Appendix — The Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection1317
In this appendix Kant gives a criticism of the Leibnizian rationalism—a criticism already partially stated in the section on the Postulates—and he does this in a manner which very clearly reveals the influence which that rationalism continued to exercise upon his own thinking. Thus Kant speaks of the “mere concept,”1318 and in doing so evidently means to imply that it exists in its own right, with a nature determined solely by intrinsic factors of a strictly a priori character, in complete independence of the specific material of sense-experience. He denies, it is true, the objective validity of such concepts, and maintains that in their empirical employment they are completely transformed through the addition of new factors. None the less he allows to the concepts an intrinsic nature, and practically maintains that from the point of view of the pure concept, and therefore from the point of view of a logic based upon it, the Leibnizian rationalism is the one true system of metaphysics. For pure thought, Leibniz’s system is the ultimate and only possible philosophy; and were thought capable of determining the nature of things in themselves, we should be constrained to adopt it as metaphysically valid. This is the standpoint which underlies much of Kant’s argument in the Dialectic. It leads him to maintain that the self must necessarily, in virtue of an unavoidable transcendental illusion, believe in its own independent substantial reality, that the mind is constrained to conceive reality as an unconditioned unity, and that the notions of God, freedom, and immortality are Ideas necessarily involved in the very constitution of human thought.
But we must not regard Kant’s doctrine of the pure concept merely as a survival from a standpoint which the Critical teaching is destined to displace and supersede. For Kant is not led through inconsistency, or through any mere lack of thoroughness in the development of his Critical principles, to retain this rationalistic doctrine. To understand the really operative grounds of Kant’s argumentation, and so to place the contents of this section in proper focus, we must recall the fundamental antithesis, developed in my introduction,1319 between the alternative positions, which are represented for Kant by the philosophies of Hume and Leibniz. Kant, as already observed, is profoundly convinced of the essential truth of the Leibnizian position. He holds to the Leibnizian view of reason. Human reason is essentially metaphysical; its ultimate function is to emancipate us from the limiting conditions of animal existence; it reveals its nature in those Ideas of the unconditioned, the discussion of which Kant reserves for the Dialectic.
The chief defect in Kant’s criticism of Leibniz, as developed in this section, is that the deeper issues, which determine the extent of his agreement with Leibniz, are not raised or even indicated. Consequently, his references to pure thought, and his assertion1320 that from the point of view of pure thought Leibniz is entirely justified in his teaching, bewilder the reader, who has been made to adopt a Critical standpoint, and therefore to believe that thought can function only in connection with the data of sense-experience. Kant would seem, indeed, to have lapsed into the dogmatic standpoint of the Dissertation, distinguishing between a sensible and an intelligible world, and maintaining that pure thought is capable of determining the nature of the latter. The only difference between his teaching here and in the Dissertation consists in the admission that all knowledge is limited to sense-experience, and that we are therefore unable to determine whether this intelligible world which we must think, and think in the precise manner defined by Leibniz, does or does not exist.
This section is, indeed, like the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena, wrongly located. Giving, as it does, Kant’s criticism of the Leibnizian ontology, it discusses problems of metaphysics; and ought therefore to have found its place in the Dialectic, in natural connection with the corresponding examination of the metaphysical sciences of rational psychology, cosmology, and theology. Architectonic, that ever-present source of so many of Kant’s idiosyncrasies, has again interposed its despotic mandate. As there are only three forms of syllogism, only three main divisions can be recognised in the Dialectic; and the criticism of ontology, to its great detriment, must therefore be located, where it does not in the least belong, in the concluding section of the Analytic.1321
But we must follow Kant’s argument as here given. Leibniz views thought as capable of prescribing, antecedently to all experience, the fundamental conditions to which reality must conform. The possible is prior to, and independent of, the actual; and can be adequately determined by pure reason from its own inherent resources. Kant does not here question this assertion of the independence and priority of pure thought. He is content to maintain that what is valid for thought need not hold of those appearances which are the only possible objects of human knowledge, since in sense-experience conditions, unforeseen by pure thought, partly limitative and partly extensive of its concepts, intervene to modify the conclusions which from its own point of view are logically valid. Leibniz, through failure to realise the dual character of thought and sense, overlooked this all-important fact; and, in asserting that what is true for pure thought is valid of the sensuously real, fell victim to the fallacy which Kant entitles transcendental amphiboly.
Kant’s clearest statement of the fallacy is in A 280 = B 336. It reduces, formally stated, to the fallacy of denying the antecedent. In accordance with the dictum de omni et nullo, we can validly assert that what belongs to or contradicts a universal concept, belongs to or contradicts the particulars which fall under that concept. Leibniz employs the principle in a negative and invalid form. He argues that what is not contained in a universal concept is also not contained in the particulars to which it applies. “The entire intellectualist system of Leibniz is reared upon this latter principle.” And as Kant points out,1322 the reason why so acute and powerful a thinker succumbed to this obvious fallacy is to be found in his view of sense as merely confused thought; or, to state the same point in another way, in his interpretation of appearances as being the confused representations of things in themselves.1323 All differences between appearance and reality are, on this view, due merely to lack of clearness in our apprehension of the given. Sense, when completely clarified, reduces without remainder to pure thought; and in the concepts, which thought develops from within itself, lie the whole content alike of knowledge and of real existence. Owing to a metaphysical theory of the nature of the real, itself due to a false interpretation of the nature and function of pure thought, and ultimately traceable to an excessive preoccupation with knowledge of the strictly mathematical type,1324 Leibniz failed to do justice to the fundamental characteristics of our human experience, and in especial to the actual given nature of space, time, and dynamical causality. His rationalistic metaphysics has its roots in the Cartesian philosophy,1325 and is, in Kant’s view, the perfected product of philosophical thinking, when developed on dogmatic, i.e. non-Critical, lines. It is the opposite counterpart of the empirical or sceptical type of philosophy which in modern times found its first great supporter in Locke, and which, as Kant held, obtained its perfected expression in the philosophy of Hume. While Descartes and Leibniz intellectualise appearances, Locke and Hume regard the a priori concepts of understanding as merely empirical products of discursive reflection. Both commit the same fundamental error of failing to recognise that understanding and sensibility are two distinct sources of representations.1326 Both consequently strive, in equally one-sided fashion, to reduce the complexity of experience to one alone of its constituent elements. This section of the Critique ought to have developed the Critical teaching in its opposition to both these alternative attitudes; Kant arbitrarily limits it to criticism of the Leibnizian rationalism.
Kant’s method of introducing and arranging his criticism is artificial, and need be no more than mentioned. Critical reflection upon the sources of our knowledge, which Kant, in order to distinguish it from reflection of the ordinary type, entitles transcendental reflection, is, he states, a duty imposed upon all who would profess to pass a priori judgments upon the real. It will trace the concepts employed to their corresponding faculties, intellectual and sensuous, and will reveal the independence and disparity of sensibility and understanding, and so will effectually prevent that false locating of concepts to which transcendental amphiboly is due. Such reflection, he further argues, consists in a comparison of the representations with the faculty to which they are due, and like ordinary comparison will determine the relations of (1) identity and difference, (2) agreement and opposition, (3) inner and outer, (4) determinable and determining (matter and form). In this arbitrary but ingenious fashion Kant contrives to obtain the four main headings required for his criticism of the Leibnizian ontology.
(1) Under the first heading he deals with the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. It is, Kant maintains, a typical example of the fallacy of transcendental amphiboly. Leibniz argues that if no difference is discoverable in the concept of things, there can be none in the things themselves; things which are identical in conception must be identical in all respects. But this, Kant replies, is true only so long as the concepts abstract from the sensuous conditions of existence. Thus no two cubic feet of space are alike. They are distinguishable from one another by their spatial location; and that is a difference which concerns the conditions of intuition; it is not to be discovered in the pure concept.1327 Spaces, alike for thought, are distinguishable for sense. To take another of Kant’s illustrations: two drops of water, if indistinguishable in all their internal properties of quality or quantity, are conceptually identical. Through differences of location in space, irrelevant to their conception, they can none the less be intuited as numerically different. The principle of indiscernibles is not a law of nature, but only an analytic rule for the comparison of things through mere concepts.1328
(2) A second principle of the Leibnizian metaphysics is that realities can never conflict with one another. This is supposed to follow from the fact that in pure thought the only form of opposition is logical negation. Realities, being pure affirmations, must necessarily harmonise with one another. This principle ignores the altogether different conditions of sense-existence. Space, time, and the resulting possibility of dynamical causality supply the conditions for real opposition. Two existences, though equally real and positive, may annul one another. Two forces acting upon a body may neutralise one another. From the above logical principle Leibniz’s successors1329 profess to obtain the far-reaching metaphysical conclusions, that all realities agree with one another, that evil is merely negative, consisting exclusively in limitation of existence, and that God, without detriment to the unity of his being, can be constituted of all possible realities.
(3) Viewing space and time, which condition external relation, as merely confused forms of apprehension, Leibniz further concluded that the reality of substance is purely internal. And ruling out position, shape, contact and motion, all of which involve external relations, he felt justified in endowing the monads with the sole remaining form of known existence, namely consciousness. The assertion that the monads are incapable of external relation leads to the further conclusion that they are incapable of interaction, and stand in systematic relation to one another, solely in virtue of a pre-established harmony.
(4) From the point of view of pure thought matter must precede form. The universal must precede the particular which is a specification of it.1330 Unlimited reality is taken as being the matter of all possibility, and its limitation or form as being due to negation. Substances must antecedently exist in order that external relations may have something upon which to ground themselves. Space and time must be interpreted as confused apprehensions of purely intellectual orders, space representing a certain order in the reciprocal (pre-established) correspondence of substances, and time the dynamical sequence of their states. On the other hand, from the standpoint of sense and its intuitional forms the reverse holds. The world of appearance is conditioned by the forms of space and time; the objectively possible coincides with the actual; and the substantia phaenomenon has no independent essence, but reduces without remainder to external relations. For pure thought this world of given appearance is an utterly paradoxical form of existence; it is the direct opposite of everything that genuine reality ought to be. In this strange conclusion the problems of the Dialectic, in one of their most suggestive forms, at once loom up before us. As stated above, this entire discussion is an anticipation of questions which cannot be adequately treated within the limits of the Analytic.
The text of this section is highly composite. The entire content of the Appendix is twice reintroduced and restated at full length in the accompanying Note. These successive expositions of one and the same argument were doubtless independently written, and then later pieced together in this external fashion. A 277-8 = B 333-4, on the nature of the substantia phaenomenon, would by its references to the transcendental object seem to be of early origin.1331 It has already been commented upon.1332 A 285-9 = B 342-6, on the other hand, which supplements the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena,1333 would seem to be of late origin. It is so dated by Adickes,1334 owing to the reference to schemata in its opening sentence.
A 289-91 = B 346-9. Table of the division of the conception of nothing.—This curious and ingenious classification of the various meanings of the term ‘nothing’ is chiefly of interest through its first division: “empty conception without object, ens rationis.” The ens rationis can best be defined in its distinction from the fourth division: “empty object without conception, nihil negativum.” The former is a Gedankending; the latter is an Unding. The former indeed, though not contradictory, is mere fiction (bloss Erdichtung), and consequently must not be taken as falling within the field of the possible. The latter is a concept which destroys itself, and which therefore stands in direct conflict with the possible. The ens rationis includes, Kant explicitly states,1335 the conception of noumena, “which must not be reckoned among the possibilities, although they must not for that reason be declared to be also impossible.” Kant must here be taking noumena in the positive sense.1336 As usual Kant’s attempt to obtain parallels for the four classes of category breaks down. The so-called nihil privativum and the ens imaginarium do not properly come within the denotation of the term ‘nothing.’ This is very evident in the examples which Kant cites. Cold is as real as the opposite with which it is contrasted, while pure space and pure time are not negative even in a conventional sense.
TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC
DIVISION II
THE TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC
INTRODUCTORY COMMENT UPON THE COMPOSITE ORIGIN AND CONFLICTING TENDENCIES OF THE DIALECTIC.
We have had constant occasion to observe the composite origin and conflicting tendencies of the Analytic. The Dialectic is hardly less composite in character, and is certainly not more uniform in its fundamental teaching.
The composite nature of the text, though bewildering to the unsophisticated reader, is not, however, without its compensations. The text, as it stands, preserves the record of the manifold influences which presided over its first inception, and of the devious paths by which Kant travelled to his later conclusions. It thus enables us to determine, with considerable accuracy, the successive stages through which it has passed in the process of settling into its present form. As we shall find, the sections on the antinomies contain the original argument, out of which by varied processes of supplementation and modification the other parts have arisen.
The conflict of doctrine has also its counter-advantages. The problems are impartially discussed from opposed standpoints; the difficulties peculiar to each of the competing possible solutions are frankly recognised, and indeed insisted upon; and the internal dialectic of Kant’s own personal thinking obtains dramatic expression. We are thus the better enabled to appreciate the open-minded pertinacity with which Kant set himself to do justice to every significant aspect of his many-sided problems, and are consequently in less danger of simplifying his argument in any arbitrary manner, or of ignoring the tentative character of the solutions at which he arrives.
I shall first define the main lines of conflict, and shall then attempt to trace those conflicts to the considerations in which they have their source. The two chief lines of thought traceable throughout the Dialectic are represented by its negative and by its positive tendencies respectively. From one point of view, Reason is merely the understanding in its self-limiting, self-regulative employment, and the main purpose of the Dialectic is to guard against the delusive power of fictitious principles. From the other point of view, Reason is a faculty distinct from understanding, and its problems run parallel with those of the Analytic, forming no less important a subject of philosophical reflection, and no less fruitful a source of positive teaching. The one line of argument connects with Kant’s more sceptical tendencies, the other with his deep-rooted belief in the ultimate validity of the absolute claims of pure thought.
When we approach the Dialectic from the standpoint of the Analytic, it is the negative aspect that is naturally most prominent. In the Analytic Kant has proved that all knowledge is limited to sense-experience, and that a metaphysical interpretation of reality is altogether impossible. But as the human mind would seem to be possessed by an inborn need of metaphysical construction, this conclusion cannot obtain its due influence until the sources of the metaphysical tendency have been detected and laid bare. The Dialectic must yield a psychology of metaphysics as well as a logic of illusion.
But when, on the other hand, the problems of the Dialectic are viewed in their distinction from those of the Analytic, and their independent character is recognised, they appear in a perspective which sets them in a very different light. Reason is a faculty co-ordinate with understanding, and yields a priori concepts distinct in function, no less than in nature, from the categories. To mark this distinction Kant entitles the concepts of Reason Ideas. They demand both a metaphysical and a transcendental deduction. These requirements are fulfilled through their derivation from the three forms of syllogism, and by the proof that they exercise an indispensable function, at once limiting and directing the understanding. As limiting concepts, they condition the consciousness of those Ideal standards through which the human mind is enabled to distinguish between appearance and things in themselves. As regulative, they prescribe the problems which the understanding in its search for knowledge is called upon to solve.
These two tendencies, sceptical and constructive, are never, indeed, in complete opposition. Common to both, rendering possible the psychological explanation of the metaphysical impulse, which even the negative standpoint demands, is the doctrine of the regulative function of Ideal principles. This doctrine, which already appears in the Dissertation of 1770, was later developed into the Critical theory of transcendental illusion; and by means of that theory Kant succeeded in bringing the two standpoints into a very real and vital connection with one another. At first sight it may seem to achieve their complete reconciliation, accounting for their distinction while rendering them mutually complementary; and Kant’s teaching may perhaps be so restated as to bear out that impression. But the harmony is never completely attained by Kant. Here, as in the Analytic, there is an equipoise of tendencies that persist in opposition.
Kant’s mediating doctrine of transcendental illusion may first be stated. It rests upon a distinction between appearance and illusion. Appearance (Erscheinung) is a transcript in phenomenal terms of some independent reality; and of such appearances we can acquire what from the human point of view is genuine knowledge. On the other hand, all professed insight into the nature of the transcendent or non-empirical is sheer illusion (Schein), and purely subjective. There are three species of illusion, logical, empirical and transcendental. Logical illusion stands apart by itself. It is due merely to inattention or ignorance; and vanishes immediately the attention is aroused. Empirical and transcendental illusion, on the other hand, have a twofold point of agreement, first, in being unavoidable, and secondly, in that they originate in our practical needs. We may know that the moon at its rising is no larger than in mid-heavens, that the ocean is no higher in the distance than at the shore; this makes not the least difference in the perceptions as they continue to present themselves. That the illusions are adapted to our practical needs, and are consequently beneficial, is less often observed. Changes in the colour, form, and size of objects as they recede from us, the seeing of the parallel sides of a street as converging, enable us to achieve what would not otherwise be possible. By their means we acquire the power of compressing a wide extent of landscape into a single visual field, of determining distance, and the like. Their practical usefulness is in almost exact proportion to the freedom with which they depart from the standards of the independently real. Kant argues that, in these respects, transcendental illusion is analogous to the empirical. Just as the illusory characteristics of our perceptions are to be understood only in terms of their practical function, so the Ideas of pure Reason have always a practical bearing, and can only be explained and justified in terms of the needs which they satisfy. As theoretical enquirers, we accept all that affords us orientation in the attainment of knowledge; as moral agents, we postulate the conditions which are necessary for the realisation of the moral imperative. And as the Ideals of natural science are found (such is Kant’s contention) to be in general form akin to those of the moral consciousness, they thus acquire a twofold footing in the mental life, maintaining their place there quite independently of theoretical proof. Though illusory, they are unavoidable; and though theoretically false,1337 they are from a practical point of view both legitimate and indispensable.
Kant, in developing this thesis, might profitably have pointed to still another respect in which the analogy holds between sense-experience and transcendental beliefs. The illusions of sense-perception come in the ordinary processes of experience to be detected as such by the mind. From the theoretical standpoint of the outside observer who compares the situation of one percipient with that of another, and so is enabled to cancel the differences which variety of situation carries with it, the useful illusions of ordinary experience are reduced to the level of mere appearance. In contradicting one another they reveal their subjective character, and also at the same time afford data for determining the objective conditions to which their subjectively necessary existence is causally due. In similar fashion the transcendental illusions result in contradictions, which compel the mind to recognise that the Ideals to which it is committed by its practical needs are of a merely subjective character, and may never be legitimately interpreted as representing the actual nature of the independently real.
The chief transcendental illusion, and ultimately the cause of all the others, consists in the belief that the Ideals of explanation which satisfy Reason must in general outline represent the nature of ultimate reality. What the individual seeks to discover he naturally believes to exist prior to the discovery. As practical beings, we regard the objects of sense-experience as absolute realities—they are the realities of practical life, and we are practical rather than theoretical beings—and the existing empirical sciences, conceived as Ideally completed, are therefore viewed as yielding an adequate representation of ultimate reality. But such a belief involves us in contradictions. The world of phenomena in space and time is endlessly relative. It can have no outer bounds or first beginning, and no smallest parts; and in the series of causal antecedents there can be no member that is not effect as well as cause. Viewed as representing a pre-existent goal, the Ideas of Reason are imaginary completions of the intrinsically and merely relative, and are in their very notion self-contradictory. All that is definite in their content conflicts with their absoluteness; and yet, as it would seem, only in their empirical reference can they hope for objective verification.
Such are the problems of the Dialectic, so far as they can be formulated in terms common to the two opposed standpoints. Their deeper significance, and the grounds of Kant’s alternating treatment of them, only appear when he raises the further questions, what those Ideals of explanation which Reason prescribes really are, and how, if they conflict with the content of experience, it is possible that they should be conceived at all. To these questions Kant propounds both a sceptical and an Idealist answer. The former, in bare outline, may be stated as follows. The so-called Ideas are based upon experience and are derived from it. The understanding removes the limitations to which its pure concepts are subject in sense-experience, and proceeds to use them in their widest possible application, i.e. to things in general. As thus employed, they are without real significance, and are indeed self-contradictory. To form the Idea of the unconditioned, we have to omit all those conditions through which alone anything can be apprehended, even as possible. To construct the concept of absolute or unconditioned necessity, we have similarly to leave aside the conditions upon which necessity, as revealed in experience, in all cases depends; in eliminating conditions, we eliminate necessity in the only forms in which it is conceivable by us. Such Ideas are, indeed, simply schematic forms, whereby we body forth to ourselves, in more or less metaphorical terms, the concept of a maximum. They are imaginary extensions, in Ideal form, of the unity and system which understanding has discovered in actual experience, and which, under the inspiration of such Ideals, it seeks to realise in ever-increasing degree. If the understanding, as thus insisting upon Ideal satisfaction, be entitled Reason, the Ideas must be taken as expressing a subjective interest, and as exhausting their legitimate employment in the regulation of the understanding. Their transcendental deduction will consist in the proof that they are necessary to the understanding for the perfecting of its experience. They do not justify us in attempting to decide, in anticipation of actual experience, how far the contingent collocations and the inexhaustible complexities of brute experience are really reducible to a completely unified system; but they quite legitimately demand that through all discouragements we persist in the endeavour towards their realisation. In any case, it is by experience that the degree of their reality has to be decided. We judge of things by the standard of that for which they exist, and not vice versa. As the sole legitimate function of the Ideas is that of inspiring the understanding in its empirical employment, they must never be interpreted as having metaphysical significance. As the Ideas exist solely for the sake of experience, it is they that must be condemned, if the two really diverge. We do not say “that a man is too long for his coat, but that the coat is too short for the man.”1338 It is experience, not Ideas, which forms the criterion alike of truth and of reality.
Kant’s teaching, when on Idealist lines, is of a very different character. Reason is distinct from understanding, and yet is no less indispensably involved in the conditioning of experience. All consciousness is consciousness of a whole which precedes and conditions its parts. Such consciousness cannot be accounted for by assuming that we are first conscious of the conditioned, and then proceed through omission of its limitations to form to ourselves, by means of the more positive factors involved in this antecedent consciousness, an Idea of an unconditioned whole. The Idea of the unconditioned is distinct in nature from all other concepts, and cannot be derived from them. It must be a pure a priori product of what may be named the faculty of Reason. Its uniqueness is what causes its apparent meaninglessness. As it is involved in all consciousness, it conditions all other concepts; and cannot, therefore, be defined in terms of them. Its significance must not be looked for save in that Ideal, to which no experience, and no concept other than itself, can ever be adequate. That in this Ideal form it has a very real and genuine meaning is proved by our capacity to distinguish between appearance and reality. For upon it this distinction, in ultimate analysis, is found to rest. Consciousness of limitation presupposes a consciousness of what is beyond the limit; consciousness of the unconditioned is prior to, and renders possible, our consciousness of the contingently given. The Idea of the unconditioned must therefore be counted as being, like the categories, though in a somewhat different manner, a condition of the possibility of experience. With it our standards both of truth and of reality are inextricably bound up.1339 The Ideas in which it specifies itself, so far from depending upon empirical verification, are the touchstone by which we detect the unreality of the sensible world, and by which a truer reality, such as would be adequate to the Ideal demands of pure Reason, is prefigured to the mind.
These two standpoints are extremely divergent in their consequences. Each leads to a very different interpretation of the content of the Ideas, of their function in experience, and of their objective validity. On the one view, their content is merely empirical, and sense-experience is our sole criterion of truth and reality; on the other, they have to be recognised as containing a pure a priori concept, and are themselves the standards by which even empirical truth can alone be determined. In the one case, they are Ideals projected by experience for its own empirical guidance; they are built upon contingent experience, and depend upon it alike for the content which makes them conceivable and for their validity. In the other, they are presuppositions of experience, at once conditioning its possibility and revealing its merely phenomenal character. According to the sceptical view, Reason is concerned only with itself and its own subjective demands; on the Idealist view, it is a metaphysical faculty, and outlines possibilities that may perhaps be established by practical Reason.
Such, in broad outline, are the central doctrines of the Dialectic. They constitute an extraordinarily stimulating and suggestive body of Critical teaching. In no other division of the Critique do the power and originality of Kant’s thinking gain such abundant, forceful and illuminating expression. The accumulated results of the painstaking analyses of the earlier sections contribute a solidity and fulness of meaning, which render the argument extremely impressive, even to those who are out of sympathy with Kant’s ultimate purposes. Its persistent influence, on sceptical no less than on Idealist lines, and often conveyed by very devious channels, can frequently be detected even in thinkers—Herbert Spencer is an instance—who would indignantly repudiate the charge of being indebted to such a source.
THE HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF KANT’S VIEWS IN REGARD TO THE PROBLEMS OF THE DIALECTIC1340
We may now proceed to consider the evidence in support of the early origin of the central portions of the Dialectic—the sections on the antinomies. As Benno Erdmann1341 has very conclusively shown, preoccupation with the problem of antinomy was the chief cause of the revolution which took place in Kant’s views in 1769, and which found expression in his Dissertation of 1770. It was the existence of antinomy which led Kant to recognise the subjectivity of space and time. That is to say, it led him to develop that doctrine of transcendental idealism which reappears in the concluding sections of the Aesthetic, and which was recast and developed in the Analytic. Already in the Dissertation it supplies the key for the solution of the problems concerning infinity. The impossibility of completing the space, time, and causal series, and the consequent impossibility of satisfying the demands of the mind for totality, simplicity and unconditionedness, do not, it is there maintained, discredit reason, but only serve to establish the subjectivity of the sensuous forms to which the element of infinitude is in all cases due.
Kant’s thinking was, of course, diverted into an entirely new channel (as his letter to Herz of February 21, 1772,1342 shows), when he came to realise that the metaphysical validity or invalidity of thought must be decided prior to any attempt to discover a positive solution of such problems as are presented by the antinomies. And when, owing to the renewed influence of Hume, at some time subsequent to the date of the letter to Herz, this new problem was recognised as being the problem of a priori synthesis, all questions regarding the nature of the absolutely real were made to take secondary rank, yielding precedence to those of logical theory. When the antinomy problems re-emerge, their discussion assumes Critical form.
In three fundamental respects Kant’s treatment of the antinomies in the Dissertation differs from that of the Critique. In the first place, the demand for totality or absoluteness is not in the Dissertation ascribed to a separate faculty. Indeed Kant’s words would seem to show that at times he had inclined to ascribe it merely to the free-ranging fancy or imagination.1343 Secondly, as the various antinomies were traced exclusively to the influence of space and time upon pure thought, they were treated together, and no classification of them was attempted. And lastly, though Kant’s utterances are somewhat ambiguous,1344 the illusory character of the antinomies was in the main viewed as being of a more or less logical nature. That is to say, it was regarded as entirely preventable and as “vanishing like smoke”1345 upon adoption of a true philosophical standpoint.
A number of the Reflexionen reveal the various tentative schemes, by trial of which Kant worked his way toward a more genuinely Critical treatment of the problems of infinity. The intellectual factors receive fuller recognition, and as a consequence a definite classification results. At some time prior to the discovery of the table of categories, Kant adopted a threefold division of what he names first principles or presuppositions—principles of substance-accident, of ground-consequence, and of whole-part. Reflexion ii. 578 is typical.
“Three principia: (1) in the field of the actual there is the relation of substance to accident (inhaerentia): (2) of ground to consequence (dependentia): (3) of parts and of composition (compositio). There are three presuppositions: of the subject, of the ground, and of the parts; of insition [Kant’s own term], of subordination, and of composition; therefore also three first principia: (1) subject, which is never a predicate; (2) ground, which is never a consequence; (3) unity, which is not itself composite.”
There are numerous other Reflexionen to the same effect.1346 The resulting conceptions are defined both as limits1347 and as absolute totalities, and in Reflexion ii. 1252 are enumerated as follows:
“The first subject; the first ground; the first part. The subject which holds everything in itself; the ground which takes everything under itself; the whole which comprehends everything. The totalitas absoluta of reality, of series, of co-ordination.”
The introduction of the terms ‘absolute’ and ‘totality’ indicate that Kant has also come to recognise the presence of a unique notion (equivalent to the “unconditioned” of the Critique), distinct in content from any of the three enumerated principia, but common to them all. From the very first Kant would seem to have appropriated for it the title Idea. Reflexionen ii. 1243, 1244, and 124 may be quoted:
“The Idea is single (individuum), self-sufficient, and eternal. The divinity of our soul is its capacity to form the Idea. The senses give only copies or rather apparentia.” “Idea is the representation of the whole in so far as it necessarily precedes the determination of the parts. It can never be empirically represented, for the reason that in experience we proceed from the parts through successive syntheses to the whole. It is the archetype (Urbild) of things, for certain objects are only possible through an Idea. Transcendental Ideas are those in which the absolute whole determines the parts in an aggregate or as series.” “Metaphysics proper is the application of transcendental philosophy to concepts supplied by Reason and necessary to it, to which, however, no corresponding objects can be given in experience. The concepts must therefore refer to the supersensible. That, however, can be nothing but the unconditioned, for that is the sole theoretical Idea of reason. [Not italicised in the original.] Metaphysics thus relates: (1) to that of which only the whole can be represented as absolutely unconditioned: (2) to things so far as they are in themselves sensuously unconditioned. The first part is cosmology, the second rational doctrine of the soul, pneumatology and theology.”
At this stage, therefore, Kant would seem to have held that there is but one Idea strictly so called, and that the above three principia are merely specifications of it in terms of the concepts of substance-accident, ground-consequence, and whole-part. The classification thus obtained is in certain respects more satisfactory than that which is adopted in the Critique. It locates the cosmological argument with the causal category, and so would enable the conceptions of freedom or causa sui, and of Divine Existence, to be dealt with in their natural connection with one another. It also supplies, in the category of whole and part, a more fitting heading for those antinomy problems which deal with the unlimited and the limited, the divisible and the indivisible, the complex and the simple. The classification would, however, in separating the problem of the simple from that of substance, remain open to the same criticism as that of the Critique.1348
This classification must, as we have stated, be of a date prior to Kant’s discovery of the table of categories. That is quite clear from its ignoring the category of reciprocity, and from its combination of the other two categories of relation with the merely quantitative category of whole and part. For though the last is also entitled composition and co-ordination, it is conceived in these particular Reflexionen in exclusively quantitative terms. When Kant formulated the “metaphysical” deduction of the categories he was, of course, compelled to recast the classification, and did so in the only possible manner, consistent with his architectonic, by substituting the category of reciprocity for that of whole and part,1349 and by taking the new heading, obtained through combination of reciprocity with the Idea of the unconditioned, as equivalent to the Idea of Divine Existence. But this could not be done without dislocating the entire scheme. The category of ground and consequence is deprived of its chief application, that expressed in the cosmological argument; and in order to provide a new content for it, Kant is compelled to force upon it the problems previously classified under the displaced category of whole and part. Even so, the problem of the causa sui cannot be eliminated, and reappears, partly as the problem of freedom, and partly as the modal problem of necessary existence.
The identification of the theological Idea with the category of reciprocity has a further consequence. It carries the problem of Divine Existence outside the sphere of the problems of infinity, and necessitates a very different treatment from that which it would naturally have received at Kant’s hands, if developed in its connection with his own Critical teaching. He is driven to expound it in the extreme rationalistic form in which it had been formulated by Leibniz and Wolff, as a doctrine of the Ens realissimum.
Prior to the rearrangement, necessitated by recognition of the category of reciprocity, Kant would seem to have expected to bring the entire body of Wolffian metaphysics within the scope of a general doctrine of antinomy. The problems of the divisible and the indivisible, of the simple and the complex, leading as they do to discussion of the presuppositions underlying the Leibnizian monadology, concern spiritual as well as material substance. Similarly, the main problems of theology would have been treated in connection with the cosmological inference to a first cause, and with the discussion of the possibility of first beginnings in space and time.1350
The sections in the Critique devoted to the antinomies reveal, in many ways, Kant’s original design. It is especially noticeable in his discussion of the third and fourth antinomies. The problems of freedom and of necessary existence are by no means treated in merely cosmological fashion. Indeed Kant makes no pretence of concealing their psychological and theological implications. Even the first and second antinomies have obvious bearings of a similar character. But it is in the section entitled The Interest of Reason in this Self-conflict1351 that the broader significance of the antinomies finds its fullest expression. In its suggestive contrast of the two possible types of philosophy, Epicurean and Platonic, the argument entirely transcends the bounds prescribed to it by its cosmological setting. As we follow the comprehensive sweep of its argument, we can hardly avoid regretting that Kant failed to keep to his original plan, as here unfolded,1352 of expounding the self-conflict of Reason in the form of a broad judicial statement of the grounds and claims of the two opposing authorities which divide the allegiance of the human spirit, namely, the intellectual and the moral, science with its cognitive demands on the one hand, the consciousness of duty with its no less imperious prescriptions on the other. The materialist philosophies would then have been presented as inevitably arising when intellectual values are made supreme; and the Idealist philosophies as equally cogent when moral values are taken as primary and are allowed to determine speculative tenets. Against this background of conflicting dogmatisms the comprehensive and satisfying character of the Critical standpoint would have stood out the more clearly; and its historical affiliations, its debt to the sceptics and materialists, no less than to the Idealists, would have been depicted in more adequate terms. As it is, in the chapters on the Paralogisms and the Ideal of Pure Reason there is almost entire failure to recognise the possibility of a naturalistic solution of the problems with which they deal, and Kant so far succumbs to the outworn influences of his day and generation—the very influences from which the Critical philosophy, consistently developed, is a final breaking away—as to maintain, almost in the manner of the English Deists, of Voltaire and Rousseau, that God, Freedom, and Immortality are conceptions which the mind must necessarily form, and in the validity of which it must spontaneously believe. Kant is here, indeed, interpreting “natural reason” in the light of his own personal history. The Christian beliefs, in which he had been nurtured from childhood, and their rationalist counterparts in the Wolffian philosophy, had become, as it were, a second nature to him; and the resistance, which in his own person they had offered to the development of Critical teaching, he not unnaturally interpreted as evidence of their being imposed by the very structure of reason. He transforms the metaphysical sciences in their Wolffian form into inevitable illusions of the human mind.1353
There is evidence that the theological problems were the first to be withdrawn from the sphere of the “sceptical method,”1354 peculiar to the antinomies. Thus Reflexion ii. 1251355 states that “metaphysics proper consists of cosmologia rationalis and theologia naturalis”—rational psychology being, as it would seem, still included within cosmology.1356 What the considerations were which induced Kant to claim similarly independent treatment for rational psychology, we can only conjecture. For a time, while still holding to the bipartite division, he would seem to have made the further change of also separating psychology from cosmology, classing psychology and theology together as subdivisions of the rational science of soul.
”[Metaphysics has two parts]: the first is cosmology, the second rational doctrine of soul, pneumatology and theology.”1357
A main factor deciding Kant in favour of a dogmatic, non-sceptical treatment of rational psychology may have been the greater opportunity which it seemed to afford him of connecting its doctrines with the teaching of the Analytic, and especially with his central doctrine of apperception. But to whatever cause the decision was due, it resulted in the impoverishment of the second antinomy, through withdrawal of the more important half of its natural content. This antinomy could no longer be made to comprehend a discussion of the logical bases of monadology, and of its professed proofs of the simplicity and immortality of the soul. Nothing is left to it save the discussion of the monadistic theory of matter (somatologia pura).1358 This change has also, as already noted, the unfortunate effect of precluding Kant from recognition of the physical application of the category of substance. By the simple he means the substantial, and yet he may not say so; his architectonic forbids.
I may hazard the further suggestion that Kant’s interpretation of rational psychology in terms of the Critical doctrine of apperception is of earlier date than his doctrine of transcendental illusion. For the chapter on the Paralogisms seems in its first form to have contained no reference to that latter doctrine.1359 The few passages which take account of it, all bear evidence of being later intercalations. This is the more remarkable in that the Paralogisms can easily be shown to be typical examples of transcendental illusion. Indeed, neither the antinomies nor the theological Ideal conform to its definition in the same strict fashion.
The problem as to whether the doctrine of transcendental illusion and the deduction of the Ideas from the three species of syllogism originated early or late, is largely bound up with the question as to when Kant finally adopted the terms Analytic and Dialectic as titles for the two main divisions of his Transcendental Logic. That Kant was at first very uncertain as to what the main divisions of his system ought to be, appears very clearly from the Reflexionen.1360 To his teaching as a whole he usually applies the title Transcendental Philosophy, and in Reflexion ii. 123 he enumerates the following subdivisions within it: Aesthetic, Logic, Critique, and Architectonic. By Critique Kant must here mean what in other Reflexionen he names Discipline, and which he finally named Dialectic. As thus identified with the Discipline, the Dialectic is at times viewed as a division of a Methodology or Organon, whose other divisions are entitled Canon and Architectonic.1361 This earlier scheme may therefore be represented as follows:
| Transcendental Philosophy– | Doctrine of Elements | Aesthetic. Logic. |
| Critique = Discipline [corresponding to the Dialectic of the Critique]. | ||
| Doctrine of Methods (Methodology) | Canon. Architectonic. |
The terms Analytic and Dialectic do not occur in these Reflexionen, and their adoption may therefore be inferred to synchronise with Kant’s later decision to include the treatment of the metaphysical sciences within his Logic; and that decision was probably an immediate result of his having developed meantime a doctrine of transcendental illusion. The new scheme in its final form is therefore as follows:
| Transcendental Philosophy or Critique of Pure Reason | Doctrine of Elements | Aesthetic. Logic. | Analytic | of Concepts. of Judgement. |
| Dialectic—of Reason. | ||||
| Doctrine of Methods (Methodology) | Discipline (retained but given a new and more general content). | |||
| Canon. Architectonic. History. | ||||
In thus transferring Dialectic from the Methodology to the Doctrine of Elements, Kant stands committed to the view that it contains positive teaching of a character analogous to that of the Analytic, with which it is now co-ordinated. As we have already noted, the fundamental opposition which runs through the entire Dialectic is due to the conflict between the older view of Reason as merely understanding in its transcendent employment, and this later view of it as a distinct faculty, yielding concepts with a positive and indispensable function, different from, and yet also analogous to, that exercised by the categories of the understanding.
Adickes, to whom students of Kant are indebted for a convincing demonstration of the constant influence of Kant’s logical architectonic upon the content of the Critical teaching, would seem at this point to rely too exclusively upon that method of explanation. He contends that Kant’s deduction of the Ideas of Reason from the three species of syllogism is entirely traceable to this source, and is without real philosophical significance. That is perhaps in the main true. But it need not prevent us from appreciating the importance of the doctrines which Kant contrives to expound under guise of this logical machinery. We have already observed that prior to the discovery of this deduction Kant had recognised the connection between the concept of the unconditioned and the three Ideas through which it finds expression. As the forms of syllogism are differentiated in terms of the three categories of relation, the deduction does not interfere with Kant’s retention of this classification of Ideas; while in connecting Reason as a faculty with reasoning as a logical process, an excellent opportunity is found for explaining the grounds and significance of the demand for unconditionedness, i.e. for completeness of explanation. This demand, as he has also come to recognise, lies open to question, and therefore calls for more precise definition.
The artificial character of the metaphysical deduction lies not so much in this derivation of the three Ideas of the unconditioned—unconditioned substance, unconditioned causality, unconditioned system—from the categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive forms of syllogism respectively, as in the further equating of them with the Ideas of the Self, the World, and God. The Idea of unconditioned substance has many possible applications besides the use to which it is put in rational psychology. The Idea of an unconditioned causality may be conceived in psychological and theological as well as in cosmological terms; and as a matter of fact Kant himself frequently identifies it with the concept of freedom, as in the third and fourth antinomies, or when he enumerates the Ideas as being those of God, Freedom, and Immortality.1362 Similarly, the Idea of system is the inspiring principle of materialism, and also finds in such philosophies as that of Spinoza much more adequate expression than in the Ens realissimum of the Wolffian School. But further comment is not, at this stage, really profitable. These are questions which can best be discussed as they emerge in the course of the argument.1363
Kant carried his logical architectonic one stage further. Not satisfied with connecting the three Ideas of Reason with the categories that underlie the three species of syllogism, he also attempted to organise the various particular applications of each Idea in terms of the fourfold division of the table of categories. By the use of his usual high-handed methods he succeeded in doing so in the case of the psychological and cosmological Ideas. There are four paralogisms and four antinomies. But when the attempt failed in regard to the theological Idea, he very wisely abstained from either apology or explanation. That the failure was not due to lack of desire or perseverance appears from Reflexion ii. 1573, which would seem to be the record of an unavailing attempt to obtain a satisfactory articulation of the theological Ideal. Doubtless, had he been sufficiently bent upon it, he could have worked out some sort of fourfold division; but there were limits even to Kant’s devotion to the architectonic scheme. It is difficult to see how any such arrangement could have been followed without serious perversion of the argument.
Adickes has suggested1364 that the distinction between the faculty of understanding and the faculty of judgment is subsequent to, and suggested by, Kant’s successful tracing of the Ideas to a separate faculty of Reason. Some such distinction was demanded in order that the parallelism of transcendental and formal logic might be complete. This conjecture of Adickes is probably correct. It would seem to be supported by the internal evidence of the Analytic of Principles. As we have had occasion to note,1365 the doctrine of schematism, in terms of which the distinction between understanding and judgment is formulated, is late in date of origin.1366 This distinction is of the same artificial character as that between understanding and Reason; and though, like the latter distinction, it supplies Kant with a convenient framework for the arrangement of genuine Critical material, it also tends to conceal the simpler and more inward bonds of true relationship.