pure reason. It acknowledges with sensationalism that the matter of our ideas is furnished by the senses; with idealism it claims that their form is the work of reason, that reason, by its own laws, transforms into ideas the given manifold of sensation. Criticism neither aims to be sensationalistic nor intellectualistic in the extreme sense of these terms, but transcendental; i. e., going beyond (transcendens) the sensationalistic and idealistic doctrines, it succeeds in reaching a higher standpoint, which enables it to appreciate the relative truth and falsehood in the theories of dogmatism. It is a method rather than a system, an introduction to philosophy rather than a finished system. Its motto is the yvôli γνῶθι σeavτóv of Socrates, which it interprets to mean: Before constructing any system whatever, reason must inquire into its resources for constructing it. In its examination of reason, criticism carefully separates the different elements of this faculty, and, true to the critical spirit whence it springs, distinguishes between the theoretical order, the practical order, and the æsthetical order. Reason resembles a queen, who, under three different. names, governs three separate states, each having its own laws, customs, and tendencies. In the theoretical sphere, it manifests itself as the faculty of knowing, or the sense of truth; in the practical sphere, as the active faculty, or the sense of goodness; in the aesthetical sphere, as the sense of beauty and teleological fitness. The Kantian philosophy gives each of these three spheres its due, examining one after another, without prejudice or dogmatic prepossessions. I. Critique of Pure Reason 1 And, first of all, it asks: What is knowledge? An idea taken by itself (man, earth, heat) is not knowl [H. Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, vol. I., Stuttgart, 1881; vol. II, ib., 1892; H. Cohen, Kant's Theorie der edge; in order to become knowledge, the ideas of man, earth, and heat must be combined with other ideas; there must be a subject and a predicate, i. e., a judgment. Examples: Man is a responsible being; the earth is a planet; heat expands bodies. Hence, all knowledge is formulated into propositions; all knowledge is judgment, but not every judgment is knowledge. There are analytic judgments and synthetic judgments.1 The former merely analyze (avaλúe) an idea, without adding anything new to it. Example: Bodies are extended. The predicate extended adds nothing to the subject that is not already contained in it. This judgment tells me nothing new; it does not increase my knowledge. When, on the other hand, I say: The earth is a planet, I make a synthetic judgment, i. e., I join (σvvrínμ) to the idea of the earth a new predicate, the idea of a planet, which cannot be said to be inseparable from the idea of the earth; nay, it has taken man thousands of years to connect it with the latter. Hence, synthetic judgments enrich, extend, and increase my knowledge, and alone constitute knowledge; which is not the case with analytic judgments. But here Kant makes an important reservation. Not every synthetic judgment is necessarily scientific knowledge. In order to constitute real scientific knowledge, with which alone we are here concerned, a judgment must be true in all cases; the union which it establishes between subject and predicate should not be accidental, but necesErfahrung, Berlin, 1871, 2d ed., 1885; J. Volkelt, Kant's Erkenntnisstheorie, etc., Leipsic, 1879; E. Pfleiderer, Kantischer Kriticismus und englische Philosophie, Tübingen, 1881; J. H. Stirling, Text-book to Kant, Edinburgh and London, 1881; Watson, Kant and his English Critics, London, 1881; G. S. Morris, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Griggs's Philosophical Classics), Chicago, 1882; K. Lasswitz, Die Lehre Kant's von der Idealität des Raumes und der Zeit, Berlin, 1883. — TR.]. 1 Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Rosenkranz), p. 21; Prolegomena, P. 16. sary. "It is warm," is undoubtedly a synthetic judgment, but it is accidental and contingent, for it may be cold tomorrow; hence it is not a scientific proposition. Whenever, however, you say: Heat expands, you state a fact which will be as true to-morrow and a thousand years from now as it is to-day; you state a necessary proposition and a concept properly so-called. But what right have I to affirm that this proposition is necessary, universal, true in every instance? Does experience reveal to me all cases, and are there no possible cases, beyond our observation, in which heat does not expand the bodies which it usually expands? Hume is right on this point. Since experience always furnishes only a limited number of cases, it cannot yield necessity and universality. Hence, a judgment a posteriori, i. e., one based solely on experience, cannot constitute scientific knowledge. In order to be necessary, or scientific, a judgment must rest on a rational basis; it must be rooted in reason as well as in observation; it must be a judgment a priori. Now, mathematics, physics, and metaphysics consist of synthetic judgments a priori.1 Hence, to sum up: Knowledge may be defined as synthetic judgment a priori. This is Kant's answer to his preliminary question: What is knowledge? How can we form synthetic judgments a priori? In other terms: Under what conditions is knowledge possible? This is the fundamental problem which Kantian criticism undertakes to solve.2 It is possible, Kant answers, provided the senses furnish the materials for a judgment, and reason the cement needed to unite them. Take the proposition already cited: Heat expands bodies. This proposition contains two dis - Before Kant's time, mathematical pro 1 Prolegomena, pp. 22 ff. positions were regarded as analytic. 2 Prolegomena, pp. 28 ff. tinct elements: (1) the elements furnished by sensation: heat, expansion, bodies; (2) an element not given by sensation, but derived solely from the intellect the causal relation which the sentence in question establishes between heat and the expansion of bodies. What is true of our example is true of every scientific judgment. Every scientific judgment necessarily contains sensible elements and pure or rational elements. In denying the former, idealism ignores the fact that persons born blind have no idea of color, and, consequently, no notion of light; in denying the rational, innate, a priori element, sensationalism forgets that the most refined senses of the idiot are incapable of suggesting a scientific notion to him. The critical philosophy occupies a place between these two extreme theories, and recognizes both the rôle of sensibility and that of pure reason in the formation of our judgments. But we must make a more penetrating analysis of the faculty of knowledge. As we have just seen, it is divided. into two sub-faculties, one of which furnishes the materials of our knowledge, while the other fashions them, or makes concepts of them. Hence, our examination of reason, in the broad sense of faculty of knowledge, will take up: (1) the sensibility (intuitive reason) and (2) the understanding proper.1 1. Critique of Sensibility, or Transcendental Esthetic We now know in a general way that knowledge is the common product of sensibility and the understanding. But what are the conditions of sense-perception, or, to use Kant's language, intuition (Anschauung)? Sensibility, we said, furnishes the understanding with the materials of its knowledge. But the materials themselves, of which the garment is to be made, already have 1 Kritik, p. 28. a certain shape; they are no longer absolutely raw materials the latter have been subjected to the preliminary processes of spinning and weaving. Or, in other words, our sensibility is not purely passive; it does not turn over to the understanding the materials which the latter needs, without adding something of its own; it impresses its stamp, its own forms, upon things; or, as one might say, it marks the perceived object just as the outline of our hands is traced upon a handful of snow. It is in particular what the faculty of knowledge is in general: both receptive and active; it receives a mysterious substance from without, and makes an intuition of it. Hence, there are, in every intuition, two elements: a pure or a priori element and an a posteriori element, form and matter, something that reason produces spontaneously and something, I know not what, derived elsewhere. What is this form? What are the a priori elements which our sensibility does not receive, but draws from its own nature and adds to each of its intuitions, just as the digestive apparatus adds its juices to the swallowed food, in order to transform it into chyle? These a priori intuitions, which sensationalism denies, and whose existence the Critique of Pure Reason proves, are space, the form of the outer sense, and time, the form of the inner sense. Space and time are original intuitions of reason, prior to all experience this is the immortal discovery of Kant, and one of the fundamental teachings of the critical philosophy.1 The following proofs may be offered in support of the view that space and time come from reason and not from experience (1) Although the infant has no accurate notion of distance, it tends to withdraw from disagreeable objects and to approach such as give it pleasure. Hence it knows a priori that such objects are in front of it, by the side of Prior to all other intuitions, it has the it, beyond it, etc. 1 Kritik, pp. 31-54. |