowing subject would at the same time be the
ground of being of all phenomena. But since this is not the
case, it must be asked: What is the substratum which is the
ground of the knowing subject as well as of the entire phenom-
enal world P. Thirdly, between this substantial ground and
everything based upon it there must subsist a relation which
determines the nature of the forms and objects of knowledge
(phenomena) peculiar to us, and which, if it lie within our com-
prehension, explains them. The question is: Why the nature
of our knowledge, and the nature of things, are constituted as
they are, and not otherwise P The three problems may be
summarily designated by the initial words : Who P What ?
Why P
The first question is solved by the Critique of Pure Reason
through its investigation of our faculties of knowledge, and
through its doctrine that the sense-world originates from the
material elements of our impressions and the formative elements
of our perceptions and notions. The second question Kant
answered by his differentiation of phenomena from things-in-
themselves. What the latter are, the Critique of Practical Reason
shows by its doctrine of freedom and the moral order of the
world, and the cognate doctrines of God and immortality. The
third question is regarded by Kant as incapable of solution,
Doctrine of Development. 65
owing to the constitution of the human faculties of knowledge.
If the relation of things-in-themselves and phenomena were an
intelligible relation, the first cause of things, and therefore their
primal origin, the timeless creation, would be known, and the
riddle of the world solved. But this relation remains unknow-
able, the inner nature of things unsearchable, the mystery of the
world still a mystery. Of these unsolvable problems there are
three : the cosmological, the psychological, and the theological.
If the intelligible character of the world consists in freedom,
then it is the Will which determines the peculiar constitution of
our knowing sensuous reason, as well as the peculiar nature of
phenomena, and upon which they both depend. How this is
possible is the question which holds the secret of the world.
Kant rightly grasped and rightly stated this question, but he
declared an answer to it to be impossible. Schopenhauer claims
the honour of having found the only true answer, and of having
solved by his own doctrine the problem which Kant merely
discovered.
The psychological and theological problems are subordinate
to, rather than co-ordinate with, the cosmological,' since they
contain the same problem applied in the one case to human
reason, and in the other to human character. The psychological
problem is concerned with the nature of our knowing faculties,
5
66 Critique of Kant.
in the constitution of which sense and understanding are at
once distinguished and united, as is indicated in Kant's ques-
tion : “How is external perception—namely, that of space—
in a thinking subject in general possible P” If we call the
thinking subject “soul,” and its outward manifestation “body,”
the psychological problem involves, in this its true conception,
the old inquiry concerning the relation of body and soul. The
theological problem deals with the fact of our moral disposition,
with the relation of our intelligible to our empirical character,
or with the way in which freedom and necessity consist together
and are united in our moral conduct. All these questions Kant
held that it was impossible to answer with the means of our
theoretical or scientific knowledge.
The fundamental inquiry has to do with the relation between
things-in-themselves and phenomena, or, what is the same thing,
the relation between freedom and nature, between the intelligible
and the sensible, the moral and the material orders of the world,
or between the causality of will and mechanical causality. The
unification of both lies in the principle of natural adaptation,
and the teleological view of the world based upon it—a view
which by no means lays claim to the validity of scientific (theo-
retical) knowledge—yet claims, nevertheless, the character of a
necessary and indispensable principle of judgment. But the idea
Doctrine of Development. 67
of immanent ends in nature is so intimately connected with the
idea of natural development that the two are inseparable. That
which develops itself must develop itself to something, i.e., self-
development implies the necessary actualization of an inherent
end; and whatever has such an inherent end, or implanted
tendency, which strives for realization, must, in the very nature
of things, develop itself. In the notion of natural development,
therefore, final and mechanical causality, will and mechanism,
freedom and nature, thing-in-itself and phenomenon, unite them-
selves. We accordingly take Kant's doctrine of development as
the unification of his doctrines of knowledge and freedom.
II. THE WORLD VIEWED AS AN HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
1. The Matural Development.
If we compare the pre-Critical inquiries of our philosopher
with the Critique of Pure Reason and with the views that grow out
of it, we find one fundamental thought running through the ideas
of both periods; it is Kant's view of the world as an historical
development—a view which was by no means contradicted nor pre-
judiced by the Critique, but, in fact, more firmly established than
had been possible before it. Since the subject of this view of the
world is nothing other than the natural cosmic changes, or the
succession in time of the different states of the world (which are
68 Critique of Kant.
connected according to the law of causality, so that the later
necessarily follow from the earlier), the development of things
coincides with their natural history, which is something entirely
different from the customary description of nature. This contents
itself with artificially classifying things, with grouping their
external attributes, and with describing what they are in their
present state. Natural history, on the other hand, explains how
things originated and have become what they are, what changes
and transformations they have undergone in the course of time,
how and under what conditions the present states have grown
out of the previous ones. Such a natural history of the world
Kant missed in the scientific knowledge he found at hand, and
he demanded that it be attempted as a new and bold problem,
the solution of which must be ventured. He himself led the
way by his own example, founding with his General Matural
Aistory and Theory of the Heavens this new scientific account of
the world. His short geological treatises, together with his
Physical Geography, may be regarded as contributions to the
natural history of the earth, while his two treatises on the human
races are rightly designed to be contributions to the natural
history of man. “It is true philosophy,” said Kant, “to trace
the diverse forms of a thing through all its history.”
* A ant: Physische Geographie, Introduction, § 4. Part II, Sec. I., § 3.
Doctrine of Development. 69
2. The Intellectual Development.
The Critigue of Pure Reason teaches how phenomena, the sense-
world, and experience originate from the conditions of our repre-
sentative nature, how experience grows and becomes increased,
and how it systematises itself, as in accordance with the regula-
tive Ideas of reason it strives toward a scientific system of know-
ledge, the final goal of which, were it attainable, could be
nothing other than the completely intelligible system of develop-
ment of the world. If we follow out the investigations of the
Critique in the development and progress of its results, and see
how it makes phenomena or objects originate from our sensa-
tions and the form-giving capacities of our perception and
thought, and experience originate from the synthesis of pheno-
mena, and systematised experience, i.e., science in the pro-
gressive development of its various departments, or the history
of the sciences, originate from the co-ordination of experiences
in accordance with the regulative Ideas, we see that the problem
and results of the Critique cannot be more concisely and aptly
Summed up than in the designation we have chosen : it is the
doctrine of the origin and development of human knowledge.
In every development the stadium reached is always in its com-
pletion the condition, the material, the beginning of a higher
7o Critique of Kant.
form. This is also true of our states of knowledge. Impres-
sions are the material out of which phenomena are formed,
phenomena the material for experience, completed experiences
the material of actual experimental knowledge. Thus the states
of knowledge, the origin of which the Critique teaches, are the
states of development of knowledge.
3. The Social Development and the Development of Culture.
The natural history of man is the condition and the material
of the history of his freedom. The natural and intellectual
development serves the moral, which does not merely, so to say,
continue the former on a higher plane, but subordinates it and
makes its development subservient to its own. The progressive
development of our natural and intellectual capacities shows
itself, in this service of freedom, as human civilization, or as the
history of culture; and the nature of civilization is, according to
the view of Kant, such that it is involuntarily impelled forward
from the natural ends and interests of man to the fulfilment of
the law of freedom, but it is completed only by the Idea of
freedom itself. Moral freedom can only develop itself as his-
torical culture, and the history of culture can complete itself
only when its highest goal is striven for with the clearest know-
ledge and purpose. Then the laws of freedom will not be
Doctrine of Development. 7 I
blindly fulfilled, but fulfilled with freedom. In order that the
capacities of human nature receive full development and attain
their natural ends, the antagonism of interests, the competition
of ability, the division of labour, discord and the struggle for
existence, must enter into life; there must be an advancement
from the isolated state of life to the social, and from barbaric
freedom to social and civil freedom, where the conflict of
interests, to be sure, continues, and, with the increase of Our
wants, becomes more complex and more intense, but without
that reciprocal destructiveness and the endangering of existence
and freedom. For the full unfolding of capacities is only pos-
sible under the condition of the security of life. Security belongs
to the natural ends of life, hence Social union and public law
and order must be sought and attained in the highest form
possible. That form is the constitutional government. But even
the constitutional state remains insecure, as well as the existence
of all individuals and the development of all interests of culture,
as long as states and peoples still exist in a condition of barbaric
freedom, warring with each other to their mutual destruction.
Consequently the natural ends of life, or the needs which man
has for security, demand not only a civil, but an infernational law,
the most secure form of which is a federation of free, civilised,
and constitutionally governed peoples.
72 Critique of Kant.
4. The Moral and Religious Development.
But freedom is only actualised and, as it were, embodied
in a moral state of the world, when it is striven for, not on
account of the security of life, but for freedom's own sake,
and with those means which are the factors of freedom itself:
these are, not the “mechanism of our inclinations,” but
conscious purpose, ethical knowledge, and moral character.
Kant, accordingly, demanded that the necessity of a con-
federation of nations, with a view to establishing lasting peace,
should not be urged merely in the interests of security and
civilisation, but that it should be placed upon moral grounds,
and held up to view as the moral end of the world, and that
in this spirit of world-citizenship the universal history of man
should be written. In order to show that “the evolution
of a form of government based upon natural right” lay in the
plan of the world’s history, and that its time had come, Kant
appealed to the enthusiasm and intense interest with which all
civilised nations greeted the attempt of the French to found
a government of natural rights. And in his own epoch, he
saw the rise of Individualism in thought and knowledge—“ the
age of enlightenment,” the goal of which could be nothing
other than an intellectually and morally enlightened period,
Doctrine of Development. 73
whose culture should be permeated through and through with
the Idea of freedom.
But the moral development by no means goes hand in hand
with the progress of our culture and our external civilization.
On the contrary, the more complex human society becomes, the
more it suffers internal disruption, the more it develops the
inequality of individuals in the circumstances of life, the more
it arouses and fosters motives of self-seeking, and allows conten-
tion and hateful and evil passions, these “offspring of lawless
dispositions,” to grow without bounds. It is because such
enormous vices as ingratitude and hatred, jealousy and malicious
pleasure, ill-will and calumny, flourish and luxuriate in the very
bosom of society, that the latter needs to be transformed and
purified in its very core, needs a complete regeneration, which
not “the juridical,” but only “the ethical state,” hence not the
State, but only the Church, as the moral kingdom of God on
earth, is capable of effecting. Here the sinful natures, out of
which all those evils spring that men intentionally bring upon
one another, are to be rooted out, and men's hearts purified, in
order that good-will may reign in the world. The establishment
of such a kingdom of God upon earth is necessary for the solution
of that most important of all problems—man's salvation, and it
is consequently recognized by Kant as a duty of mankind to
74. Critique of Kant.
itself, and in this respect as sui generis. The fulfilment of this
duty constitutes the special theme of the religious development,
the true problem and goal of which first found its historical
expression in the appearance of Christianity, and which needed
in the growth of the visible Church constant rectification, in
order that it should not become fixed in outward, lifeless
forms, and the real essence be lost sight of. To true faith
there belongs that veracity which is identical with sincere
conviction based upon moral self-knowledge. Nothing con-
flicts with religious belief more than hypocrisy, and hypocrisy
is the Offspring and companion of compulsory faith. Hence
Kant regarded the religious Aufklärung, owing to its principle
of tolerance, as an essential feature of the Aufklärung itself,
and its epoch as a necessary stage of reform in the history of
the Church.
The manner in which Kant apprehended the relation of
religion and revelation, of the invisible and the visible Church,
may serve as an excellent illustration of his doctrine of develop-
ment in general. He, like Lessing, regarded revelation as the
religious education of mankind, the visible Church as the form
of manifestation and development of the invisible; and he laid
great stress upon the just appreciation of these historical,
formative stages, since it is quite as mistaken to consider them
Doctrine of Development. 75
worthless and superfluous as to hold them to be the essence of
religion, or its immutable forms. And just as the visible Church
is related to the invisible, so our natural and social history is
related to freedom and the final moral end of man, and Our
sense-life to our intelligible being, and the sensible world to the
moral.
III. THE TELEOLOGICAL VIEW OF THE WORLD.
1. The World-development as Phenomenon.
- We see how the Kantian philosophy presents itself, in its
entire view of the world, as Doctrine of Development. It regards
nature and freedom, culture and the state, religion and the
church, as historical developments; and, although it has not
developed these subjects, but only sketched their main features
and general outline, yet it had already Serzed upon the problem
of such a view of the world before the Critique of Pure Reason,
and has established it by means of the latter.
The laws of world-development are partly laws of nature,
partly laws of freedom. The first consist in the laws of motion
of the material world, in the causality of objective and subjective
changes, in the necessary succession in time of the different
states of the world; the second consist in the moral end of
reason, from which follow those objective and subjective laws
76 Critique of Kant.
of freedom which are to be fulfilled in the development of
culture and of the State, of religion and of the Church.
In the pre-Critical period, Kant’s views of development were
confined to natural history, and especially to the mechanical origin
and transformations of the cosmos. Nevertheless, he declared
even at this time, that the origin of organic bodies could not be
comprehended after mere mechanical laws. The inquiry con-
cerning the knowableness of natural changes, or of the causal
nexus of things, lay still remote from him when, in his General
Matural History and Theory of the Heavens, he set forth his
mechanical cosmogony. He took the world and its laws as
given, and left unconsidered the way in which they become
known to us. The thorough investigation of this question,
which concerns the causal nexus of things, necessitated him first
to abandon rationalism, then also the old-school empiricism,
and to set out upon the entirely new path of the Critique of Pure
Reason. This brought the solution : it discovered how, in accord-
ance with the constitution of our reason, phenomena, and their
necessary synthesis—the sense-world as constituted by natural
law (nature), originate out of the material of our impressions
and the laws of our thought (sense and understanding). We are
obliged by the nature and laws of our reason to conceive the
material universe in a mechanical development, the realm of
Doctrine of Development. 77
animal life in an organic development, and mankind in a moral
development. And, since all these orders of development con-
tain nothing that might not be conceivable and conceived, the
entire world-development is through and through phenomenal.
Its laws are laws of nature and of freedom ; both are necessary
ideas of our reason ; those condition the sensible, these the
moral experience. Hence, also, the history of nature and free-
dom, i.e., the entire world-development, has the character of idea
or phenomenon. And what else could it be, since all stages of
evolution, of whatever sort they may be, are successive, or con-
stitute a time-succession, hence must take place in time, which, as
a pure form of thought, can itself contain only ideas or
phenomena P
2. The World-development as Teleological Phenomenon.
The notion of phenomenon, however, is necessarily grasped
much more adequately in the doctrine of development than in
doctrine of knowledge. As objects of our experience or scien-
tific knowledge, phenomena may not be referred to ends ; as
forms of development, on the contrary, they cannot be conceived
apart from ends. Whatever evolves itself must evolve itself into
something; it bears its own determination within itself, and
manifests the character of self-determination and freedom. If
78 Critique of Kant.
we compare phenomenon as object of knowledge with pheno-
menon as stage of development, we see that the difference lies
in the conception of immanent teleology, which is excluded in the
former and comprehended in the latter. And, indeed, the idea
of inherent, final causes as operative in phenomena must be
applied to the entire world-development; not merely to the
organic and moral development, but also to the mechanical. In
the organic development the notion of ends is a necessary prin-
ciple of our judgment, since living bodies are ipso facto those
which develop or organize themselves, and are consequently in-
conceivable without the Idea of inherent ends. In the moral
development the notion of ends acts as the necessary principle,
not only of our judgment, but also of our conduct and the out-
ward manifestations of our character, since the will acts in
accordance with ends, and the moral character of its acts is
both determined and judged by the moral law. In the moral
world ends have real, in the organic, ideal, validity; in the
mechanical world they are to have no validity whatever!
According to the doctrine of Kant, there is but one time and one
space, and therefore only one sense-world, or one universal
nexus of all phenomena. If, now, some phenomena show
themselves to be determined by ends, and others must be
teleologically judged, there certainly can be no phenomena that
Doctrine of Development. 79
are wholly without end. For the moral development of man-
kind is also organic, and without its organic-sensuous character
it would not be development at all ; and organic bodies are
material and mechanical as well. Consequently the inorganic
bodies also, although they must be explained independently of
the notion of ends, cannot yet be without end, else there would
be no universal nexus of phenomena, no unity of the sense-
world, no unity of time and of space, by which we understand,
not a closed unity in the sense of totality, but a world-unity, as
opposed to those numberless independent worlds assumed by
Leibnitz, and also accepted by Kant in his first studies—
afterwards, however, reckoned, together with the Monadology,
among “the legends from the Utopia of Metaphysics.” Our
view of the world advances from the lifeless realm to the living,
and from the living to the moral ; that is, it sees how the
organic world evolves from the inorganic, and how humanity and
the moral world evolve from the organic world. And this view
would fall to the ground if it should deny the validity of ends in
the first stadium of evolution, and then in the second be obliged
to acknowledge their necessary application, and, finally, in the
third, discover their reality. But this is not the view expressed
in the Kantian doctrine. The latter denies, not the validity of
ends, but their theoretical or scientific knowableness in both the
8O Critique of Kant.
inorganic and organic worlds. It affirms their knowableness in
the moral world, because here the activity of ends is immediately
apparent from the will itself. Matter renders ends unknowable ;
the will, on the contrary, knowable. Ends are immanent causes,
but matter is spatial, and, like space, completely external ; every-
thing in space exists as externality, and consists in outward
relations; hence it contains no sort of knowable immanent
causes. This is true of phenomena in general ; hence of all
bodies, even the organic, which oblige us to consider them as
controlled by ends, simply because they produce, form, and
reproduce themselves, i.e., because they develop themselves.
The unity of the world is also the unity of the world-develop-
ment. Consequently the end that reveals itself in the moral
order of things and gives them their intelligible meaning must
also be recognized as the principle that underlies the natural
order of things, but presents itself as knowable in no natural
phenomena. That end is freedom. Accordingly, we must
consider the entire world-development as the manifestation of
freedom, and the sensible order of the world as the manifestation
of the moral. We thus rise to a point of view where the inner
nature of things, which ever remains hidden from our knowledge
in its exact sense, becomes unveiled, and where the mystery of
the world is solved.
Doctrine of Development. 8 I
3. The World-development as Manifestation of Thing-in-itself.
Thus in the Kantian doctrine of development the two other
fundamental disciplines of the Critical philosophy—the doctrines
of knowledge and freedom, or, what is the same thing, the
notions of nature and freedom—are united. The Critique of Pure
Reason culminates in the teleological point of view, and attains,
by working this out, a systematic view of the world. The con-
clusions we have drawn stand directly in the line of the Kantian
doctrine, and they are embodied in expressions which in no way
ascribe to Kant or force upon him views that he has not himself
expressed or sanctioned in his teaching. For he held both to
the unity of the world and to evolution, both to the ideal valid-
ity of design in the organic realm and to its real validity in the
moral realm, both to freedom as the moral end of the world and
to the intelligible character of freedom ; and he declared that
intelligible character is identical with thing-in-itself. Adaptation,
of whatever sort it may be, consists in the correspondence of a
thing with an end or purpose. This presupposes activity towards
an end, hence an end-active power and an end-positing faculty, i.e.,
will and freedom. Such a correspondence is either given in the
thing itself and exists in actuality, or it appears to our reason
that it must be present. In the one case it is factual and real,
6
82 Critique of Kant.
in the other it is only a necessary idea, and therefore merely
ideal. Moral ends are of the first sort, organic or natural of the
second. Since, now, without end or purpose, i.e., without will or
freedom, adaptation in general can neither exist nor be conceived,
and all development must be considered as teleological, the latter
must be recognized as the manifestation of freedom or of thing-
in-itself. In other words, while the world-development consists
in the natural and moral orders of things, the second is not merely
the highest stage of development of the first, but also its ground;
the sensible world is not merely the temporal presupposition of
the moral, but also its phenomenon. In short, the entire world-
development or world-order is the manifestation of freedom.
That such is in fact the truth of the matter Kant declared in
his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason, and confirmed it
in the Critique of Judgment. He explained that that super-
sensible substratum of our knowing reason and of all phenomena,
“ that superSensible upon which we must base nature as phenome-
93.
non,” is identical with freedom. The literal statement is as
follows: “There must, however, be a ground of the unity of the
supersensible. which underlies nature, with that which the
notion of freedom practically contains, and even if the notion of
this ground leads neither to a theoretical nor a practical know-
ledge of the same, and hence possesses no particular sphere, yet
Doctrine of Development. 83
it makes possible the transition from the mode of thought
according to the principles of the one, to that according to the
principles of the other.” “What the notion of freedom prac-
tically contains " is, according to Kant, nothing other than final
moral end. What is coincident or one with this can only be the
moral end itself, for this is only one with itself. When, con-
sequently, “the unity of the supersensible which underlies nature,
with what the notion of freedom practically contains,” is spoken
of, that supersensible substratum can be nothing other than the
final moral end itself. And when Kant says “there must be
35
a ground of that unity,” only the ground of the final moral end
can be understood by it; but this is simply and solely will or
freedom. That “supersensible which underlies nature” is, there-
fore, will or freedom. There is, according to the letter as well
as the spirit of Kant's doctrine, no other issue. Now, of freedom
as the final moral end we have no theoretical, but indeed a
practical, knowledge. But of freedom as the supersensible
substratum of all phenomena we have neither a theoretical nor
a practical knowledge, i.e., we can form no sort of an idea of
the “ground of the unity of the supersensible which underlies
* Kant : Kritić der Urtheilsåraft, Introduction II. (Werke, vol. vii., p. 14.)
Ad. : Dialectić der teleologischen Urtheilséraft, $ 78, p. 231. Cf. Fischer :
Gesch, d. m. Philos., vol. iv., pp. 397 and 497.
**
84 Critique of Kant.
nature, with what the notion of freedom practically contains.”
Hence Kant says, there must be such a ground, the character of
which permits us to unite the principles of nature with those of
freedom, although we can acquire neither a theoretical nor a
practical knowledge of this ground. The unification of nature
and freedom consists in the notion of natural freedom or adapta-
tion; and all organic phenomena must be considered and esti-
mated in accordance with this principle as criterion. Of natural
necessity or the mechanism of things we have a theoretical
knowledge, of moral freedom a practical knowledge, of natural
freedom no knowledge at all ; that is, will or freedom in nature
is unknowable; natural ends or final causes must necessarily be
conceived, but they can never be known.
All the phenomena of hature are exertions of force: natural
freedom consists in the freedom of force; it is the freedom of
phenomenon, or the phenomenon in its freedom. Within the
natural world this freedom displays itself in self-developing
bodies, i.e., in such bodies as bring forth, shape, and reproduce
themselves; these are the living phenomena of nature, which
we are accordingly obliged to conceive of after the principle
of objective, immanent teleology. The necessity of regarding
organic nature in this way was the subject which Kant worked
out in his Critique of Teleological Judgment.
Doctrine of Development. 85
There is also the free contemplation of things, where freedom
is not our object or problem, but our state—that harmonious
condition of our powers of mind which does not seek to investi-
gate and analyze phenomena, but leaves them in their freedom,
apprehending them with pure contemplative pleasure. To this
perfectly free attitude of mind, dependent upon or restrained by
no interests, there corresponds the free phenomenon, i.e., the
phenomenon in its complete freedom. It is the object of our
pure pleasure; we pronounce it beautiful or sublime. Upon this
principle of the subjective fitness of phenomena is founded our
faculty of aesthetic judgment, which furnished Kant with the
theme of his Critique of the Æsthetic Judgment. His investigation
confined itself to the analysis of our aesthetic judgment, or of our
thought in the state of freedom. This needed to be supple-
mented by a discussion of the correlate of our aesthetic contem-
plation, namely, the phenomenon in the state of freedom, or by the
attempt to establish also the objectivity of aesthetic fitness. This
supplementary step was taken by Schiller, who, more than any
other down to Schopenhauer, furthered and extended the Kantian
AEsthetics without abandoning the principles of the Critical
philosophy. If freedom is the highest law of reason, and if,
as such, it determine the character of our knowledge, the laws
of which (the laws of the understanding) condition the Sense-
86 Critique of Kant.
world, then we must necessarily conceive freedom in phenomena
also ; and phenomenon in its freedom is beauty. Schiller could
not have indicated his Kantian standpoint, and at the same time
his advance within it, more aptly and more forcibly than he has
done in a word in one of those letters to Körner, which give his
chief aesthetic ideas in all their freshness. Even these few words
show what a profound understanding of the Critical philosophy
he possessed: “Certainly no greater word has yet been spoken
by mortal man than the Kantian ‘Determine thyself out of
thyself” (which is at once the content of his whole philosophy),
and this other, of the theoretical philosophy, ‘Nature stands
under the laws of the understanding.” This great Idea of self-
determination is mirrored back to us from certain phenomena of
nature, and this we call Beauty.” "
We shall not now ask whether the Kantian doctrines of know-
ledge and development conflict with one another, but only note
that, in the first, things-in-themselves are absolutely unknow-
able and absolutely distinguished from phenomena, while in the
second the Phenomenon of Freedom shows itself. With End, will
* Schillers Briefwechsel mit Körner, 2nd ed., edited by Carl Goedeke, 1878.
Letter of the 18th of February, 1793, pp. 18, 19. The letters referred to
above are the following five written in Jena : that of January 25th, and those
of the 8th, 18th, 23rd, and 28th of February, 1793. Wide pp. 5-51.
Doctrine of Development. 87
enters the phenomenal world; with Will, freedom, intelligible
character, or thing-in-itself, and the farther the evolution of
things advances, the more distinctly it manifests itself. The
woºd-development is recognized by Kant as the manifesta-
tion and ever-increasing revelation of freedom. That which in
the mechanical world is not at all manifest or is completely
hidden, forces itself already in the organic realm so far to the
light that we are not even able perfectly to experience the
phenomena of life without the idea of life's inner adaptation to
an end; and in the moral sphere it is completely manifest and
present. In the organic evolution of the world we take ends
into account; in the moral, it is the thing itself.
Yet between the two doctrines, as they shaped themselves in
the mind of Kant, there is, in the first place, no contradiction,
but a deep underlying harmony. Against the charge that, while
the doctrine of knowledge holds things-in-themselves to be for-
ever absolutely hidden, the doctrine of development regards
them as increasingly intelligible and knowable, Kant is shielded
from the outset by his distinction of the sorts of knowledge. To
such a stricture he would reply: Things-in-themselves are only
so far intelligible as they are practically knowable; theoretically
knowable they never are. Every phenomenon is, as object of
knowledge, a link in the nexus of things; each has in our idea
88 Critique of Kant.
of the world its fixed time and place; none is thinkable without
the thing-in-itself which underlies them all; in none is this
thing-in-itself knowable, it nowhere appears, i.e., it never so
appears that we could come across it in our knowledge and say,
“There it is ” In order to know a phenomenon we must
analyze and dissect it, resolve it into its knowable factors, and
then from these construct our knowledge of it. Among such
factors the thing-in-itself, the creative or originative ground of
being of all phenomena, is not to be found. This does not
appear, because it is the cause of appearance. No more does
it show itself, either, in the evolution of things, since it does not
exhaust itself in any one form or stage of development, nor
consist in any transition. It can reveal itself, but not appear.
It becomes manifest, yet ever remains hidden, like character in
conduct, the genius of the artist in his work, the will to live
or the inherent end of life in the organism, force in its exertion,
God in the world. For something to appear means, in the exact
sense of the word, that it is contained in an object in such a
way that in the analysis of the object it will be hit upon and
found. Now, even the most searching analysis of any pheno-
menon is not able to discover the ground why and to what end
it is, i.e., to discover its innermost being. To be sure, one need
not necessarily trouble himself with this question, and, indeed,
Doctrine of Development. 89
in experimental knowledge and the so-called exact sciences, he
is authorized to pay no heed to it whatever. One may also,
if he choose, banish it completely from thought, as an idle
question. But this the profound thinkers among philosophers,
those upon whom the mystery of the world rests as a burden,
Can never do. Thus the Kantian distinction of things-in-them-
Selves from phenomena, as well as its doctrine of the unknow-
ableness of the former in the way of the scientific analysis of
the latter, retains its deep and abiding meaning.
The question concerning the thing-in-itself as the ground of
being of all phenomena carries us back to the original ground
of things. This, according to Kant, becomes intelligible to us
from no phenomenon, of whatever sort it may be, but solely
from the final end of the world, i.e., from the end which our
reason, by means of its freedom from the world we conceive
(sense-world), posits for itself, and realizes through the purifica-
tion of the will. In this sense man may be recognized as the
final end of the world. “Hence it is only the faculty of desire;
but not that which makes man dependent (through sensuous
impulses) upon nature, not that in respect to which the worth
of his existence depends upon what he receives and enjoys. It
is rather that worth which he alone can give to himself, and
which consists in what he does, how and according to what
90 Critique of Kant.
principles he acts, and not as a part of nature, but in the freedom
of his appetitive faculties. That is, a good will is that whereby
alone his existence can have an absolute worth, and in relation
to which the existence of the world can have a final end.”
Our philosopher judges like our poet: “Enjoyment debases; ”
“The deed is everything, nothing the fame.” With this
confession Goethe's Faust rises to the point of its highest
morality.
If the end of our existence were mere happiness, or that
enjoyment of the world which consists in continual amusement,
if we came into the world only in order, like the man in the
farce, to make a “joke” of ourselves, and to seek unmixed
pleasure, it would seem that modern Pessimism, inspired as it is
by the pleasure-seeking of our day, is right in declaring that
this object of life has proved a failure, and that it is the opposite
goal that has been reached, inasmuch as the sum of pleasure is
in reality far less than the sum of pain, and ennui far more pre-
valent than amusement. Then the result of life, as that of the
buffooney, would be truly a most sad “joke.” Nothing is more
foolish and wanting in all genuine knowledge of man than this
sort of a debit-and-credit account of pleasure and pain, of joy
* Kant : Kritić der Urtheiſsèraft, § 86. (Werke, vol. vii., p. 326.) Cf.
Fischer : Gesch d, n. Philos. vol. iv., pp. 505–17.
Doctrine of Development. 9I
and sorrow, as if they could be added and subtracted like money,
and the sum of life figured out by such a childish example. The
pessimism and optimism of the ordinary sort stand upon pre-
cisely the same plane; both are eudaemonistic, and hold happiness
to be the only desirable good. The pessimists, on the one
hand, find the world so ill-conditioned that we can never attain
and enjoy this good, but only and ever chase after it with un-
satisfied craving, so that we are thus condemned to a continual
Tantalus—torment, to the most intense misery conceivable. The
optimists, on the other hand, find the world and the human
mind so beneficently planned that, with the right knowledge and
a corresponding regulation of conduct, we are able to attain a
perfectly happy life.
As people are busying themselves a good deal nowadays with
Kant, there is naturally considerable dispute, this way and that,
as to whether his teachings are to be taken in the sense of a
pessimistic or an optimistic view of life. But the simple fact
that such a question is debated, as answerable by yes or no,
shows sufficiently well how little Kant is understood. His
doctrine is neither the one nor the other, since it does not judge
of the object of life eudaemonistically at all. Were this object
the happiness which we necessarily craved, according to the
sensuous impulses of our nature, such a state of well-being, even
92 Critique of Kant.
if it could be fully attained, would leave our moral nature empty
and unsatisfied, since we should thereby utterly fail of the truly
human or personal end of life, which cannot be given to us, but
only posited, i.e., willed, by ourselves.” The end of human exist-
ence in the world consists in man’s moral self-development,
which comprehends culture as well as all its wide interests, and
which in its very nature is an unceasing and endless progress.
Every solved problem presents new problems for solution.
Here there is no idle bliss, which we are to enjoy with folded
hands, no moment of complete contentment; yet all content-
ment worthy of man is only to be found in the way of this free
self-development. Indeed, it is not to be found, but won :
“Only he earns freedom as well as life who daily has to win it!”
Contentment lies in no one moment, but in the entire fulness of
life, in both the joys and sorrows of creating. He who traverses
this path is free from the attacks of the monster Care, who robs
man of life's every gratifying enjoyment; moral energy alone
she cannot stay: that she merely intensifies. Of the end and
worth of human life Kant judged at the close of his teleological
view of the world, as Goethe at the end of Faust. It needed no
magic to free man from care and the world’s spirits of torment:
"Kant : Ār, d. Urtheilséraft, $83. (Werke, vol. vii., p. 311 et seq.)
Doctrine of Development. 93
“Im Weiterschreiten find’ er Qual and Glück,
Er, unbefriedigt jeden Augenblick : * *
The goal of our moral self-development is freedom from the
world. If “man under moral laws " is recognised as the final
end of the world, then these laws must be recognised as world-
laws, and the moral order of the world as the order of all things;
then there must be also a moral author of the world, or an
original ground of all things, which can be nothing other than the
world-creating will or God. Thus Kant's teleological view of
the world culminates in the moral theology which furnishes the
basis for the only valid demonstration of the existence of God,
whose reality Kant never doubted, whose theoretical demonstra-
bility he denied and disproved in his doctrine of knowledge,
whose existence he affirmed with complete certitude in his
doctrine of freedom and faith. Without will as the original
ground of the world, there is in the latter neither freedom, nor
final end, nor development.
1 “In marching onward, bliss and torment find,
Though, every moment, with unsated mind "
—Taylor's Translation,
Faust, Part II., Act V., Scene 5.
CHAPTER IV.
A.XAM/WA 7TWOAW OF KAAW 7"S AWUAVOAMAEAV7.4/. DOCZ'RZAVES.
Y fixing and uniting Kant's fundamental doctrines, we have
won the right conception of the system, as it was present to
the mind of its author. It contains themes enough, which Kant
s has only sketched in outline, or not developed at all; problems
enough, which he partly left unsolved, partly declared incapable
of solution. To discover and supply the deficiencies is the task
of scholars who wish to fill out and complete the work of the
master without touching upon its principles. On the other
hand, the attempt to extend the system beyond its original
limits, and to advance where Kant remained stationary and
commanded philosophy to halt, is a problem which leads for
its solution to a transformation and development of the Kantian
doctrines. But, in order to determine such a problem, we must
ascertain whether the principles of Kant's teaching, in their
authentic form, are permanent principles, and whether they are
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. 95
fundamentally consistent in themselves and harmonious with
one another.
I. ExAMINATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF KNOWLEDGE.
1. The Contradiction in the Critique of Pure Reason.
We fix our eyes, first of all, upon the doctrine of knowledge,
which constitutes the real theme of the Critique of Pure Reason.
And our first question is: Does Transcendental or Critical
Idealism, the founding of which won for Kant the fame of
being the Copernicus of philosophy, stand uncontradicted in the
Critique of Pure Reason itself? The fundamental recognition of
this doctrine of Idealism is unquestionably not the same thing
as a logically consistent adherence to it. Here, as the special
student will at once notice, we touch upon the point which
involves the much-controverted difference between the first and
second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, a point which
we have already made the subject of a very careful and exhaus-
tive discussion, to which we here take occasion to refer. The
present problem, which is concerned with the criticism of the
Kantian doctrine, obliges us to return to this very important
point.
* Fischer: Gesch, d. m. Philos., vol. iii., pp. 558-576.
96 Critique of Kant.
It will be well to put the question itself as briefly and precisely
as possible. Transcendental idealism teaches : all our pheno-
mena or objects of experience are mere ideas, and nothing inde-
pendent of the latter. That subjective phenomena are such, is
beyond question. We are concerned, therefore, only with the
objective phenomena; these are the things external to us, the
phenomena in space, hence bodies or matter. Kant must
necessarily have taught, and has taught in the most unambiguous
’ as it appears in
manner in the “Paralogisms of Pure Reason,’
the first edition of the Critique, that matter is a mere idea. In
the second edition, he added a “Refutation of Idealism,” in
which he declares that matter is not a mere idea. This is the
point with which we are here concerned. We have before us a
contradiction, which no ingenious interpretation can explain
away from either the spirit or letter of the original passages.
In the first edition of the Critique—to cite these passages—
in the sections entitled “Paralogisms of Pure Reason’’ and
“Observations on the Result of the Pure Doctrine of the Soul,”
we read the following: “We have undeniably shown in the
Zºranscendental Zsthetic that bodies are mere phenomena of our
external sense, and not things-in-themselves.” “I understand,
under the Transcendental idealism of all phenomena, that principle
according to which we regard phenomena as a whole as mere
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. 97
ideas, and not as things-in-themselves.” “Since he (the
Transcendental idealist) recognizes matter, and indeed its inner
possibility, merely as phenomenon, which is nothing apart from
our sensibility, matter is with him only a sort of ideas (percep-
tion) which are objective, not as if they were related to objects
in themselves external, but because they refer perceptions to space,
in which everything external is, while space itself is in us. To
this Transcendental idealism we have already given our adherence
at the beginning.” “Now, external objects (bodies) are merely
phenomena, hence nothing other than a sort of my ideas, the
objects of which only have existence in virtue of these ideas;
apart from them, however, they are nothing.” “It is clearly
shown that if I should take away the thinking subject, the entire
material world would disappear, since it is nothing but the
appearance in the sensibility of the subject, and a sort of its
ideas.” "
According to Kant’s doctrine, substance is only knowable
through its persistence, and persistence only knowable in the
phenomenon which at all times fills space. Hence matter is the
only knowable substance, since it alone among objects persists.
Now, the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason declares,
* Kant : Kritié der reinen Vermunſt. (Werke, vol. ii., pp. 667, 675, 676,
684.)
98 Critique of Kant.
in its disproof of idealism: “Thus the perception of this
persistence is only possible through a thing external to me, and
not through the mere idea of such a thing.”.”
Accordingly, as to what concerns things external to us, i.e.,
bodies or matter, Kant teaches in the first edition of the Critique,
fhał external objects (bodies/ only have existence in zirtue of our ideas,
but apart from them they are nothing; in the second edition, on
the other hand, that the perception of maſſer is only possible through
a thing external to me, aud not through the mere idea of such a thing.
There he teaches that things external to us are mere ideas;
here, on the other hand, that they are not mere ideas. There he
teaches that things external to us have existence merely in virtue
of our ideas, but that they are nothing independent of the latter;
here, that they have existence, by no means in virtue of our
ideas, but independently of them. Hence our ideas of things
external to us, and these things themselves are different from
one another, and external things must, consequently, be objects
independent of our ideas, i.e., things-in-themselves. Since, now,
things external to us are in Space, Space also must be something
independent of our thought. But this means utterly to abandon
Transcendental idealism and to return under full sail to the old
* Kant : Ār, d. r. Verminſt. (Werke, vol. ii., p. 224.) Y
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. 99
dogmatism. In his establishment of Transcendental idealism,
Kant appears as the Copernicus of philosophy; in his refutation
of “psychological idealism,” on the contrary, as Ptolemy, or
rather as Tycho Brahe, who confounded both systems.
The inconsistency of the two editions is perfectly obvious.
The second, in which the text of the Critique should presumably
have received its definitive form, contains the establishment of
Transcendental idealism and at the same time a disproof of
idealism, which directly contradicts the original doctrine.
Accordingly, the Kantian Critique of Pure Reason or doctrine of
knowledge, is here at variance with itself, and indeed in literal
Statement. ./
2. The Origin of the Contradiction.
The new refutation of idealism in the second edition of the
Critique, as well as the notes and appendix to the Prolegomena,
was called forth by the misconceptions which arose with the
very first review of the Kantian masterpiece, the Transcendental
idealism of the new doctrine being confounded with the old
dogmatic idealism, and especially that of Berkeley.
Rant wished to shield his work from such misapprehensions,
and therefore undertook radically to distinguish the new idealism
from the old by a logical and convincing proof. The former
establishes phenomena and experience; the latter, on the
TOO Critique of Rant.
contrary, bases itself upon the facts of inner experience. Hence
Kant designates this dogmatic idealism as the “empirical ‘’ or
“psychological.” He found this developed in two principal forms.
Upon the ground of our inner experience, which furnishes
nothing but ideas in us, empirical idealism had declared the
existence of things external to us to be either doubtful or
impossible. The former position was taken by Descartes, the
latter by Berkeley. Hence Kant called the doctrine of the one
the “problematic,” that of the other the “dogmatic idealism.”
Berkeley had a radically false idea of space, which, like colour,
taste, etc., he ascribed to our sensations, and, consequently, re-
garded an idea of space independent of impressions as something
impossible and wholly imaginary. He took as the matter of
thought that which is the form of thought. Hence he denied
the existence of external things. Kant rightly said: “The
ground for this idealism has already been destroyed in our
(Transcendental Asthetic.””
Thus it only remained to disprove Descartes. To do this, it
was necessary to show that our inner experience was only possi-
ble under the presupposition of outer experience, which consists
in the idea of external things. But since all ideas are in us, even
1 Kant : Kr. d, r. Vernumſ, “Refutation of Idealism.” (Werke, vol. ii.,
p; 223. Cf. 1st ed., pp. 67, 68. Note.) -
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. IOI
those of things external to us, it had to be shown that these ideas
were only possible under the presupposition of the existence of
things external to us, or that “the idea of matter is only possible
through a thing external to me, and not through the mere idea of
such a thing.” Precisely this course was taken, and for this rea-
son, by the “Refutation of Idealism” in the second edition of
the Critique. In order to prove the existence of things external
to us, Kant made inner experience dependent upon outer, and
outer experience dependent upon the existence of external things;
that is, he made the existence of external things independent of
our thought, and the latter dependent upon the former; he thus
made things external to us, i.e., bodies and matter, things-in-
themselves. And so Kant subverted, in this particular, his own
doctrine of Transcendental idealism, while seeking to vindicate
it, and to secure it against confusion with empirical idealism.
In order fundamentally to differentiate the one from the other, he
tore them asunder in the very point in which they agree; for
they agree in holding all our objects of knowledge to be pheno-
mena or ideas, and as such in us. In order, now, to show that
he could demonstrate what Descartes had been unable to prove,
he brought forward a proof which Descartes had already made
use of, and, indeed, in the same way,+that, namely, that our
idea of bodies is only possible under the condition of the
IQ2 Critique of Rant.
existence of bodies independent of our ideas. In like manner
Descartes had shown that matter or extended substance was a
thing-in-itself, entirely independent of thought, and that space
was the attribute of this thing, and likewise independent of
thought.”
Certainly this refutation of idealism is a very noteworthy
example of how easily, in the vindication of his cause, even so
powerful a thinker as Kant could surrender his own position, in
order to avoid the mere appearance of agreement with certain
related standpoints which he opposed. Kant and Berkeley both
teach that space is in us, and that things external to us are our
phenomena or ideas, and nothing independent of the latter. In
spite of this agreement, however, their doctrines are fundamen-
tally different. According to Berkeley, space is a sensation, like
colour and taste; according to Kant, it is a perception which is
independent of all sensation. According to Berkeley, space is
a given material of thought, like all our impressions; according
to Kant, it is a necessary form or fundamental law of thought.
Thus Berkeley's idealism was overthrown by Kant's Transcendental
Asthetic, and consequently the confusion of the two points of
view, was utterly unjustifiable and false. Kant rightly appealed
' Cf. Fischer : Gesch. d, re. A hilos., vol. i. (3rd ed.), pp. 324-26.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. IO3
to this refutation, and ought to have let the matter rest there.
Put he would have nothing in common with the dogmatic ideal-
ism of Berkeley, and so now he demonstrates that external things
are by no means mere ideas, and that matter is something inde-
pendent of our thought, Berkeley had declared matter to be a
nonentity, so Kant now demonstrates its reality, as if it were a
thing-in-itself. Berkeley had said, Space is in us; so Kant now
proves that it is external to us.
3. The Second Refutation of Idealism. Kant versus Jacobi.
But Kant had not satisfied himself with having disproved ideal-
ism in the text of the second edition of the Criſique; he felt also
called upon to furnish the preface to this edition with a long
note, which should renew and confirm most emphatically the
former refutation, and drive from the field an opponent who had
but just appeared. This opponent was Jacobi, in his Letters on
the Doctrine of Spinoza, and his Talks on David Hume. The
former appeared two years after the Prolegomena (1785), the
latter in the same year as the second edition of the Critique of
Pure Reason (1787), but some months earlier. Now Jacobi had
maintained that we can never demonstrate the existence of ex-
ternal things, but only be certain of it through faith, since such
existence becomes apparent to us purely through immediate
IO4 Critique of Kant.
revelation. He opposed this position not only to all dogmatism,
but also to all philosophical idealism, since the latter is obliged
to hold external things to be mere ideas in us. This criticism
also affects Transcendental idealism.
Of course, Jacobi understands, under external things, things
independent of all our ideas, i.e., things-in-themselves. Now
Kant wants to prove the contrary; he wants to demonstrate the
existence of external things in the same sense in which Jacobi
maintains its indemonstrability. Thus originates the AWołe which
he has inserted in his preface.” One sees in advance that he
will abandon his standpoint a second time; he will show that
external things are things-in-themselves. Really, the attack of
Jacobi put Kant so beside himself, that he let idealism fall with
a word. He says: “However innocent Idealism may be held to
be (as in fact it is not) in respect to the essential aim of meta-
physics, yet it is none the less an abuse of philosophy and of
common human reason to be obliged to take the existence of
external things (from which we nevertheless receive the entire
material of knowledge, even for our inner sense) merely on faith,
and not to be able, if any one is inclined to doubt it, to con-
front him with satisfactory proof.” He had, to be sure, already
* Kant : Kritik d. r. Vernunſt. Preface to 2nd ed. (Werke, vol. ii., pp.
31, 32.)
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. IO5
disproved idealism and cleared himself of the charge of it, but
“certain obscurities” were found in the expressions of the proof
which should now completely disappear. And this time the
refutation of idealism takes such a form that we can no longer
doubt that external things figure as things-in-themselves; else
also his disproof of Jacobi's philosophy of faith would be com-
pletely ineffectual.
We know that, according to the doctrine of Kant, all the
material of our cognitions consists in our impressions or sensa-
tions, which we do not make, but receive, which are given to us,
and, indeed, through things-in-themselves." The new “note ”
now instructs us that it is external things “from which we
receive the entire material of knowledge, even for our inner
sense.” Accordingly, external things figure as things-in-them-
selves.
According to the doctrine of Kant, matter, among all our
objects of knowledge, is the only substance, since it is the only
thing that persists; and as that which fills space, it is nothing
other than external appearance or idea.” We are now told in
the “note ” most expressly, and in italics, the diametrical
* Wide supra, Chap. I., Part III., Sec. 2, on “The Thing-in-Itself.”
* Cf. supra, Chap. IV., I. I. : “The Contradiction in the Critique of Pure
A'eason.” - ,
IO6 Critique of Kant.
opposite: “This persisting object, however, cannot be a per-
ception in me, for all determining grounds of my being, which
can be found in me, are ideas, and demand as such a persisting
object distinct from them, in relation to which their change, and
hence my existence in time, in which they change, can be deter-
mined.” There is, accordingly, no doubt that in this passage,
in order that all idealism may be disproved, and the existence of
external things demonstrated, matter must be taken as some-
thing independent of our ideas, i.e., as a thing-in-itself.
It is likewise pointed out to us anew, that inner experience is
dependent upon outer, and that the latter is dependent upon the
existence of external things. For, the “note ’’ continues, “To
this the remark may still be added, that the idea of something
persistent in existence is not tantamount to a persisting idea, since
this may be very variable and inconstant, as all our ideas are,
even those of matter, and yet it is related to something per-
sistent, which must consequently be an external thing distinct
from all our ideas,” etc. The Kantian doctrine holds matter to
be (1) the sole persisting object; and (2) a mere appearance or
idea ; it is accordingly the only persisting idea, and, as such,
completely identical with the idea of something persistent in exis-
tence. If, now, this persisting something must be, as the
y
“note ’ declares, “an external thing, distinct from all our
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. IO7
ideas,” then matter is a thing-in-itself. And if consistent, we
shall now be obliged, in harmony with the “note,” to dis-
tinguish also space and the idea of space, and to pronounce
space an object wholly independent of and distinct from our idea
of space, i.e., a thing-in-itself, or the attribute of a thing-in-
itself. And thus space becomes, once more, with Kant what it
was with Descartes.
When thought is distinguished from the object of thought, as
was done by Kant in his disproof of idealism and in the “note,”
Transcendental idealism is surrendered, and, at the same time,
the possibility of explaining the correspondence between idea and
object, i.e., of explaining knowledge, and, as well, the possibility
of understanding the Critique of Pure Reason. It was with this
insight that Sigismund Beck declared such a distinction between
thought and its object to imply a standpoint from which it was
impossible to understand or rightly estimate the Critique. For
thought can only correspond with its object, when its object is
thought. This point of view, which regards the object of
thought, not as a thing independent of thought, but as its
necessary product, Beck called “the only possible” one for
comprehending and rightly appreciating the Critique of Pure
A'eason. From this point of view he wrote a Commentary on
Kant's Works, and, indeed, as he expressly says on the title-page
IO8 gº Critique of Kant.
of his book, “With Kant's Approval.” This is a very note-
worthy fact, and one which must not be overlooked, when the
question of the real teaching of Kant, and of passages that
contradict it, is to be investigated and decided upon. Beck
very well knew of the contradictions, but sought too lightly- to
explain them away, in permitting the philosopher to assume at:
times the language of dogmatism and the common conscious-
ness for the sake of a pleasing intelligibility. He thinks that
when Kant talks about the object of thought as a thing indepen-
dent of thought, he speaks, e.g., as Copernicus might of the
rising and setting of the Sun ; he simply speaks according to the
common usage, without at all changing his standpoint. We find,
however, that, in the passages we have examined, Kant exchanges
his standpoint for that of the common consciousness, since he
teaches that the existence of external things can be demonstrated
in the sense in which such existence is denied by dogmatic
idealism and presupposed by the common understanding.
Kant had proved the existence of external things in a manner
perfectly consistent with Transcendental idealism, and, indeed,
in such a way that the fact of the external world, as it appears to
the common consciousness, was completely explained. He had
pointed out, that is, that the existence of things external to us
is immediately apparent to every human consciousness—a fact
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. IO9
which would be impossible if external things were anything
other than phenomena or ideas. He says, “Now all external
objects (bodies) are merely phenomena, hence nothing other
than a sort of my ideas, the objects of which only have existence
through these ideas, while apart from them they are nothing.
External things exist, therefore, just as really as I myself exist, and
both, in truth, on the immediate evidence of my self-conscious-
ness, only with the difference that the idea of myself as the
thinking subject is referred merely to the inner sense, while the
ideas which designate extended beings are also referred to the
outer sense. I am just as little obliged to deduce the actuality of
external objects as the actuality of the objects of my inner
sense (my thought); for they are on both sides nothing but
ideas, the immediate perception (consciousness) of which is a
sufficient proof of their actuality.” This lucid and highly
significant declaration stands in the first edition of the Critique
of Pure Reason, in the second edition it is left out, and in the
observations that take its place it is by no means compensated
for by any equivalent statement, although, here also, at the
close of the criticism of rational psychology, it is noted that
outer and inner objects “are distinguished from one another
J g
* Kant : Kritik der reinen Vermumſ: (1st ed.). “Critique of the Fourth
Paralogism of Transcendental Psychology.” (Werke, vol. ii., p. 676.)
I IO Critique of Kant.
only so far as the one appears external to the other, and that
which underlies the phenomenon of matter, as thing-in-itself,
may perhaps not be so unlike in kind.” As if totally uncon-
scious that he had already explained from the Critical point of
view the existence of the external world, and shown with trans-
parent clearness that, and why, we are not obliged logically to
deduce the actuality of external objects, Kant now gives in the
second edition of the Critique a refutation of idealism in which
the existence of external things is syllogistically proved. The
syllogism runs, in brief, as follows: Our inner experience is
dependent upon the outer; outer experience is dependent upon
the existence of external things: therefore external things are
independent of our inner experience, and are not mere ideas.
4. Review of Objections.
Emil Arnoldt has shown himself, by a series of instructive in-
quiries, such a thorough and scholarly critic of both the life º
* Kant : Ār, d. r. Vernunft (2nd ed.). “Conclusion of the Solution of
the Psychological Paralogism.” (Werke, vol. ii., pp. 326, 327.)
* By his recent biographical studies he has, among other things, shown, for
the first time beyond doubt, that Kant was never enrolled in the theological
faculty, and that his pedagogical and social relations to the Count Kayserling's
House in Rautenburg and Königsberg are to be determined according to family
connections hitherto unknown. Wide E. Arnoldt; Kants Jugend und die firef
ers/en. Jahré seizzer Privatdocentur (Königsberg, 1882), pp. 26, and 54-57.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I I I
and doctrines of Kant, that his investigations are deserving of
the most careful attention. In his commendatory review of my
work, he has also brought forward the points in which he does
not share my views. The most important among them concerns
the contradiction stated to exist in the Kantian doctrine of
knowledge. Respecting the character and fundamental import
of Transcendental idealism we are agreed. Arnoldt, too, is “not
disposed to explain away the philosophical difference between
the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason.” He grants
that the second edition might give rise to a false conception of
the Kantian doctrine, and indeed, as a matter of fact, has done
so ; and that the first edition, owing to the energetic and un-
ambiguous manner in which it teaches the ideality of the
material world, is to be preferred to the second. On the other
hand, he contends that the difference between the two editions
does not affect the fundamental principles of Kant’s doctrine of
knowledge, and that, in particular, the “Refutation of Idealism,”
which Kant developed in the second edition, is not inconsistent
with Transcendental idealism. The rather, Kant here sought
to show, as a refutation of Descartes only, that our inner ex-
I mention this incidentally, in order to correct my own exposition in reference
to Kant's theological studies. Wide Fischer : Gesch d, n. Philos., vol. iii.,
p. 51. Cf. Pref., p. viii.
I I.2 Critique of Kant.
perience is dependent upon and mediated by the outer; he had
succeeded in proving it, and this constituted the special service
rendered by his new “Refutation of Idealism.” I must oppose
Arnoldt's pointed arguments for the following reasons: (1) Trans-
cendental idealism teaches the full and direct immediacy of
inner and outer experience. This doctrine is contradicted
when outer experience is regarded as the means and condition
of the inner. Outer experience cannot be such a condition,
since it is itself also inner experience; it is a part or special and
necessary sphere of inner experience. (2) To show that our
inner experience is dependent upon and mediated by the outer
was not the end of Kant’s new “Refutation of Idealism,” but
merely a stadium of the argument. The real end was to show
the dependence of outer experience upon the existence of external
things, that is, to show that external things are independent of our
thought. Then things external to us figure as things-in-them-
selves; then phenomena are confounded with things-in-them-
selves; then Transcendental idealism and Kant’s whole doctrine
of knowledge are completely contradicted. This is the point
in question. I maintain, therefore, that the Transcendental
idealism expounded in both editions of the Critique, compared
! E. Arnoldt : Kant nach Kuno Fischers neuer Darstellung (Königsberg,
1882), pp. 31-42. &
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. II 3
with the new “Refutation of Idealism,” and the Note to the
preface of the second edition, is related to these latter positions,
as A to non-A. Consequently, in order to disprove this, it must
be shown that Kant has not denied throughout the first edition
of the Critique that external things (bodies) are independent of
our ideas, and that he has by no means affirmed and sought to
demonstrate the same in the passages cited.
Arnoldt denies that there is a contradiction in the two
editions, and seeks to graduate their difference. “The first
shows with greater explicitness that bodies, but with less
explicitness that souls, are phenomena; it approximates spiritual-
ism. The second shows with greater explicitness that souls,
but with less that bodies, are phenomena; it vindicates, as
opposed to spiritualism, which it sets aside, the relative justifi-
cation of materialism, which it likewise rejects.” If one only
knew in each case the degree of “the greater” and “the less
explicitness” For Kant declared with all explicitness, in the
first edition of the Critique, that bodies were mere phenomena,
and denied with all explicitness, in both editions, that souls
were phenomena or knowable objects at all."
In an excellent paper, evincing exact technical knowledge and
* Id, ; p. 32.
II4. Critique of Kant.
a penetrating judgment, written upon my history of philosophy,
and especially my work on Kant, Johann Witte has also touched
upon the critical question with which we are at present occu-
pied. He is of my opinion, that the “altered exposition of the
second edition is not to be regarded as a change for the better,”
but denies that it contradicts the fundamental doctrine of the
first edition, and would limit the difference of the two to the
fact that “the second weakens the idealistic character of the
first by indistinctness.” I must object to this expression as
too indefinite, and to Witte's further explanation as incorrect.
What Kant seeks in the passages cited to show, as appears both
from the passages and the context, is not, as Witte supposes,
that external things are independent of subjective or individual
thought, but of thought as such. Of that, the Note appended
to the preface of the second edition—which Kant intended to
confirm the “Refutation of Idealism" to be found in the text—
does not leave the least doubt. Nor, indeed, does the “Refuta-
tion ” itself, according to which “the perception of this persis-
tence is only possible through a thing external to me, and not
through the mere idea of such a thing.” Now, Witte interprets
“ the perception of this persistence ’’ as that “ of my existence
in time.” This interpretation seems to me impossible, for two
reasons: because (1) “my existence in time” is not persistent,
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. II 5
and because, (2) according to Kant's express teaching, no
existence, among all knowable objects, persists, "except matter.
If Kant, as Witte holds, always understands by “thing” an
“object thought,” or the idea of a thing, then he in reality says
in the above passage: “The perception of this persistence is
only possible through a thing (i.e., through the idea of a thing)
external to me, and not through mere idea of a thing external
to me.” It is evident that no sort of skilful exegesis can explain
away the contradiction which I have pointed out and traced to
its origin. And I ought certainly to be protected from the
supposition, which surely would not be entertained by so acute
and expert a critic as Witte, that any prepossession for the
doctrine of another philosopher, as Hegel, has exerted the least
influence upon my estimate of Kant."
It is always a thankworthy and profitable experience to receive
the criticisms of thorough scholars, in order to be able either to
correct one’s own views, or, as I may have succeeded in doing in
the present important question, to confirm them. But it is most
disagreeable to be obliged to repel opponents who know nothing
whatever of the matter in question, or of the method in which it
* Joh. Witte: Kuno Fischers Behandlung der Geschichte der Philosophie und
sein Verhältniss zur Kaniphilologie. Altºr. Monatsschr, vol. xx, pp. 129-151,
esp. pp. I45-I48.
II 6 Critique of Kant.
is treated, yet who, with ignorant and over-confident loquacity,
take part in the discussion, and affect to write a polemical
treatise, such as one of our weekly papers has granted an un-
known author against me.”
It will suffice to point out, by a striking illustration, what
ignorance of the Critical philosophy, and what complete in-
capacity for a comprehension of it, our anonymous critic exhibits
with his empty bombastic phrases. Every one versed in the
Critique of Pure Reason knows that Kant regarded the stand-
points of transcendental idealism and empirical realism on the
one hand, and those of transcendental realism and empirical
idealism on the other, as necessarily belonging together; and
that he united the first two in his doctrine, and claims to
have disproved the other two, which belong to dogmatism.
Transcendental idealism teaches the origin of our common phe-
nomenal world ; empirical realism teaches that there are, accord-
ingly, no other objects of knowledge but phenomena, or sensible
things. Therefore the two standpoints necessarily go together,
and their names merely denote different sides of the same way
of thinking. It is precisely the same with the other two. Trans-
cendental realism teaches that things external to us are in-
* Die Grenzāoten, No 40 (1882): Kant and Āzeno Fischer, pp. Io-I7.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I 17
dependent of our thought, or are things-in-themselves; empirical
idealism teaches that precisely on that account we do not
conceive external things immediately, but only mediately, i.e.,
by logical inference, and that therefore we can be less certain of
their existence than of our own thought; or, what is the same
thing, that the existence of our thinking being (soul) is alone
certain, while the existence of external things is uncertain or
doubtful. In other words, whoever is a transcendental realist
must also be an empirical idealist. These two standpoints are
not at variance with one another, but identical, and their names
simply denote different sides of the same method of thought.
If it is as the transcendental realist maintains respecting the exis-
tence of external things, then it must be as the empirical
idealist teaches regarding our idea of things, and the certainty
of their existence. The two points of view need no reconcilia-
tion, since they do not conflict with one another, but are
complementary sides of the same thing, and together constitute
the character of that dogmatic rationalism which was founded
by Descartes, and overthrown by the Critical investigations of
Kant." The matter stands thus. And now the Grenzôofen lets
its philosopher announce the following nonsense, with that
Fischer : Gesch. d, m. Philos., vol. iii. (3rd ed.), pp. 450-456.
II 8 Critique of Kant.
ridiculous emphasis which delights empty heads: “Kant exerted
his whole prodigious power to reconcile the contradiction between
empirical idealism and transcendental realism,” etc. So Kant
(1) reconciled two standpoints which, according to his view,
are completely harmonious ; he (2) reconciled two points of
view, both of which he proved to be untenable ; and, in order to
solve a contradiction which, according to his doctrine, is none,
nor ever was one, he (3) “exerted his prodigious power,” and,
moreover, the “whole” of it ! It is impossible to utter more
nonsense in fewer words. (0ſ, gł A. tº r rººz & -
I come back to the result of my examination of the Kantian
doctrine of knowledge, and must regard it as sustained.
According to Kant’s doctrine, things-in-themselves are to be
distinguished from phenomena, hence also from things external
to us, with the utmost precision, and every confusion of the two
is to be most carefully guarded against. Notwithstanding, in
the text and in the preface of the second edition of the Critique
of Pure Reason, Kant has refuted idealism in such a way that
things external to us are recognised as independent of our
thought, hence as things-in-themselves, and consequently the
latter are confounded with phenomena. It corresponds com-
* “Pie Grenzłoten,” No. 40 (1882), p. 16.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I IQ
pletely to the Kantian doctrine, both in its spirit and letter, to
ascribe reality and causality to things-in-themselves. Yet it just
as much contradicts this doctrine to attribute to them theoretical
knowableness (empirical reality) and external causality. They
are the causes of our sensible impressions, or of the empirical
material of our knowledge, but they are not external causes,
since these are external things or phenomena, which originate
from sensations, hence cannot create the latter. It is, accord-
ingly, a radically false and inverted conception of the Kantian
doctrine to regard it as holding things-in-themselves to be the
external causes of our affections of sense. Such a conception is
absolutely impossible with Transcendental idealism, but with
the later “Refutation of Idealism" it is not impossible—indeed,
it is so far possible, that it soon became the customary one with
Kantians of the ordinary sort. It is this view which Fichte, in
his opposition to the Kantians, and later Schopenhauer, in his
Critique of the Kantian Philosophy, could not strongly enough
condemn as anti-Kantian and contradictory. Fichte said: “So
long as Kant did not expressly declare, that sensations are to be
explained in philosophy from an externally present, in itself trans-
cendental object, so long I shall not believe what these expounders
tell us about Kant. But if he makes this declaration, I shall
sooner hold the Critique of Pure Reason to be the product of
I 20 f. Critique of Kant.
remarkable chance than that of a mind.”* Yet it is just as false
and inverted a view of the Kantian doctrine to hold that it
denies all reality and causality whatever to things-in-themselves,
since they cannot be the external causes of our sensations, and
that it recognises them as nothing further than mere inoperative
notions. I have already shown in detail, both from the spirit
and letter of the Kantian system, that our philosopher taught,
and must have taught, the reality and causality of things-in-
themselves, only this reality is not the empirical, and this
causality not the sensible and external, but the supersensible and
intelligible—namely, the causality of will. Is will and freedom,
then, according to Kant, somehow not thing-in-itself, and at the
same time reality and activity ? The thing-in-itself is, according
to Kant’s explicit teaching, the cause of our sensations. The
thing-in-itself is, according to Kant’s explicit teaching, will.
How can will be the cause of our sensations, of our sensibility,
and of the constitution of our reason in general P How 3 That
is the question. Kant regarded an answer to it as for ever im-
possible. Schopenhauer saw in it the enigma of the world,
which he sought to solve by his doctrine of the will. And to-
day’s history of organic development established by Darwin,
J. G. Fichte : Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre. Wide Werke,
vol. i., p. 486.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I 2 I
implies, as appears from the intelligent way in which it grasps
the relation of function and organ, this factor which Schopen-
hauer called the will to live."
If Kant had not maintained the being of things-in-themselves
independent of all ideas and phenomena, a man like Herbart, that
pronounced opponent of all idealism and monism, would never
have called himself a “Kantian,” and have been convinced that
“Kant possessed the true notion of being.” He who had
demonstrated the impossibility of the ontological proof for the
existence of God, as Kant had done in the Critique of Pure Reason,
was, in Herbart’s view, “the man to overthrow the old
metaphysics.”” **
II. ExAMINATION OF THE DOCTRINES OF FREEDOM AND
DEVELOPMENT.
I. Schopenhauer's Critique of the Kantian Philosophy.
In his Critique of the Kantian Philosophy (which is based upon
the second edition of the chief work), Schopenhauer has
accounted the same the highest product which the history of phi-
losophy has brought forth. It is related to the old metaphysics
* Cf. supra, Chap. I., Part III., 2, and Chap. III., Part I.
* Cf. infra, Chap. V., Part II., 2.
I 22 Critique of Kant.
of the nature of things (God, the world, and the soul) as the true
view of the world to the false, or as the new chemistry to alchemy
And even the profound idealistic systems of old time, which, as
the religion of India and the Platonic philosophy, had attained
the insight that our sense-world is only conceived and phenome-
nal, are related to the Kantian doctrine as the incorrectly esta-
blished truth to that which is correctly established, or as the
heliocentric view of the world of a Pythagorean to that of
Copernicus. At the same time the Kantian philosophy wants
both completeness and consistency. Its two chief merits are
accompanied by two chief errors. Its greatest merit consists in
the “distinction of phenomenon from thing-in-itself,” by which
“the complete diversity of the Real and the Ideal,” and the
merely conceived or phenomenal (hence not real) being of our
sense-world, become apparent. Its second merit consists in the
“knowledge of the undeniably moral meaning of human conduct,
as entirely different from and not dependent upon the laws of
phenomena, nor even explicable in accordance with them, but
as something that is immediately connected with the thing-in-
itself.” 1
The first of the two main errors of Kant, Schopenhauer finds
Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. i., Appendix (5th
ed., 1879), pp. 494-5OO.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I23
in the fact that he has not clearly distinguished between sensible
and abstract or reflective knowledge. This has led to irre-
mediable confusion, now by falsely confounding, now by falsely
opposing the two sorts of knowledge. Thus Kant has denied
sensible knowledge to the understanding, as if there could be
a visible sense-world without understanding ; and has treated
reason, not as the faculty of abstract or reflective knowledge by
means of judgments and conclusions, but as tha of principles
and moral conduct, while, in truth, it only determines the rules
according to which prudent conduct is regulated. Moral or
virtuous, and reasonable or prudent, are by no means synony-
mous terms. The Machiavelian policy is not virtuous, but it is,
indeed, clever and reasonable, while self-sacrificing generosity is
quite as virtuous as it is unwise. From the sensible knowledge
of the understanding there arises the abstract, through the faculty
of reflection or thought (reason). Hence sensible perceptions
are related to notions, as sensible objects to thought-objects, or
as “phenomena” to “noumena,” but not as appearances to
things-in-themselves; for abstract notions represent nothing but
appearances. Kant's treatment of the difference between
phenomena and noumella as equivalent to the difference
between appearances and things-in-themselves, and his con-
sequent designation of the latter as noumena, has proved a
I 24 Critique of Kant.
mischievous and fatal error, growing out of that first fundamental
one.”
The second main error, which seriously conflicts with the
fundamentally idealistic view of the Critique of Pure Reason, con-
sists in the false introduction of the thing-in-itself as the external
cause of our sensations. It is not the recognition of a thing-
in-itself as related to -a given phenomenon that is erroneous,
but this method of deducing it; and it is this which proved
troublesome to the second edition of the critique in its “Refu-
tation of Idealism.” “No one imagines that he knows the
Critique of Pure Reason, and has a clear notion of Kant's doctrine,
when he has read it only in the second or in one of the follow .
ing editions; that is absolutely impossible, for he has read only
a mutilated, corrupted, and in some measure spurious text.””
It is equivalent to a contradiction of the fundamental idealism
of the Kantian doctrine to regard the thing-it-itself, according
to the law of causality, as the external cause of our sensations.
And it is equivalent to an utter misconstruction and denial of
the entire Kantian doctrine to reject the thing-in-itself alto-
gether, or to deny it reality, i.e., the character of original being,
' Schopenhauer : Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. i., pp. 513 and
517, 563-566, 610-614.
* Ibid., pp. 515-517.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I25
as has recently been done in some of the latest periodicals.
Schopenhauer unjustly attempted to ascribe this view of the
Kantian system—which he was wont to call “nonsensical tittle-
tattle "—to Fichte, who, on the contrary, had maintained, like
Schopenhauer, that the logically consistent criticism of reason
could never teach the external existence and causality of things-
in themselves," and had, like him, denied the unknowableness of
the same, and held that the thing-in-itself is to be immediately
known in our self-consciousness, that it is so known, and,
indeed, as will. ---
We have here no interest in further pursuing Schopenhauer’s
criticism of the Kantian doctrine of knowledge, since that would
necessarily lead to an examination of his own doctrine, which
saw itself obliged, following its distinction between under-
standing and reason, between the sensible knowledge of the one
and the abtsract knowledge of the other, to reject entirely
Kant's doctrine of the categories of the understanding and the
postulates of reason. In the two chief points which constitute
the character of Kant's system, viz., in the doctrines of the
ideality of all phenomena (objects), and of the reality of the
thing-in-itself, which is completely independent of and different
* Cf. supra, pp. I 19, I2O.
I 26 Critique of Kant.
from phenomena, Schopenhauer is agreed with Kant, and has
sought to develop his own system—The World as Will and Idea—
in accordance with these principles. In his view respecting the
groundwork of the Kantian philosophy we must concur; also
in his view that the confusion of phenomena and things-in-
themselves conflicts with this groundwork; also in his view that
things-in-themselves are confounded with phenomena when they
are recognized as things external to us, and as the external
causes of our sensations; also in his view that in the “Refutation
of Idealism,” as developed in the second edition of the Critique,
things external to us do figure as something independent of all
thought, and accordingly as things-in-themselves. When, how-
ever, Schopenhauer holds that not merely the external causality
of things-in-themselves, but their causality in general, is irrecon-
cilable with the Kantian doctrine (since, according to the latter,
the notion of causality in general is inapplicable to things-in-
themselves), we cannot agree with him, either that such a view
contains the contradiction he claims, or that the first edition of
the Critique is free from this contradiction, if it were one. That
things-in-themselves are the Supersensible substratum or hidden
ground of the constitution of our reason, hence also that of our
sensations and world of sense, Kant himself declared to be “the
constant assertion of his criticism.” It never occurred to him
Examination of the Kantiam Doctrines. 127
to apply temporal or sensible causality to things-in-themselves ;
their causality is the timeless or intelligible, just as their reality
is not temporal, but timeless, reality.” If Schopenhauer will
recognise the validity of no other than time-causality, that is his
affair, and the discussion of it belongs to the exposition and
criticism of his system, with which we are not now concerned.
He censures Kant for ascribing causality to things-in-themselves.
Why does he commend his affirmation of their reality ? It has
been difficult enough for Schopenhauer himself, and a wholly
futile attempt withal, to ascribe to the thing-in-itself (will) original
being, and at the same time to deny it causality. After I have
shown in what points I agree with Schopenhauer concerning
the difference between the two editions of the Critique of Pure
A'eason and the contradiction in the Kantian doctrine of know-
ledge, I must express the wish that, respecting this very question,
those points shall not be overlooked in which I differ from him.
2. The Correspondence between the Doctrines of Knowledge and
Afreedom.
The Kantian doctrine of knowledge, subject to the contradic-
tion pointed out, conflicts with the doctrine of freedom. Free
from this contradiction, it establishes the possibility of freedom,
* Cf. supra, Chap. I, Part III., Sec. 2, and Chap. II., Part II., Sec I.
I 28 Critique of Kant.
and, indeed, it alone among all systems. For there is no doubt
that, according to this doctrine, the thing-in-itself, absolutely
distinguished from all phenomena and absolutely independent
of space and time, is, and can be, nothing other than freedom
or will. We have already enlarged upon this point at such
length that we here need only to refer to that earlier discussion."
The three Critiques may be taken as the authentic documents
for the assertion: The Critique of Pure Reason in its doctrine of
intelligible and empirical character, the Critique of Practical
Reason in its doctrine of the reality of freedom and the primacy
of will, and the Critique of Judgment in its doctrine of natural
adaptation and immanent natural ends, as well as its doctrine of
final moral ends and the original ground of the world. After
Kant has shown with such fulness and clearness the connection
of his doctrines of knowledge and freedom, or, what is the same
thing, the identity between thing-in-itself and will, we cannot
possibly think, with Schopenhauer, that the matter only hovered
dimly before him, like a presentiment; and that he recognised
the thing-in-itself as will, not with the conviction of a philo-
sopher, but as “A good man, through obscurest aspiration,
has still an instinct of the one true way.”” “I therefore venture
* Wide supra, Chap. II., Part II.
* Faust.—Taylor's tr.
Examination of the Kanſtan Doctrines. I 29
to assume,” said Schopenhauer, “although it is not to be
proved, that Kant, as often as he spoke of the thing-in-itself,
always thought in the obscurest depths of his mind indistinctly
of will.” But after Schopenhauer himself has recognised the
“distinction of phenomenon from thing-in-itself,” and the
“knowledge of the undeniably moral meaning of human con-
duct, as something that is immediately connected with the
thing-in-itself,” as the two greatest services of our philosopher,
and has extolled his doctrines of time and space, and of intelli-
gible and empirical character, as “the two diamonds in the
crown of Kantian fame,” we are compelled to regard the sen-
tence just cited, not only as an imperfect and less commendatory
estimate of the services of Kant, but as an obvious contradiction
of his own statement. Kant must have been conscious of what
he taught, when he apprehended things-in-themselves as Ideas,
these as ends, these as determinations of will, and the will itself
as freedom, which, although revealed to us with immediate and
absolute certainty only in our own moral being, is nevertheless
necessarily identical with “that supersensible which we are
obliged to posit as underlying nature as phenomenon,” i.e.,
it is necessarily identical with the thing-in-itself.”
Schopenhauer : Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. i., p. 599.
* Cf. supra, Chap. III., Part III., Sec. 3.
I 30 Critique of Kant.
3. The Contradiction in the Doctrine of Freedom.
Between the logically consistent Kantian doctrines of know-
ledge and freedom, there is no contradiction, but the deepest
and most perfect harmony. To have discovered and expounded
this harmony is Kant's immortal service.
The doctrine of freedom demands a system of morals absolutely
free from hedonism, elevated entirely above every eudaemonistic
view of life, and thus above all strife between optimism and
pessimism. Kant himself, in separating virtue from happiness,
developed such a system of ethics; but when in his doctrine of
the summum bonum he united them, this high ethical ground was
virtually abandoned. After all eudaemonistic aims in life had
been utterly shut out in a system based upon freedom and the
purity of will, they should not have been introduced by the
doctrines of the summum bonum and of the immortality of the
soul. We were obliged earlier in the discussion, in order to set
forth clearly Kant's doctrine of immortality, and to distinguish
the true conception of it from the false, to point out this
contradiction in his doctrine of freedom, and may avoid all
repetition by referring to those remarks."
* Wide supra, Chap. II., Part III., Sec. 2. Cf. Schopenhauer: Pie Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung, vol. i., pp. 620–622.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I3 I
4. The Contradiction between the Doctrines of Knowledge and
Development. f
That Kant had already furthered the evolutionist view of
things before the Critique of Pure Reason, and had made it his
working problem ; that he had established this view by means
of the Critique, and had developed its principles in his treatment
of both nature and civilization, or the whole organic, social, and
moral world—all this has been pointed out in a previous sec-
tion.” We have also shown that, according to his doctrine, the
world-development is to be apprehended as phenomenon, and in
fact, as teleological phenomenon; that in its unity as well as in
its ultimate ground it is nothing other than the progressive
revelation of freedom.” We therefore regarded Kant's doctrine of
development as a unification of his doctrines of knowledge and
freedom, and the world-development itself as a unification of
phenomenon and thing-in-itself, and Such a unification as
neither confounds both nor negates itself by holding the un-
knowableness of the thing-in-itself, on the ground that, as the
immanent end of a thing, it is not to be found in the phenomenon,
as the object of our experience, by even the minutest analysis.
Wide supra, Chap. III., Parts I. and II.
* Wide supra, Chap. III., Part III.
132 Critique of Kant.
There is, accordingly, a point of view from which the Kantian
doctrine of development does not, in the first place, conflict with
the doctrine of knowledge.
We must conceive the development of things as teleological,
and as universal. We must extend its application to the entire
universe, but its knowableness must be limited to the moral
order of things, since all ends become known merely from the
will, and the will only from one's own practical reason. Conse-
quently, the development of things, like ends in general, remains
theoretically unknowable. Since, now, all phenomena are objects
of our experience or scientific (theoretical) knowledge, and
development is a phenomenon, and yet held not to be an object
of knowledge, we are here confronted with a contradiction
between the Kantian doctrines of knowledge and development,
which affects the truth of the latter. It consists in ascribing the
character of phenomenon to development, and at the same time
denying its scientific knowableness. The Kantian philosophy
teaches the unknowableness of thing-in-itself and the knowable-
ness of phenomenon : this, its foundation doctrine, is shattered
as soon as it sees itself obliged to recognise either the know-
ableness of the former or the unknowableness of the latter. To
such a recognition it is brought by its doctrine of development.
Without the knowledge of the end, or of the thing-in-itself,
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I 33
which underlies the development of things, this development is
an incomprehensible, unknowable phenomenon, and therefore,
in strictness, no phenomenon at all. If the immanent end of
things is not apparent to us, then certainly there appears to us
no development in the nature of things. Hence the Kantian
doctrine of development finds itself in the following dilemma:
either the intelligible, knowable, i.e., phenomenal, character of
development must be denied, or the knowableness of the thing-
in-itself affirmed ; and, indeed, not merely its practical and
moral knowableness, but also its theoretical and scientific.
III. ExAMINATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF PHENOMENA AND
THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES.
I. The Knowableness of Human Æeason.
The scientific validity of the doctrine of development demands
this affirmation. Hence the Kantian doctrine of knowledge does
not admit of permanent acceptance in the form it received in the
Critique of Pure Reason, in accordance with which only sensuous
phenomena are objects of knowledge, and all theoretical know-
ledge is confined to the realm of phenomena or objects of sense,
while all practical knowledge remains restricted to the realm of
freedom or of Ideas, and any further knowledge is held to be
impossible. But the Critique of Pure Reason itself contradicts this
I34. Critique of Kant.
!
!
result, inasmuch as it is obliged to admit the existence of a sort
of knowledge which is neither practical (moral), nor has sensible
things or phenomena for its objects. This knowledge is the
criticism itself, so far as in its investigation it discovers and
establishes the conditions of experience. The Critique professes
to have determined in its 7%anscendental Asthetic and Analytic
the constitution or organization of human reason. This know-
ledge is not a practical knowledge, for its subject is not freedom ;
and its objects are not phenomena, since according to the Critique
space and time are not phenomena, any more than productive
imagination, pure understanding, or pure consciousness. This
knowledge is not experience, for its objects are precisely those
conditions which precede all experience and make it possible.
All knowledge which aims in the first place only at insights, and
not at conduct, must be termed theoretical and scientific. Such
a knowledge is presented in the Critique of Pure Reason ; it is
neither empirical nor practical, but theoretical, and such as lays
claim to the character of science: it is the Doctrine of Knowledge;
and that it would not be, if its doctrine of knowledge were not
itself knowledge. It establishes the knowledge of experience by
showing how experience originates; and it would fail of its end
entirely if it itself were experience; for that would be tantamount
to establishing experience by experience, hence not establishing
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I35
it at all, but presupposing it, as the dogmatic philosophy had
done. And it ought not to be objected here that Kant, there-
fore, has used the inductive method of experimental science, in
establishing his doctrine of knowledge, so that the Critique of
Pure Reason itself rests on experience. Let us not deceive our-
selves by an ambiguous play with the word “experience.” In
strictness, our philosopher recognises only the knowledge of
phenomena; while, on the contrary, the Critique of Pure Reason
virtually leads to a sort of knowledge the objects of which are
not phenomena, but the subjective conditions of phenomena.
The fact of experience is one thing, its establishment another.
Whatever is established by experience is empirically known;
that, on the contrary, by which experience itself is established
is, precisely on that account, no object of empirical, but only of
7%anscendenſal knowledge. These two sorts of knowledge Kant
must have distinguished in the way that he did. Transcendental
knowledge has the character of theoretical as opposed to prac-
tical, but not that of empirical, knowledge. We thus see how
the Critique of Pure Reason transcends by its own insights the
bounds which it had set as the insurmountable limits of all
theoretical knowledge.
The insight into those subjective conditions from which phe-
nomena (objects of experience) and the knowledge of phenomena
I 36 Critique of Kant.
originate, constituted Transcendental Idealism ; and the insight
thereby gained, that we can have no other objects of knowledge
than sensuous phenomena, constituted Empirical Realism. We
know the necessary connection that subsists between these two
doctrines: they are related as premise and conclusion. Nothing
is therefore more thoughtless in estimating the Critical philo-
sophy, than to leave the character of Transcendental idealism,
whether through ignorance or misconception, entirely out of
sight, and then to declare the Kantian doctrine to be Empiricism.
The Critique of Pure Reason involves the problem of deducing
from the nature of our reason—which is revealed to us only
through the most penetrating self-knowledge—the conditions of
experience (“faculties of knowledge,” Kant termed them), and
thus of developing the doctrine of knowledge into an actual
doctrine of the process of knowledge. This problem remains un-
solved in the Kantian philosophy itself; but we have shown that
the Critique of Pure Reason contains the data for such a solution,
and that its investigations are ordered in such a way that it
shows us in outline the course of development of human know-
ledge from perception to Scientific thought, and to the system-
atization of the sciences. Now, the doctrine of knowledge
* Vide supra, Chap. III., Part II., Sec. 2. Cf. Fischer : Gesch. d. n. Philos.,
vol. iii. (3rd ed.), p. 519 et seg.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. 137
itself is scientific knowledge; and the doctrine of development
founds itself upon the notion of end, without which no sort of
development as such is intelligible. Hence this notion may
not be regarded merely as a moral principle for the knowledge
of the moral order of things, and a maxim of reflection for
contemplating the organic world; it is a principle of knowledge
which is valid for the entire knowable order of the world, the
natural as well as the moral.
2. The Knowableness of Matural Ends in Man and of Blind
Antelligence.
Let us examine the reason why Kant limited the knowableness
of ends to the moral, and excluded it from the natural world,
—why he saw himself obliged to deny knowableness to the imma-
nent natural end, which he had introduced into his Critique of
Pure Reason as a necessary Idea in our contemplation of the
organic world, and as the principle of teleological judgment. He
held that ends are only so far knowable as they are consciously
possessed and willed; that only will and intelligence can posit
ends and act in accordance with them ; that consequently nature
or the material world has no ends (no knowable ones); and that
therefore also the ends, without which we are unable to com-
prehend the organization and constitution of living bodies, are
138 Critique of Kant.
not forces operative in nature, not knowable objects, but mere
Ideas. They are, however, necessary Ideas; for, although in
organized bodies the parts should be understood in the light of
the whole, we, with our discursive understanding, can only put
together and comprehend the whole from the parts, and as we
are consequently incapable of perceiving and knowing such a
whole as the creative ground of life, we must conceive it as its
end. The whole, that is, which we are to conceive, but cannot
perceive sensibly as object, we are obliged to think as Idea, and
hence we are compelled to consider living bodies teleologically.
Had we an intuitive understanding, we should not need a faculty
of teleological judgment. In its weakness our reason takes
refuge, as it were, in this faculty, developing it out of its own
primitive powers, because it needs it to compensate, as well as
may be, for its native incapacity. By the way in which Kant
establishes the reflective judgment in general, and the teleological
in particular, the latter presents itself as a necessary form of de-
zelopment of human reason, which seeks to solve a problem, to
supply a needed knowledge, and, under the peculiar constitution
of its intellectual faculties, can attain its object in no other way."
Ends in nature, therefore, according to the Kantian teaching,
* Fischer : Gesch. d, n. Philos., vol. iv. (3rd ed.), pp. 492-498.
Examination of the Kantiam Doctrines. I39
are unknowable and in effect impossible, since they require to
be posited by will and intelligence; and such an unconscious
intelligence, such an end-active yet blind force, contradicts the
notion of matter. Thus hylozoism, which teaches that matter
is living and energized by inherent causes, was regarded by
Kant as the death of all Philosophy of Nature. Since, now,
living organized matter exists, and we cannot conceive of it
except as adapted to ends, Kant was obliged to deduce the
end-active underlying force from the moral ground of things, i.e.
from the divine will, and thus to give his teleological view of life
and of the world a theistic basis. But the immanent natural ends,
the Idea of which rules and guides our teleological judgment,
are thereby transformed into divine purposes, and life itself, as
well as all natural development, remains unexplained and inex-
plicable.
The unknowableness of natural ends is based by Kant upon
the impossibility of an unconscious intelligence or of a blind
will. But the reality of such a blind intelligence had already
been shown by Leibnitz in his doctrine of the unconscious or
imperceptible ideas (perceptions petites), a doctrine which he
raised to fundamental importance in his theory of knowledge.
And, in fact, Kant also was obliged to recognize the knowable-
ness of natural ends and the unconscious activity of our intellec-
I4O. Critique of Kant.
tual faculties. He recognized it in human nature, though he
had denied it in the organic world. We further the moral ends
of life by means of the “mechanism of instincts”—as Kant
terms the impulses of our natural ends of life—without being
conscious of them and willing them. Our natural interests
create that struggle for existence, and that increasing complexity
of industrial society, from which issue, unconsciously and with-
out volition, the moral orders of life. Wherever Kant esta-
blished the necessity of the latter, he laid the greatest stress upon
the reality and activity of our purely natural, and, at the same
time, intelligible ends of life." That we conceive a common
world of sense is a fact that our reflective consciousness finds at
hand, but does not create, since it is, the rather, produced from
the material of our impressions by the systematizing representa-
tive faculties of reason, and hence arises through the non-
reflective and unconscious activity of intellect. Kant saw in
the productive imagination this form-giving faculty, which acts
unconsciously in accordance with the laws of pure consciousness,
and constitutes the bond that unites sense and understanding.
“Synthesis in general is merely the work of the imagination, a blind
though indispensable function of the soul, without which we should
* Vide supra, Chap. III., Part II., Sec.
Examination of the Kanlian Doctrines. I4 I
have no knowledge whatever, yet of which we are seldom even con
scious. But to bring this synthesis to moſſons—that is a function
which belongs to the understanding, and in the exercise of
which the latter first procures for us knowledge in the real
sense.” +
When, accordingly, in our contemplation of nature, and
especially organic nature, Kant ascribes only subjective validity
and necessity to the motion of end, it conflicts with his theistic
doctrine, according to which the final end of things, and par-
ticularly the origin of life, is deduced from the original ground
of things, thus recognizing an end-active power, which is by
no means a mere idea. When Kant denies the knowableness of
inherent natural ends in general, it conflicts with his doctrine
of the natural ends of human life, which he regarded as a com-
pletely knowable and end-conformable mechanism of instincts,
by means of which the natural historical progress of mankind is
forced to a moral development, and its end unconsciously and
involuntarily promoted, though not of course attained. When
Kant denies the possibility of an unconscious intelligence and
an unconscious activity toward an end—which is necessarily
presupposed in the conception of inherent natural ends—this
Kant : Āritić der reinen Vermunſt. Transcend. Analytić., § Io. Cf.
Fischer: Gesch. d. m. Philos., vol. iii. (3rd ed.), p. 370.
I42 Critique of Kant.
assertion is contradicted not only by his doctrine of morals in
the points just mentioned, but also by his doctrine of knowledge
—that is, by the Critique of Pure Reason itself in its deduction
of the pure notions of the understanding, and especially in its
doctrine of the productive imagination, as being “a blind but indis-
pensable function of the soul, without which we should have no
knowledge whatever.”
3. The Knowableness of Zife and of Beauty.
When Kant teaches that all phenomena originate from the
subjective conditions of our reason, i.e., from the material of our
own impressions and the form-giving faculties or the laws of
our thought, this doctrine is contradicted by his view of organic
phenomena. According to these conditions, there can be no
objects in the sense-world which are not composed of such
parts as precede the whole; hence Kant also holds that all
phenomena, especially bodies, are only mechanically knowable.
But, now, there are certain objects with which this relation is
reversed. In this case, the whole does not result from the parts,
but the parts from the whole. Every object of this sort is a
whole which differentiates, articulates, and develops itself.
Such phenomena are living bodies. Could we perceive a whole
before its parts, and derive the latter from the former, then also
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I43
an organism would be mechanically knowable, and hence an
object of scientific knowledge in the exact sense of the word.
But that we cannot do, because such a faculty of perception, such
an intuitive understanding, is wanting in us. We are therefore
obliged to derive the constitution and parts of an organism from
the Idea of the whole, and consequently to consider it
£eleologically.
The character, then, of living bodies consists in their being
wholes which articulate, organize, and develop themselves.
Now, let it be carefully noted that it is not this character of the
organism, but only the teleological idea of the same, which comes
to the account of our reason. What, accordingly, characterizes
living phenomena, and makes them what they are, does not
permit of being determined from the subjective conditions of
our impressions and forms of thought, and is not founded in the
general, but in the specific conformity to law or type of the
phenomena themselves.” If there are living things, Kant ex
plains to us in his Critique of Judgment why we must conceive of
them teleologically. That, however, there are living things, or, in
other words, that life appears to us in the sense-world, the
Critique of Pure Reason and Transcendental idealism do not give
* Cf. Fischer : Gesch. d. n. Philos., vol. iii. (3rd ed.), pp. 514-518; vol. iv.
(3rd ed.), pp. 403-406.
I44 Critique of Kant.
us to understand. On the contrary, when we compare the way
in which Kant explains phenomena with the way in which he
apprehends the character and fact of life, it remains unexplained
and inexplicable, that life appears to us in the natural world
at all. We are therefore obliged to conclude either that life
per se does not belong in the phenomenal world, or that some-
thing appears in it, which the criticism of reason cannot derive
from our faculties of knowledge, neither from sense, nor from
understanding, but which, independently of our ideas and
phenomena, underlies life and constitutes its phenomenon.
Now, the fact or phenomenon of life is undeniable. Its creative
ground, since it subsists independently of our ideas and pheno-
mena, belongs to things-in-themselves, which are to be thought
as Ideas and ends, and are, in truth, will, the principle of the
intelligible, or moral order of the world. We are obliged to
conceive this creative ground of life as immanent natural end,
i.e., as unconscious intelligence and blind will, and can now no
longer hold this conception to be a mere Idea, which we
superadd to the phenomenon of life, since, without the reality
and activity of inherent natural ends, i.e., without blind will, the
fact and phenomenon of life, would not exist at all, and every
addition from the side of our reason would be useless. That
whole, which differentiates, articulates, and organizes itself, is
Examination of the Kantain Doctrines. I45
the definite end of life, or the will to live, which must assert
itself by activity, and develop the necessary organs for the
fulfilment of its functions.
And what is true of living phenomena must also be true of
aesthetic. That there is a state of harmony and freedom for our
faculties of mind, in which, independent of all desire and all in-
terests of knowledge, we give ourselves to pure contemplation
and enjoyment, follows from the constitution of our intellectual
nature. AEsthetic pleasure is a pure subjective state, apart from
which there could be no talk about aesthetic objects. That, how-
ever, in this state of free contemplation one object impresses us
as beautiful, another as ugly, a third as sublime, must be condi-
tioned by the peculiar sort of the phenomena, and can as little as
the character of life be derived from the subjective factors,
which are the ground of the phenomena and their general
conformity to law. There must, accordingly, be something
independent of our faculties of reason, which underlies the
phenomena themselves, makes them what they are, and which is
related to the given phenomenon, as the intelligible character
in us is related to the empirical. We must add, that this some-
thing becomes known to us from the phenomena themselves,
although we do not find the same in the analysis of the given
object.
I O
I46 Critique of Kant.
4. The Knowableness of Things-in-themselves.
This something is the thing-in-itself, the absolute unknowable-
ness of which Kant, it is true, asserted ; but in the progress of
his investigations he by no means adhered to this assertion. On
the contrary, in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique
of Judgment light was thrown upon the subject in a way which
he had not foreseen in the Critique of Pure Reason. We know
that he still denied in the second edition of the latter the
possibility of those principles which he afterwards discovered to
be necessary, and made the basis of his criticism of the aesthetic
judgment." This very noteworthy fact must not be overlooked.
And in criticising the Kantian philosophy we should always
remember that it by no means issued from the Critique of
Pure Reason as a finished system, but that, on the contrary,
it unfolded and developed itself, and reached results which
were not involved in that work, which do not accord with
its fundamental principles, and could not be adjusted to them
by any attempt at artificial symmetries, such as the philosopher
was so fond of applying. The phenomena to which we add
the idea of beauty, of Sublimity, or of inner adaptation, are not
included among the phenomena whose origin the Critique of
* Cf. Fischer : Gesch. d, n. Philos., vol. iv. (3rd ed.), p. 408 seg.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. - I47
Pure Reason investigates; the former are sui generis, and include
more than these.
According to the Critique of Pure Reason, things-in-themselves
are the substratum of the nature of our reason as well as of
phenomena. They are, therefore, to be absolutely distinguished
from phenomena, never confounded with them, hence never
with things external to us, but always to be thought of as the
unknowable original ground of things. This is the doctrine
which runs through the entire Critique of Pure Reason, and it is
difficult to believe that any one having read this work would
dispute its Kantian character. It could not have occurred to
Kant to hold the thing-in-itself to be a mere idea, or a mere
thought-thing, i.e., a cause ascribed by us in thought to pheno-
mena, as it is maintained in numerous recent publications
that he did. Were the thing-in-itself a mere thought-thing
and nothing more, it would, as such, be completely knowable,
and not unknowable and inscrutable, as the Critique of Pure
Reason nevertheless teaches with the utmost explicitness. If
the character of actuality or reality did not belong to things-in-
themselves, as the original ground of thinking and phenomenal
being, the doctrine of their unknowableness would be not only
meaningless, but absurd. How can anything which in reality
does not exist at all, but is merely thought, be seriously regarded
I48 - Critique of Kant.
as something unknowable P Whoever, then, thinks that accord-
ing to the Kantian teaching there is no such thing as the
reality of things-in-themselves, must also maintain that Kant
has never spoken of their unknowableness. But if any one
actually thinks that, then he belongs to the already numerous
critics of Kant who write books on his philosophy, yet for
whom the Critique of Pure Reason is to this day a thing-in-
itself.
Every one who has followed the fundamental investigations
in this work up to the close of the Zºranscendental Analytic,
will have the impression, especially after the section: “On the
Ground of the Distinction of all Objects whatsoever as Pheno-
mena and Noumena,” that things-in-themselves are and
remain unknowable, that they represent the insoluble mystery
of the world, and that our knowledge must confine itself to
sensible objects and to sensible experience. This new esta-
blishment of empiricism, which carries with it the destruction
of all metaphysics, often receives the distinction of being the
chief service and real result of the Kantian criticism. Thus
the Neo-Kantians of the day have stopped short under this
impression, and likewise many of our natural scientists, who
understand the Königsberg philosopher less than they praise
him. They overlook the fact that the establishment of empiricism
Examination of the Kantuan Doctrines. I49
is not empiricism, and cannot be empiricism ; that, on the con-
trary, it consists in the investigation of the principles of all
experience, and must therefore result in a Doctrine of Principles,
or a “Metaphysics of Phenomena,” to have established which,
Kant regarded as the problem and performance of his doctrine
of knowledge. Otherwise he would not have written his
Prolegomena to every future Metaphysic which may claim a Scientific
Character.
When, however, we have followed the course of the Critique of
Pure Reason further, and reached the close of the 7%anscendental
Dialectic, the darkness which obscured the thing-in-itself begins
to disappear, although the unknowableness of the same is
now confirmed by proofs. We are taught that, and why, we
are obliged to conceive of things-in-themselves: that while
they are not objects of knowledge, they are nevertheless
necessary Ideas, which have for their subject the original ground
of both thinking and phenomenal objects, as well as the original
ground of all possible and actual existence. We now know,
furthermore, what is to be thought under these original grounds
or unconditioned principles, viz., the soul, the world as totality,
and God. Among the world-Ideas, Transcendental freedom is
represented to us as the sole Idea, which, while it can never
be a phenomenon or object of knowledge, can yet be the con-
I 50 Critique of Kant.
ceivable original ground of all phenomena, and of their order
as natural laws. Finally, these ideas serve as a criterion of
knowledge ; they present themselves as regulative principles of
knowledge, i.e., as goals of experience, which, it is true, can
never be attained, but yet are to be continually striven for,
in order that our knowledge may become systematized, and may
so combine in itself the highest diversity with the highest
unity, that the specific results of the several experimental
sciences shall become more and more unified, and approxi-
mate a system of knowledge which forms a simple whole.
Were such a system attainable, all the sciences would ulti-
mately be members of one whole, and the order of the world
would become known to us as a genealogical system, in which
all phenomena in their various species descend from one single
primitive ground. But this primitive ground is unknowable.
Hence also the Ideas, since they prescribe “the principles
of homogeneity, specification, and continuity (affinity)” for the
experimental sciences, should be recognised only as maxims
of our knowledge, and not as principles of things.” Not-
withstanding, in the Doctrine of Ideas, things-in-themselves
have so far emerged from the obscurity which enveloped them
* Cf. Fischer : Gesch, d. m. Philos., vol. iii. (3rd ed.), pp. 514-518.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I5 I
that they present themselves, not, it is true, as objects of know-
ledge, but as principles regulative of knowledge.
The Doctrine of Methods in the Critique takes a step farther.
It reveals to us in its “Canon” the possibility of a knowledge of
things-in-themselves, not along the path of experience and
Science, but on the ground of moral laws given by immediate
self-knowledge or moral certitude. If there are such laws, they
have an unconditional validity—a validity independent of all
experience, exalted above all knowledge, opinion, and doubt,
and possessing immediate axiomatic certainty. And as certain
as these laws themselves are, so certain do they make to us the
reality of the moral order of the world and of those Ideas which
represent its power, final end, and original ground: viz., the
Ideas of Freedom, Immortality, and Deity. Thus the Critique
of Pure Reason leaves us with the possibility of a knowledge of
things-in-themselves in view, only we are forced to take this
knowledge, not as theoretical, but as practical, to regard its
certainty, not as objective, but as subjective or personal, and to
designate it, not as science, but as belief.
The Critique of Practical Reason realizes the possibility, which
the Doctrine of Methods had held in prospect. It establishes the
fact of the moral law and discerns the reality of freedom and the
moral order of the world. That the thing-in-itself underlies our
I 52 Critique of Kant.
theoretical reason, the Critique of Pure Reason teaches; that this
thing-in-itself is the will, the Critique of Practical Reason teaches.
Under whatever title the knowledge of the thing-in-itself be
recognized, the important thing is that it enters into the illumined
circle of our reason, not only as Idea, but as reality and power;
we know what it is, and we know that the history of human
civilization consists in the fulfilment of the laws of freedom and
the moral ends of reason, to which our natural ends of life are
subordinate and subservient. Kant's Philosophy of the State
and Philosophy of Religion, together with the historico-philo-
sophical treatises which belong with them, reveal to us the
history of the world as the necessary development and mani-
festation of freedom.
And that not only the moral, but also the sensible or natural
order of the world, or, in other words, that the world-develop-
ment, not only as history of culture, but also as history of nature,
is the manifestation of will and of freedom, our philosopher
taught in his Critique of Judgment. The will is that thing-in-
itself which underlies the constitution of our faculties of know-
ledge, which is the cause of our intellectual development, and
makes this subserve the moral. The will is that thing-in-itself
which underlies phenomena, and determines their empirical
character in such a way that we are obliged to judge their forms
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I 53
(in the state of our free contemplation) asthetically and their life
teleologically. It thus appears that there is something in the
empirical character of things which does not admit of being
explained from our theoretical reason, nor of being discerned
in our experience or in the analysis of phenomena, and yet which
is involuntarily present, and necessary to our thought. This
something is the phenomenon of freedom and the freedom of
- _--------------~ **** - – ----- -- - -
- - -
e g d
phenomenon, or, in one word, natural ſreedom, without which
__–~~ --~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"
there would-be -no-development, no life, no beauty; without
which, therefore, our aesthetic as well as teleological judgment
would be without an object.
That there must be a correspondence between the thing-in-
itself which underlies our faculties of knowledge and that which
underlies phenomena or the sense-world, Kant had already
intimated in (both editions of) his Critique of Pure Reason. In
the Critique of Judgment he now asserts it, explaining at the
same time in what this correspondence consists. Herewith
certain very noteworthy sentences become intelligible, which
will have left upon every penetrating reader, after a thorough
study of the Critique of Pure Reason, the impression that the
philosopher says more than his doctrine of knowledge justifies.
It declares it to be possible that one and the same thing-in-itself
may underlie both objective and subjective phenomena, or, what
I54. e Critique of Kant.
is the same thing, both matter and thought. Let us take his
own words: “That something which so affects our sense that
it receives the ideas of space, matter, form, etc.—that something,
regarded as noumenon (or, better, as transcendental object),
might also be at the same time the subject of thought, although, in
the way in which our external sense is thereby affected, we
receive no perception of ideas, will, etc., but only of space and
its determinations.”.” As long as Soul and body were regarded
as things-in-themselves and radically different substances, it was
impossible to explain their union. “The difficulty which has -
suggested this problem consists, as is well known, in the pre-
supposed dissimilarity of an object of the inner sense (soul) and
the objects of outer sense, since that depends only upon time,
these upon time and space, as the formal conditions of their
perception. If we remind ourselves, however, that both sorts
of objects do not thereby distinguish themselves from one
another inwardly, but only in so far as one seems external to the
other (hence that which underlies the phenomenon of matter as thing-
in-itself perhaps ought not to be regarded as so dissimilar), the
difficulty vanishes,” ” etc.
* Kant : Kritik d. r. Vernunft : (1st ed.) Tzanscd. Zialectié. Kritić der
Zweifen Paralogismus. Cf. Fischer : Gesch. d, n. Philos., vol. iii., pp. 447,
57O.
* Kant : Kritik d. r. Vernunft (2nd ed.), pp. 326, 327.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I55
If we designate the thing-in-itself which underlies our modes
of thought, or the constitution of our faculties of knowledge
(theoretical reason), as the unknown quantity X, and the thing-
in-itself which underlies external phenomena, or the material
world, as the unknown quantity P, then the Critique of Pure
Rawn has already pointed out to us in both its editions the
Aossibility that P =X. This it was forced to do, since the
phenomena of matter are indeed nothing other than our
necessary modes of thought. And yet, again, it had no right
to assert the possibility that P=X, if things-in-themselves
really are as unknowable as it teaches.
Now, the Critique of Practical Reason teaches, by establish-
ing the primacy of the practical reason, that this is the thing-in-
itself which underlies and determines our theoretical reason;
it teaches that X=will or freedom ; and it does not state this
proposition with a “perhaps” or “it might be,” but with
complete certitude.
If, now, P=X, and X=will or freedom, then also P, the
SuperSensible substratum of the material world, must cease to
be a perfectly unknown and unknowable quantity; for P=will
or freedom. Our philosopher must advance to this equation.
He does so in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment,
the essential purpose of which is to show that the hidden
I56 Critique of Kant.
ground of nature or the material world is one with freedom ;
that will and freedom underlie also the sense-world, or, in other
words, that the sense-world is the phenomenon of will or the
manifestation of freedom. If it were not this there would be no
self-developing bodies, no phenomenon of life, no objects of
our aesthetic and teleological judgment, no theme of the faculty
of judgment, thus also no problem as the subject of a critique
of judgment. Hence Kant says in the above-named Intro-
duction : “There must, then, be a ground of the unity of the super-
sensible which underlies mature, with the supersensible which the
motion of freedom practically contains. And the notion of this
ground, although it does not afford us either a theoretical or a
practical knowledge of the same, and hence has no particular
sphere, nevertheless makes possible the transition from the
mode of thought according to the principles of the one to
that according to the principles of the other.””
If we now compare the foundation of the Kantian criticism
with its completion, or the Critique of Pure Reason with the
Critique of Judgment, it clearly appears how the work has
progressed and been transformed under the hands of the
* Kant : Kritik der Urtheiſsèraft, Introduction. Wide Werke, vol. vii., p. 14.
Cf. Fischer: Gesch, d. 72. Philos., vol. iv. (3rd ed.), pp. 397, 497. For elucidation
of the sentence quoted, cf. supra, Chap. III., Part III., Sec. 3.
Examination of the Kantian Doctrines. I 57
philosopher. Neither the doctrine of phenomena nor that of
things-in-themselves has remained the same. Phenomena now
confront us with the character of individuality and freedom,
things-in-themselves with that of unity of essence and know-
ableness; for the correspondence between the SuperSensible
substratum of our sensuous reason and that of the Sensible or
material world bases itself in the end upon their identity of
nature; they are will and freedom. And herewith the obscurity
disappears, which had seemed to envelop things-in-themselves.
After the Critique of Practical Reason had established the reality
of freedom and the moral order of the world, and subordinated
our sensuous and theoretical reason to the practical, and the
sensible and material world to our theoretical reason, the
entire order of the world was recognised as the manifestation
of thing-in-itself, or as the phenomenon of will, i.e., as the
development and manifestation of freedom.
The farther the Kantian investigations advance, from the
doctrine of knowledge to the doctrine of Ideas, from this to
the doctrines of moral freedom and the moral order of the
world, from these to the philosophic doctrine of history, and
to the doctrine of the natural freedom of phenomena (bodies)
—which coincides with the criticism of aesthetic and teleological
judgment—the more distinctly things-in-themselves come into
158 Critique of Kant.
view. And the more the Kantian doctrine reveals things-in-
themselves in phenomena, and the latter win the character of
phenomena of will, so much the more unmistakably does the
character of the doctrine of development imprint itself upon
the Kantian philosophy; with so much the more distinctness
does it prove itself to be, as the problem of Critical thought
demands, the philosophical establishment and unfolding of the
history of the development of universal knowledge. This is the
path which the Kantian Doctrine of Ideas points out and
follows. It is therefore a very superficial and radically false
conception of the Kantian philosophy to understand its doctrine
of phenomena and things-in-themselves as dividing the world
for the weal of mankind into science and poetry, in the former
of which empiricism and materialism are sanctioned as the
only valid knowledge, while in the latter metaphysics is saddled
upon Pegasus, and the Doctrine of Ideas permitted or com-
pelled to seek its kingdom in the land of dreams. In this
way one is in danger, with the author of the History of
Materialism, of confounding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
with Schiller's Partition of the Earth.
Our examination of Kant's fundamental doctrines has reached
the result, that his system received a development in the course
of the three Critiques, which the first groundwork neither
Examination of the Kantain Doctrines. I 59 .
counted upon nor was sufficient for. After the second Critique
had made knowing reason dependent upon the law of moral free-
dom, and the third Critique had discovered in the beauty as
well as the life of phenomena the character of natural freedom,
new problems arose, which could no longer pass for insoluble
on the ground of the unknowableness of things-in-themselves.
These problems became the themes of post-Kantian philosophy.
CHAPTER V.
ZTHAE AEROARZAZMS AAWD ZZAVAES OF ADA, WAEZOAMEAV7" OA' A'OS 7.
A. AAV77AAW AAE/ZZOSOAH/Y.
I. THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMs of Post-KANTIAN
PHILOSOPHY.
1. The Metaphysical Problem.
SERIES of distinct and historically important systems has
sprung, in the course of a few decades, from the roots of
the Kantian philosophy. This fact alone shows how manifold
and fruitful have been the influences, how deep and far-reaching .
the stimulus, which the philosophic spirit received through the
Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps no philosophical epoch since
the days of Socrates and the Attic philosophy has been so ripe
for great and rapid advances as the epoch illuminated by Kant.
New problems spring from his criticism—questions which affect
the groundwork of philosophy, and which are seized from so
many and different sides, that their investigation calls forth
variously opposed points of view. And the complicated course
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. I6 I
of development which the post-Kantian philosophy takes, branch-
ing as it does again and again, finds here its explanation. We see
it separating into a number of conflicting lines of development,
these dividing up into all sorts of antitheses, and these again
into lesser contrasts. Thus there arises a great, and with the
onward movement ever-increasing, variety of views, systems, and
schools, which on the first outward appearance looks almost
like a state of confusion and decline. Yet there rules in these
phenomena a necessary law of development. In order to find
one's way in the general course and lines of development of
post-Kantian philosophy, extending down to the present, one
must know the state of the problems which resulted from the
character and final form of the Kantian work itself.
The entire theme of the latter consisted, on the one hand, in
the doctrine of the origination of phenomena from the constitu-
tion and faculties of sensuous (=human) reason, and on the
other in the doctrine of the original ground of phenomena, or the
thing-in-itself, which underlies the knowing reason and its sense-
world. For since the knowing reason, according to Kant’s
fundamental doctrine, is of a sensuous or receptive and impres-
sionable nature, it itself cannot possibly be the original ground.
Since phenomena arise from the impressions or sensations of
sensuous reason as their material, sensations cannot possibly
I I
I62 Critique of Kant.
be explained from phenomena; for our philosopher was not
of the opinion that the earth rested upon the great elephant,
and the great elephant upon the earth. The doctrine of the
origination of phenomena from (the material and the thought-
forms of) our reason is Transcendental or Kantian Idealism. The
doctrine of the original ground of our knowing reason and of
phenomena we have designated as the Kantian Realism, because
Kant wishes to have understood by 7%anscendental realism that
way of thinking which regards things external to us (i.e.,
external phenomena) as things-in-themselves."
Kant carried out the idealistic establishment of his doctrine
of knowledge, but the realistic, with all the questions involved
in it, he declared to be impossible, owing to the unknowable-
ness of the thing-in-itself. The realistic establishment would
have had to answer the question why our knowing reason has
these and not some other thought-forms, why it is thus and not
otherwise constituted. But an answer to this question Kant
held it would be impossible for any one to give. Nevertheless,
he himself in so far answered it, that he made the thing-in-itself
intelligible in the “Reality of Freedom” or of pure will, and
subordinated the theoretical to the practical reason. Distin-
* Wide suffra, Chap. II., Part I.
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. I63
guishing, now, in the doctrine of knowledge, the question
concerning the suffective origin of phenomena from that concern-
ing their real ground, the latter may be taken as constituting the
metaphysical problem, which Kant declared to be completely
insoluble, but which he by no means left completely unsolved.
He let so much light fall upon it, that his successors were
forced to seek for more, and to attempt the complete illumi-
nation of the thing-in-itself in distinction from all phenomena
and free from all confusion with them.
To obviate all misconceptions, the reader will carefully
distinguish, in connection with the Kantian doctrine, between
empirical realism and metaphysical realism; that concerns
phenomena, this things-in-themselves. Transcendental idealism
establishes empirical realism, and is itself established by meta-
physical realism.
2. The Problem of Knowledge.
The Kantian doctrine of knowledge consisted, in the broadest
sense, in isolating, fixing, and explaining the fundamental facts
of our rational knowledge. These facts were of both a theo-
retical and a practical (moral) sort. The theoretical facts
separated themselves into those of science, or knowledge in the
narrower sense, and those of our necessary contemplation or
I64 Critique of Kant.
judgment of things as guided by the Idea of end. The two
ground-facts of scientific and, in the exact sense, theoretical
knowledge, were those of mathematical and natural science.
The two necessary ways of contemplating the adaptation of
phenomena to ends, were the aesthetic and teleological points of
view, while practical knowledge had the character, i.e., the dis-
position and moral worth, of our conduct for its object.
/ These facts of reason, unlike as they are, agree in that they
all lay claim to a necessary and universal validity, which presents
itself in the form of synthetic judgments à priori. The problem
of Kant was: How are these facts possible ?' The question is
One of determining their conditions or factors. These were
sought and found along the path of inductive inquiry. As certain
as these facts are, so certain are the conditions from which they
follow. And since they are facts of reason, their conditions
must be faculties of reason. Just as conditions precede that
which is conditioned, so these faculties must precede their pro-
ducts, i.e., the facts of our knowledge and objects of knowledge,
hence also of our experience and objects of experience. They
are, therefore, before all experience, or, as Kant expresses it, “à
priori (transcendental) " ; that is, they are pure faculties of
reason, or such as belong to reason, not as resulting from its
experiences, but as preceding all experience.
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. I65
We see how the Critical philosophy proceeds. It isolates and
determines the facts of reason ; this is its starting-point, and
constitutes the putting of the question. It analyses these facts,
and finds by this inductive method the necessary and original
faculties of reason which produce these facts; this is its method.
It discerns wherein pure reason consists, or the content of what
faculties constitute it; this forms its result. Do away with any
one of the faculties discovered, as, e.g., sensibility or under-
standing, and you have done away with the possibility of
experience. Hence these facts are necessary. Add to the facts
discovered another that conflicts with them, as, e.g., an intuitive
understanding, or a superSensible perception, and you have
done away with the fact of human knowledge and experience.
Hence such a faculty is impossible. This is the method of proof
which Kant called the Critical or Transcendental. By his
process of induction, Kant claims to have discovered the con-
stitution of our reason, and the laws of our thought and know-
ledge, with just as much logical consistency and certainty as
Kepler did the harmony of the cosmos and the laws of planetary
motion. Suspend Kepler's laws, and the phenomena of plane-
tary motion became impossible.
“Human reason must combine in itself as many fundamental
faculties as there are conditions required for the fact of human
I66 Critique of Kant.
knowledge. Thus the fact of pure mathematics was established
by the fact that space and time are the two fundamental forms
of our sensibility, and hence pure perceptions; the fact of
experimental knowledge or natural science was established by
the fact that the understanding, a faculty essentially unlike the
sensibility, forms and combines phenomena by means of its pure
irreducible notions. These notions are not representative, but
synthetic, and of the nature of judgments. What they combine,
must be given, hence received, and of a sensuous nature. On
this account, our reason is only capable of knowing sensible
objects, and not supersensible, such as things-in-themselves.
There is accordingly in the arrangement of our faculties of
knowledge no intellectual perception or intuitive understanding,
to which alone things-in-themselves could be given, and could
be intelligible. There is no object without subject, no thought
without thinking, no appearance without a being to whom it
appears. We should have no common world of sense, no
objective experience, if we were not able to arrange, Connect,
and combine the given material of our impressions according to
the same universal laws of thought.” To produce phenomena
common to all, there is required “the pure consciousness,” and
“the productive imagination,” which operates unconsciously
according to the laws of the former. To conceive the given
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. 167
phenomena, there are required “the faculties of apprehension,
of reproductive imagination, and of recognition in the motion,”
as Kant designates them. Thus we see before us a series of
different fundamental faculties, which, according to the calcula-
tion of the Critique, are necessary in order to create the facts of
our knowledge, and the sum-total of which constitutes the pro-
ductive capital of the theoretical reason. But this sum has only
the character of a collective unity.
There is still to be added the fact of practical knowledge,
which consists in the moral estimate of our dispositions and
conduct. This estimate necessarily involves the idea of an
absolute command, or of an unconditionally obligatory moral
law. But a law that prescribes the course of conduct for our
disposition, and thus concerns our truest and innermost being,
can only be given by ourselves, and consequently demands the
faculty of autonomy or freedom, which consists in a completely
unconditioned or pure will. The moral law becomes apparent
from the fact of our moral judgment, and freedom from the fact
of the moral law. The moral law commands: “Thou shalt
unconditionally will and act so and not otherwise.” In this we
recognize the autonomy of our pure will, or the reality of our
freedom, which expresses itself in the declaration; “Thou canst,
because thou oughtest.” Thus Kant also brings us to the know-
I68 Critique of Kant.
ledge of our freedom by the analysis of a fact, i.e., by induction,
while at the same time he expressly declares that this insight
is not of an empirical character.
According to the results of the Critique, the theoretical reason
falls into the antithesis of sense and understanding—the two
poles of knowledge—and the entire reason into the antithesis of
theoretical and practical reason, or into that of the faculties of
knowledge and the pure will. To these faculties of reason there
correspond the two realms of reason—the sensible and the moral
orders of the world, or nature and freedom. There mechanical
causality rules, here teleological. Now, it is a fact that there are
phenomena which appeal to us involuntarily as adapted or as not
adapted to some end, and which we, therefore, judge as asthetic
or teleological, according as the character of their adaptation is
referred merely to our contemplation of them, or to their own
existence. There thus adds itself to the theoretical and practical
fundamental faculties the reflective judgment, which takes its
place between the other two, and itself falls into the two sorts
of aesthetic and teleological judgment.
Thus there results, by the inductive method of the Kantian
criticism, by its analysis of the facts of our theoretical and
practical knowledge, and of our aesthetic and teleological con-
templation of things, a series of different original faculties, the
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. I69
collective content of which constitutes our pure reason. These
faculties are related to those facts as their ground. The question
now arises: By what are the faculties themselves established # For
we cannot possibly satisfy ourselves with the idea that reason
is only their sum or collective notion. Just as the connection
between phenomena is the work of reason, so the connection
between its own faculties must be of the nature of reason. The
sum-total of these faculties, therefore, is not merely collective,
but systematic; and the system of our faculties of reason must have
a determinable common root, from which it is derived. The
investigation of this common origin. and the deduction from the
nature of reason itself, of all the faculties which Kant represented
as primitive powers and made the substratum of the phenomenal
world, is the fundamental problem which presented itself after the
close of the Critical philosophy, as proceeding from its results,
and as determining the direction of the investigations that
followed.
II. THE LINES OF DEVELOPMENT OF POST-KANTIAN
PHILOSOPHY.
1. The Re-establishment of the Doctrine of Knowledge.
The question, therefore, in the development of the doctrine of
knowledge, and in the solution of its problem, is one of a re-
17o g Critique of Kami.
establishment of the faculties of knowledge. What Kant found
by the inductive method is now to be developed by the deductive.
The possibility of such a deduction depends upon the knowledge
of a principle underlying our faculties of knowledge, and hence
the constitution of reason in general. Kant had discovered the
laws of our thought and of the process of our knowledge by
the observation and analysis of the facts of knowledge, just as
Kepler did the laws of planetary motion by the observation and
computation of its phenomena. After Kepler had discovered
these laws inductively, Newton appeared and deduced them
from one fundamental force and one fundamental law. And
similarly as Newton is related to Kepler in the establishment of
the laws of motion, the post-Kantian philosophy is related to
Kant in the establishment of the laws of thought. But this com-
parison is intended to have no further application than subserves
the apprehension of the problem, and is used simply to emphasize
the deductive character of the latter. -
Rant himself had hinted at this deductive development, not
only by the deductive or synthetic mode of exposition which he
followed in his chief work, but also by the arrangement of the
faculties of reason themselves. These he not merely co-ordinated
but sought persistently to systematize. The productive imagina-
tion was to him the uniting bond between sense and understand-
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. 171
ing. That these faculties had a common origin was possible,
but this origin was unknowable. The practical reason he
regarded as the superior faculty, the theoretical as subordinated
to it and dependent upon it, the reflective judgment as the
uniting bond of both. Thus he had himself, in effect, already
given a system of the faculties of reason, but it wanted, to be
really such, a foundation-principle and unity.
This unity Kant declared to be unknowable, and hence a
thing-in-itself. Should it become known, then the solution
of the problem of knowledge would be also the solution of the
metaphysical problem. It thus appears why the post-Kantian
philosophy takes the metaphysical direction (in that it seeks
to establish the doctrine of knowledge deductively), and it does
so by attaching itself immediately to the Kantian doctrine. It
shapes itself in its progressive forms of development into a
knowledge of the thing-in-itself; and it is easy to foresee that
in this progress the question concerning things-in-themselves
and their knowableness will be the theme of pre-eminent and
decisive importance. We will add still a second prefatory
remark on this point. If the thing-in-itself passes for unknow-
able in the current academic sense of the Kantian doctrine,
especially as this is stated in the Critique of Pure Reason, then
the doctrine of its knowableness becomes at once the doctrine
172 Critique of Kant.
of its nothingness, and the post-Kantian philosophy soon enters
a stadium where it becomes necessary to dispense with things-
in-themselves altogether. There thus arises with the advance
of post-Kantian philosophy the important and penetrating
question whether the denial or affirmation of the reality of
things-in-themselves must go hand in hand with the knowledge
of them. An affirmative answer virtually declares for the
true realism involved in a right understanding of the Kantian
doctrine, in opposition to Transcendental idealism, which has
no basis. Thus originates the conflict between Realism and
Idealism in the post-Kantian metaphysics—a conflict that
extends down to our own day.
2. The Threefold Antithesis: Fries, Herbari, Schopenhauer.
The immediate problem, then, which the post-Kantian philo-
sophy seizes upon is the establishment of a new doctrine of
knowledge from a single principle of reason. This movement
has three characteristic features: as doctrine of principles, it is
metaphysical ; as doctrine of unity, it is monistic, or, in current
historical terms, “System of Identity”; and, since its principle
is the thinking knowing reason itself, it is idealistic. Each
of these characteristic developments calls forth an opposing
development, which likewise appeals to the Kantian doctrine,
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. I73
and seeks to justify itself by laying claim to the true interpreta-
tion and criticism of Kant. Thus there arises in the principal
directions taken by post-Kantian philosophy a threefold anti-
thesis, each standpoint being a special interpretation and
criticism of the Kantian doctrine. The question with each is :
what is the truth? what the deficiencies and errors of the
Critical philosophy? what the permanent, what the perishable
in the work of Kant P
The first antithesis is the most far-reaching. It affirms the
necessity of a re-establishment of the doctrine of knowledge,
but rejects the metaphysical, monistic, and idealistic (d. priori)
line of development, as not leading to a solution of the problem,
and demands the observation of our inner life, i.e., empirical
and psychological investigation, as the only means of determin-
ing the system of our faculties of reason. The true criticism
of reason could be nothing other than “subjective anthropo-
logy”; “theory of the inner life"; “natural doctrine of the
human mind.” Accordingly, not metaphysics, but ‘‘philoso-
phical anthropology” appears as the fundamental discipline:
it is along this line that the criticism of reason and the doctrine
of knowledge is to be newly established. The representative of
this standpoint is Fries (1773-1843), who founded a school, and
has had a lasting influence. His principal works are: System of
I74 Critique of Kant.
Philosophy as Exact Science (1804); Knowledge, Belief, and
Presentiment (1805); and New Critique of the Reason (1807).
The latter is the chief work. Post-Kantian philosophy separates
itself into the metaphysical and the anthropological movements.
What else can the knowledge of human reason, hence the
criticism of reason, seek to be than subjective or philosophical
anthropology P So say Fries and his followers. How can
anthropology seek to be the fundamental philosophical discipline
when it itself, like all experimental sciences whatsoever, must
needs be established P So answer their opponents.
The second antithesis has its origin and application within
post-Kantian metaphysics. It accepts the metaphysical esta-
blishment of the doctrine of knowledge, but utterly rejects the
monistic and idealistic features of the movement. It opposes
to monism (System of Identity) the plurality of principles, and
to idealism, a realism which undertakes to discern and recognize
that which truly is (=thing-in-itself) as something absolutely
independent of all thought. Kant had rightly grasped things-
in-themselves as the SuperSensible substratum of all phenomena
and ideas, and as completely independent of them ; and this
their character must be scrupulously retained, and the knowledge
of them made a matter of earnest pursuit. Every monistic and
idealistic metaphysics rests upon the uncritical and radically false
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. I75
presupposition that one and the same subject has different
faculties or powers, i.e., upon the contradictory notion that one
is many. Kant himself was under this constant presupposition,
since he regarded human reason as of such a nature that it had
and united in itself many and essentially different powers.
His criticism of reason was in this respect—and in other
respects—not critical enough. And this constitutes its funda-
mental error. It needs, therefore, not only to be completed,
but to be reconstructed and built anew from the foundation up ;
for it worked with notions that are full of contradictions, and
hence neither qualified for knowledge nor for testing and
establishing knowledge. These contradictory notions are :
thing with its attributes and changes, causality, matter, Ego.
Accordingly, it must be the first and fundamental problem of
philosophy to investigate and rectify our categories of know-
ledge. This reconstruction and rectification is the theme of a
new metaphysics, which opposes itself to all monism and ideal-
ism, and, by the removal of the contradictions that fill our
natural thinking and constitute its evil, prepares the way for a
knowledge of true being, in order, 4 from the point of view
of such knowledge, to explain the origin of phenomena and
ideas.
The founder of this standpoint is Herbart (1776-1841). The
§
176 Critique of Kant.
first foundation-stone was laid by the work Main Points of
Metaphysics (1808). A synopsis of the whole system was given
in the Introduction to Philosophy (1813). The principal work,
containing the completed system, is the General Meſophysics
(1829). In concluding the preface to this work, Herbart says:
“Kant maintained that “our notion of an object may contain
what and however much you will; we must nevertheless go out-
side of it in order to predicate existence of it.’ This fact, now,
is that to which the present work everywhere points; and on this
account the author is a Kanſian, if only from the year 1828, and
not from the days of categories and the Critique of /udgment, as
the attentive reader will soon discover. It is not necessary to
say more in advance. But let one arm himself with patience,
for the chaotic state of previous metaphysics must first be
shown ; and it can only be gradually brought to order.””
The third antithesis has its origin and application within the
monistic metaphysics. It affirms the metaphysical and monistic
knowledge of thing-in-itself as one original being underlying all
phenomena, and hence all knowledge; but it rejects every
idealistic conception of this original being. In consequence, it
identifies original being (thing-in-itself) with thinking, knowing
* Joh. Fr. Herbart: Allgemeine Metaphysié, Preface, p. xxviii.
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. 177
reason, transforms it into an abstraction, and hence confounds
it with ideas and phenomena. It thus demands the realistic
and individualistic apprehension of thing-in-itself, in opposition
to the idealistic and abstract. The more abstract original
being is thought, or the more it is universalized and designated
with such names as “Absolute Identity,” “Absolute Reason,”
“the Absolute,” etc., the more exasperated the representative
of this opposition to idealism becomes, although he is himself
an offspring of the family of Identity-philosophers. The All-
One cannot possibly be the universal; that is original, this
derived, always derived, and so much the more derivative, the
more universal it is. Reason forms its notions by abstracting
them from ideals, which themselves are abstracted from sensible
perceptions, which latter are produced from the material of our
Sense-impressions and the perception-forms (space, time, and
causality) of our intellect. But these are functions of the brain,
which as such presuppose the bodily organism and its stages
of development. Nothing, therefore, is more absurd than that
conception of the All-One which, turning the matter upside
down, seeks to have recognized as the Original, as the absolute
First, that which in reality constitutes one of the last links in
the chain of derived and dependent phenomena. Since, now,
Original being cannot be anything universal, it must be sought
I 2
178 Critique of Kant.
in the essence of individuality. Since it does not admit of
being derived or of being known mediately, it is only to be
discerned immediately, i.e., in ourselves, in our innermost
being. Now, the essence of our self-consciousness is effort or
volition, the will for this definite life-manifestation, this par-
ticular existence, this individuality, this character. It is the
will, not as consisting, so to say, in consciousness, but as
impelling the consciousness on to a certain stage of its bodily
manifestation and Organization, and hence is the unconscious
or blind will. But the very same principle which constitutes
the essence or innermost being of our manifestation, is the
essence or being of all phenomena. Hence the All-One, the
original being, or thing-in-itself, is will. The world and the
realm of things in all their gradations are its phenomenon.
That it is so, is perfectly evident. Why and how the will
appears and objectifies itself in the phenomenal world, remains
inscrutable.
The founder of this standpoint is Schopenhauer (1788-1860).
He derives his doctrine immediately from the Kantian doctrine,
and claims to be the only philosopher who has thought out the
latter with logical consistency, and completed it. As metaphysi-
cian, he is opposed to Fries; as Transcendental idealist, to
Herbart; as realist and individualist, to the idealists of the
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. I79
System of Identity. He was fond of calling Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel “the three great sophists,” in comparison with
whom he himself was the Philosopher in the pre-eminent sense.
In his first work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of
Sufficient Reason (1813), he established his point of view ; and in
his chief work, The World as Will and Idea (1819), he carried it
out to its logical results. Schopenhauer lived to see late in life
his growing fame—a fame which has survived him, and still
survives to-day.
III. THE COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT OF POST-KANTIAN
PHILOSOPHY.
1. Metaphysical Idealism.
The threefold antithesis which we have delineated necessarily
presupposes that the thesis to which it is opposed is not only
firmly adhered to, but wrought out into such comprehensive and
powerful forms that they represent the actual dominating course
of development of post-Kantian philosophy. However different
the opponents of the thesis and their lines of work may be, they
all have one common object of attack; they reject in a body
metaphysical idealism, i.e., that movement which makes Critical
or Transcendental idealism into metaphysics, or, what is the
same thing, which seeks for the original ground of phenomena
: 8O Critique of Kant.
within knowing reason. This is utterly false, says Fries, since
critical idealism is not metaphysical, but anthropological, and
the knowledge of our transcendental faculties not Trans-
cendental /ă priori), but empirical. From this erroneous con-
ception, which confounds psychology and metaphysics, object
of knowledge and mode of knowledge, by regarding knowledge
of the transcendental as Transcendental knowledge, there
results “the unfounded assumption of the transcendental,” “the
Kantian prejudice,” which dominates the entire metaphysical
idealism. This development is utterly false, says also Herbart,
since the object of metaphysics is not the knowing reason, but
real being per se, independent of all thinking and knowing.
This development is utterly false, says also Schopenhauer, since
the knowing reason is the subjective origin of phenomena, but
by no means their original ground.
Nevertheless, metaphysical idealism or the idealistic System
of Identity was the first and most direct development that
resulted from the Kantian criticism. Kant himself had not only
indicated this development, but fixed its course. He had given
that significant suggestion, that sensibility and understanding,
these two essentially different theoretical faculties, perhaps have
a common, but to us unknown, root ; he had made theoretical
reason dependent upon the practical, and mediated both by the
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. I8I
reflective judgment; 4 he had designated the unification of
intelligible and empirical character as the theme of the funda-
mental cosmological problem, and the unification of thought and
external preception in the same subject, as that of the funda-
mental psychological problem. Everywhere in the Kantian
criticism the inquiry is raised concerning the principle and
unity of our faculties of reason. And since this unity passes
for unknowable, it is identified with the thing-in-itself, and
hence with the subject of a metaphysical problem which Kant
declared to be insoluble. The attempt to solve this problem
from the nature of reason is of necessity the next step in
advance.
2. The Threefold Advance: Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
The problem is, to solve a series of antitheses contained in our
reason. The deeper and more comprehensive these opposing
faculties are, the deeper and more comprehensive is the unity or
common root from which they spring. Consequently meta-
physical idealism passes through a series of stadia of develop-
ment, and increases or deepens and broadens with every step its
grasp of the unity of reason. And since what we have here to
discover is the origination of our faculties of reason from one
"Cf. Supra, Chap. V., Part II, Sec. I.
I 82 Critique of Kant. -
primitive ground, the constant theme of metaphysical idealism
(which was already formulated in the Critique of Pure Reason)
is the doctrine of the development of reason.
Within the sphere of the knowing or theoretical faculties of
reason there lies the antithesis between sensibility and under-
standing; within the sphere of all the faculties of reason, the
antithesis between theoretical and practical reason, or between
knowledge and will; within the sphere of the entire world as
rational, the antithesis between nature and freedom, or between
the sensible and moral orders of the world.
The first question, which comprehends least, is concerned
with the unity or common root of our theoretical faculties. It
is shown, as a solution, how sense and understanding spring
from one and the same faculty, that of representation. This
attempt was made by Reinhold (1758-1823) in his Elementar-
philosophie (1789).
The second question, more penetrating and far-reaching, has
to do with all the faculties of reason, the theoretical and the
practical. In answer, it is shown how they spring from the pure
self-consciousness or Ego (the essence of which is the will) in
accordance with the necessary law of development of the mind,
which, whatever it is and does, it must also perceive and know.
This highly important and decisive advance was made by Fichte
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. 183
(1762-1814) in his Wissenschaftslehre (1794–1799), the funda-
mental theme of which is nothing other than the doctrine of the
development of mind.
The third and most comprehensive question deals with the
unity of the entire rational world, with the common root of the
Sensible and moral order of the world, or of nature and freedom.
The antithesis of nature and spirit is to be solved by the
absolute principle of unity, which is now designated as “the
absolute identity or reason.” This movement calls itself by
preference “System of Identity,” and finds its chief representa-
tives in Schelling (1775-1854) and Hegel (1770-1831). The
development of reason in the world, or the rationality of the
world-development, is the doctrine in which they both agree,
before their lines of thought diverge. The principal works of
the former, so far as they concern this theme, fall within the
years 1797-1807; the two foundation-works of the latter, in the
years 1807-1816. These, as all other developments of post-
* Fichte's chief work, the Wºss mschaftslehre, is best known by the German
title, which it is therefore thought best to retain. A farther reason for doing
so might be found in the fact that it has no good English equivalent. As the
context perhaps makes sufficiently plain, it is a Theory or Science of Know-
ledge.
Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie, which sought to supply the principle of
unity wanting in Kant's Critique, is likewise perhaps best retained in the
German form. It is a Philosophy of the First Principle.—TR.
I84 Critique of Kant.
Kantian philosophy, it is not here intended to characterize
farther than may be done by hinting at their main features.
The chief problem of this monistic and idealistic metaphysics
lies in the solution of the antithesis of nature and spirit, or in
the knowledge of their unity. This antithesis must be solved
first within the sphere of human nature, then within the sphere
of the universe. In the nature of man, sense is in conflict with
reason; and human life itself, limited and finite, as it is, appears
in opposition to the divine. The unity of man’s sensible and
intelligible natures consists in aesthetic freedom, and develops
itself in Beauty and Art. The unity of the divine and human
life, as it is felt and experienced in the human mind, consists in
religious feeling and devout resignation. The aesthetic aspect of
Identity finds its representative in Schiller (1759-1805), the
religious in Schleiermacher (1768-1834.)
In the universe, or in the nature of things as totality, the anti-
thesis to be solved is likewise two-fold: the more restricted one
between the natural and intellectual worlds, the deeper and all-
comprehensive one between the universe and God. The solu-
tion of the first is attained by the notion of natural-rational
development, which Schelling grasped on the side of Philosophy
of Nature and Æsthetics, Hegel on the side of Logic and
Theology. The solution of the second is effected by a theisti-
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. 185
cally (as opposed to pantheism) conceived doctrine of development
of God, that is, by a theosophy, the theme of which is the world
in God, or the freedom and necessity of divine revelation. This
standpoint Von Baader (1765-1841) sough to carry out mystic-
ally; Schelling, in his later doctrine (which claims the cha-
racter of positive philosophy), “historically,” and as Philosophy
of Religion; Krause (1781-1832) rationalistically and onto-
logically.
The fundamental problem was the re-establishment of the
Kantian principles of knowledge and freedom, or of the natural
and moral orders of the world. The first question dealt with
the method of establishing these principles: Was it metaphysical
or anthropological ? Within the metaphysical development
there arose the question of the unity or plurality of principles,
of their reality or ideality. Within the metaphysical System of
Identity there arose the question respecting the character of the
All-One, respecting its reality or ideality: Was it reason or
will P universal will or individual will P God or blind will P
God in the world, or the world in God P
3. The Order of Post-Kamſian Systems.
With the logical order of post-Kantian systems the historical
is also given; the first is verified by its agreement with the
I86 Critique of Kant.
second. The first development of the Critical philosophy must
necessarily have been the metaphysical and idealistic move-
ment; it must have developed in Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling
the standpoints of the Elementarphilosophie and the Wissenschafts-
lehre, the Philosophy of Nature and the System of Identity,
before Fries could oppose to them his “anthropological
critique.” The history of these standpoints falls within the
years 1789-1800. Fries' New Critique of the Reason appeared
in 1807. The monistic and idealistic metaphysics must have
reached its culminating point in Schelling and Hegel before
Herbart could appear and oppose all monism and idealism with
his new metaphysics. Hegel’s Phenomenology appeared in 1807,
his Logic in 1812-1816. Herbart's Main Points of Metaphysics
followed in 1808, his Introduction to Philosophy in 1813. In the
same year appeared Schopenhauer's first work. When the latter
published his chief work (1819), Hegel had already made known
the works which form the foundation of his system, and had
begun his influential activity as professor in Berlin. Toward no
one of his opponents did Schopenhauer show more hostility
than toward Hegel, since (apart from other grounds of ani-
mosity) he saw in him the culmination of that perverted develop-
ment (the philosophy of identity) which he called “nonsense.”
In the short period of a generation (1790-1820) post-Kantian
Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy. 187
philosophy fixed and wrought out its leading principles, lines
of development, and antitheses. In this development one fact
is very noteworthy and significant. The new philosophy rests
in the first place entirely upon the authority of Kant, and still
seeks at the time of the appearance of the Wissenschaftslehre to
be nothing more than the well-understood Kantian doctrine.
With Schelling, however, it begins to affect superiority, and it
soon becomes fashionable to talk of “old Kant,” as of past
greatness. Then, on the other hand, as opposed to the three-
fold idealistic movement, there arises the threefold antithesis,
the representatives of which, each in his own way, point back
to Kant. Fries wants to be a Kantian without sharing the errors
which resulted in “the Kantian assumption ” of the idealists
who preceded him. Herbart wants to fulfil the demands of the
Kantian criticism by applying them to the Kantian doctrine
itself, and calls himself a Kantian from the year 1828. Schopen-
hauer honours the founder of the Kantian philosophy as his
teacher and master, as the greatest of all thinkers, and himself
claims to be the one genuine Kantian, who has thought out
the problem of the master to its end, and found the solution.
Thus the Kantian doctrine exercises a controlling power
over the subsequent systems, which describe, so to say, their
orbits about it, as the centre of motion, and gravitate from
I88 Critique of Kant.
aphelion back again to perihelion. Certainly the present bears
witness that in our time the writings of no philosopher are
so zealously studied, as fountains of living truth, as are the
works of Kant.
Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
。§§§§
&#x，y;\;33¿??¿¿.ſae
§$%$&#%&！!???-$
§, ºſſ: №ž. č. ， ſºº∞
·，，… ….……. ×
||||
N
|
III
|
977 4149
III
|
|||
OR
MUTILATE CARD
E
O
=
|----
©4
5
----
O
©
*
• ！--.*
' * * ·， č， * …
.* --

&#ffſae:«*,
-ffºſffaeſ
ſº º ‘’“ （§§
…... *
§¶√∞:',ſae∞ √° ſ√≠√
§
º.
-f'（↓ ↓ ↓ , ） ）... ► | ►