A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Appendix B — A More Detailed Statement of Kant’s Relations to His Philosophical Predecessors1759

The development of philosophy, prior to Kant, had rendered two problems especially prominent—the problem of sense-perception and the problem of judgment. The one raises the question of the interrelation of mind knowing and objects known; the other treats of the connection holding between subject and predicate in the various forms of judgment. The one enquires how it is possible to know reality; the other seeks to determine the criterion of truth. These two problems are, as Kant discovered, inseparable from one another; and the logical is the more fundamental of the two. Indeed it was Hume’s analysis of the judgment involved in the causal principle that enabled Kant to formulate his Critical solution of the problem of perception. In this Appendix I propose to follow these problems as they rise into view in the systems of Descartes and his successors.

Galileo’s revolutionary teaching regarding the nature of motion was the immediate occasion of Descartes’ restatement of the problem of perception. That teaching necessitated an entirely new view of the nature of matter, and consequently of the interrelation of mind and body. Questions never before seriously entertained now became pressing. The solutions had to be as novel as the situation which they were designed to meet.

These new problems arose in the following manner. According to the medieval view, motion may properly be conceived on the analogy of human activity. It comes into being, exhausts itself in exercise, and ceases to be. It is a fleeting activity; only its “material” and “formal” conditions have any permanence of existence. According to Galileo’s teaching, on the other hand, motion is as different from human activity as matter is from mind. It is ingenerable and indestructible. We know it only through the effect which in some incomprehensible fashion it produces in those bodies into which it enters, namely, their translation from one part of space to another. That this translatory motion is called by the same name as the power which generates it, doubtless in some degree accounts for the fact that our understanding of the one tends to conceal from us our entire ignorance of the other.1760 We have only to reflect, however, in order to realise that motion is completely mysterious in its intrinsic dynamical nature. We cannot, for instance, profess to comprehend, even in the least degree, how motion, though incapable of existing apart from matter, should yet be sufficiently independent to be able to pass from one body to another.

Descartes, following out some of the chief consequences of this new teaching, concluded that matter is passive and inert, that it is distinguished neither by positive nor by negative properties from the space which it fills, and that it is to motion that all the articulated organisation of animate and inanimate nature is due. Descartes failed, indeed, to appreciate the dynamical character of motion, and by constantly speaking as if it were reducible to the translatory motion, in which it manifests itself, he represented it as known in all its essential features. None the less, the rôles previously assigned to matter and motion are, in Descartes’ system, completely reversed. Matter is subordinated to motion as the instrument to the agency by which it is directed and shaped. On the older view, material bodies had, through the possession of formative and vital forces, all manner of intrinsic powers. By the new view these composite and nondescript existences are resolved into two elements, all the properties of which can be quantitatively defined—into a matter which is uniform and homogeneous, and into motion whose sole effect is the translation of bodies in space. Matter is the passive and inert substance out of which motion, by its mere mechanical powers, can produce the whole range of material forms.

This revolutionary change in the physical standpoint involved restatement of the philosophical issues. But the resulting difficulties were found thoroughly baffling. Though Descartes and his successors were willing to adopt any hypothesis, however paradoxical, which the facts might seem to demand, their theories, however modified and restated, led only deeper into a hopeless impasse. The unsolved problems of the Cartesian systems formed the discouraging heritage to which Kant fell heir. If matter is always purely material, and motion is its sole organising power, there can be no real kinship between body and mind. The formative and vital forces, which in the Scholastic philosophy and in popular thought serve to maintain the appearance of continuity between matter and mind, can no longer be credited. Motion, which alone is left to mediate between the opposites, is purely mechanical, and (on Descartes’ view) is entirely lacking in inner or hidden powers. The animal body is exclusively material, and is therefore as incapable of feeling or consciousness as any machine made by human hands. The bodily senses are not ‘sensitive’; the brain cannot think. Mental experiences do, of course, accompany the brain-motions. But why a sensation should thus arise when a particular motion is caused in the brain, or how a mental resolution can be followed by a brain state, are questions to which no satisfactory answer can be given. The mental and the material, the spiritual and the mechanical, fall entirely apart.

The difficulties arising out of this incomprehensibility of the causal interrelations of mind and body are not, however, in themselves a valid argument against a dualistic interpretation of the real. The difficulties of accounting for the causal relation are, in essential respects, equally great even when the interaction is between homogeneous existences. The difficulties are due to the nature of causal action as such, not to the character of the bodies between which it holds. This, indeed, was clearly recognised by Descartes, and was insisted upon by his immediate successors. The transference of motion by impact is no less incomprehensible than the interaction of soul and body. If motion can exist only in matter, there is no possible method of conceiving how it can make the transition from one discrete portion of matter to another. Causal action is thus a problem which no philosophy can pretend to solve, and which every philosophy, whether monistic or dualistic, must recognise as transcending the scope of our present knowledge.

It is in another and more special form that Descartes’ dualism first reveals its fatal defects, namely, in its bearing upon the problem of sense-perception. Descartes can solve the problem of knowledge only by first postulating the doctrine of representative perception. That doctrine is rendered necessary by the dualism of mind and body. Objects can be known only mediately by means of their action upon the sense-organs, and through the sense-organs upon the brain. The resulting brain states are in themselves merely forms of motion. They lead, however, in a manner which Descartes never professes to explain,1761 to the appearance of sensations in the mental field. Out of these sensations the mind then constructs mental images of the distant bodies; and it is these mental images alone which are directly apprehended. Material bodies are invisible and intangible; they are knowable only through their mental duplicates. Thus, according to the doctrine of representative perception, each mind is segregated in a world apart. It looks out upon a landscape which is as mental and as truly inward as are its feelings and desires. The apparently ultimate relation of mind knowing and object known is rendered complex and problematic through the distinction between mental objects and real things. Mental objects are in all cases images merely. They exist only so long as they are apprehended; and they are numerically and existentially distinct in each individual mind. Real things are not immediately perceived; they are hypothetically inferred. To ordinary consciousness the body which acts on the sense-organ is the object known; when reflective consciousness is philosophically enlightened, the object immediately known is recognised as a merely mental image, and the external object sinks to the level of an assumed cause.

The paradoxical character of this doctrine is accentuated by Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities.1762 Those physical processes, which are entitled light and heat, bear no resemblance to the sensations through which they become known. The many-coloured world of ordinary consciousness is an illusory appearance which can exist only in the human mind. We must distinguish between the sensible world which, though purely mental, appears, through an unavoidable illusion, to be externally real, and that very different world of matter and motion which reveals its independent nature only to reflective thinking. In the latter world the rich variety of sensuous appearance can find no place. There remain only the quantitative, mechanical properties of extension, figure and motion; and even these have to be interpreted in the revolutionary fashion of physical science.

The doctrine of representative perception cannot, however, defend successfully the positions which it thus involves. It wavers in unstable equilibrium. The facts, physical and physiological, upon which it is based, are in conflict with the conclusions in which it results. This has been very clearly demonstrated by many writers in recent times.1763 The conflict manifested itself in the period between Descartes and Kant only through the uneasy questionings of Locke and Berkeley. The problem, fundamental though it be, is almost completely ignored by Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff.

Stated in modern terms, the inherently contradictory character of the doctrine consists in its unavoidable alternation between the realist attitude to which it owes its origin, and the idealist conclusion in which it issues. Such oscillation is due to the twofold simultaneous relation in which it regards ideas as standing to the objects that they are supposed to represent. The function of sensations is cognitive; their origin is mechanical. As cognitive they stand to objects in a relation of inclusion; they reveal the objects, reduplicating them in image before the mind. Yet in their origin they are effects, mechanically generated by the action of material bodies upon the sense-organs and brain. As they are effects mechanically generated, there is no guarantee that they resemble their causes; and if we may argue from other forms of mechanical causation, there is little likelihood that they do. They stand to their first causes in a relation of exclusion, separated from them by a large number of varying intermediate processes. There is thus a conflict between the function of sensations and their origin. Their origin in the external objects is supposed to confer upon them a representative power; and yet the very nature of this origin invalidates any such claim.

This irreconcilability of the subjectivist consequences of the doctrine with its realist basis was seized upon by Berkeley. To remove the contradiction, he denied the facts from which the doctrine had been developed. That is to say, starting from its results he disproved its premisses. Arguing from the physical and physiological conditions of perception Descartes had concluded that only sensations can be directly apprehended by the mind. Berkeley starts from this conclusion, and virtually adopts it as an assumption which cannot be questioned, and which does not call for proof. Since, he contends, we know only sensations, the assertion that they are due to material causes is mere hypothesis, and is one for which there may be no valid grounds. As Descartes himself had already suggested, there is a second possible method of interpreting the relevant facts. There may exist an all-powerful Being who produces the sensations in our minds from moment to moment; and provided that they are produced in the same order as now, the whole material world might be annihilated without our being in the least aware that so important an event had taken place. Since we can experience only sensations, any hypothesis which will account for the order of their happening is equally legitimate. The whole question becomes one of relative simplicity in the explanation given. The simpler analysis, other things being equal, must hold the field.

Berkeley reinforces this argument by pointing to the many embarrassing consequences to which Descartes’ dualism must lead. We postulate bodies in order to account for the origin of our sensations, and yet are unable to do so by their means. The dualistic theory creates more difficulties than it solves, without a single counter-advantage, save perhaps—so Berkeley argues—that it seems to harmonise better with the traditional prejudices of the philosophic consciousness.

If we grant Berkeley his premisses, the main lines of his argument are fairly cogent, however unconvincing may be his own positive views. The crux, however, of the Berkeleian idealism lies almost exclusively in the establishment of its fundamental assumption, that only ideas (i.e. images) can be known by the mind. This assumption Berkeley, almost without argument, takes over from his predecessors. It was currently accepted, and from it, therefore, he believed that he could safely argue. It rests, however, upon the assumption of facts which he himself questions. In rejecting the Cartesian dualism he casts down the ladder by which alone it is possible to climb into his position. For save through the facts of physics and physiology there seems to be no possible method of disproving the belief of ordinary consciousness, that in perception we apprehend independent material bodies. And until that belief can be shown to be false and ungrounded, the Berkeleian idealism is without support. It cannot establish the fundamental assumption upon which its entire argument proceeds. Thus, though Berkeley convincingly demonstrates the internal incoherence of the doctrine of representative perception—the inconsistency of its conclusions with the physical and physiological facts upon which alone it can be based—he cannot himself solve the problem in answer to which that doctrine was propounded. His services, like those of so many other reformers, were such as he did not himself foresee. In simplifying the problem, he prepared the way for the more sceptical treatment of its difficult issues by Hume.

At this point, in the philosophy of Hume, the problem of perception comes into the closest possible connection with the logical problem, referred to above. The question, how mind knowing is related to the objects known, is found to depend upon the question, how in certain crucial cases predicates may legitimately be referred to their subject. This logical problem arises in two forms, a narrower and a wider. The narrower issue concerns only the principle of causality. With what right do we assert that every event must have a cause? What is the ground which justifies us in thus predicating of events a causal character? Obviously, this logical question is fundamental, and must be answered before we can hope to solve the more special problem, as to our right to interpret sensations as effects of material bodies. Hume was the first to emphasise the vital interconnection of these two lines of enquiry.

The wider issue is the generating problem of Kant’s Critique: How in a judgment can a predicate be asserted of a subject in which it is not already involved? In other words, what is it that in such a case justifies us in connecting the predicate with the subject? Though this problem was never directly raised by any pre-Kantian thinker, not even by Hume, it is absolutely vital to all the pre-Kantian systems. Thus Descartes’ philosophy is based upon a distinction, nowhere explicitly drawn but everywhere silently assumed, between abstract and fruitful ideas. The former contain just so much content and no more; this content may be explicitly unfolded in a series of judgments, but no addition is thereby made to our knowledge. The latter, on the other hand, are endowed with an extraordinary power of inner growth. To the attentive mind they disclose a marvellous variety of inner meaning. The chief problem of scientific method consists, according to Descartes, in the discovery of these fruitful ideas, and in the separation of them from the irrelevant accompaniments which prevent them from unfolding their inner content. Once they are discovered, the steady progress of knowledge is assured. They are the springs of knowledge, and from them we have only to follow down the widening river of truth.

Descartes professed to give a complete list of the possible fruitful ideas. They are, he claimed, better known than any other concepts. They lie at the basis of all experience, and no one can possibly be ignorant of them; though, owing to their simplicity and omnipresence, their philosophical importance has been overlooked. When, however, Descartes proceeded to classify them, he found that while such ideas as space, triangle, number, motion, contain an inexhaustible content that is progressively unfolded in the mathematical sciences, those ideas, on the other hand, through which we conceive mental existences,—the notions of mind, thought, self—do not by any means prove fruitful upon attentive enquiry. As Malebranche later insisted, we can define mind only in negative terms; its whole meaning is determined through its opposition to the space-world, which alone is truly known. Though it is the function of mind to know, it cannot know itself. And when we remove from our list of ideas those which are not really fruitful, we find that only mathematical concepts remain.1764 They alone have this apparently miraculous property of inexhaustibly developing before the mind. Scientific knowledge is limited to the material world; and even there, the limits of our mathematical insight are the limits of our knowledge.

Malebranche believed no less thoroughly than Descartes in the asserted power and fruitfulness of mathematical concepts. Under the influence of this belief, he developed, as so many other thinkers from Plato onwards have done, a highly mystical theory of scientific knowledge. It is a revelation of eternal truth, and yet is acquired by inner reflection, not laboriously built up by external observation. It comes by searching of the mind, not by exploration of the outer world. But Malebranche was not content, like Descartes, merely to accept this type of knowledge. He proceeded to account for it in metaphysical terms. The fruitfulness of mathematical ideas is due, he claimed, to the fundamental concept of extension in which they all share. This idea, representing, as it does, an infinite existence, is too great to be contained within the finite mind. Through it the mind is widened to the apprehension of something beyond itself; we know it through consciousness of its archetype in the mind of God. It is the one point at which consciousness transcends its subjective limits. Its fruitfulness is due to, and is the manifestation of, this divine source. The reason why we are condemned to remain ignorant of everything beyond the sphere of quantity is that extension alone holds this unique position. It is the only fruitful idea which the mind possesses, and other concepts, such as triangle, circle, or number, are fruitful only in proportion as they share in it. We can acquire no genuine knowledge even of the nature of the self. Being ignorant of mind, we cannot comprehend the self which is one of its modes. It is as if we sought to comprehend the nature of a triangle, in the absence of any conception of space. Were we in possession of the archetypal idea of mind, we should not only be able to deduce from it those various feelings and emotions which we have already experienced, and those sensations of the secondary qualities which we falsely ascribe to the influence of external objects, but we should also be able to discover by pure contemplation innumerable other emotions and qualities, which entirely transcend our present powers. And all of these would then be experienced in their ideal nature, and not, as now, merely through feeble and confused feeling. If mathematicians destroy their bodily health through absorption in the progressive clarification of the mysteries of space, what might not happen if the archetypal idea of mind were revealed to us? Could we attend to the preservation of a body which would incessantly distract us from the infinite and overwhelming experiences of our divine destiny?

This romantic conception of the possibilities of rational science reveals more clearly than any other Cartesian doctrine the real bearing and perverse character of the rationalistic preconceptions which underlie the Cartesian systems. The Cartesians would fain make rational science, conceived on the analogy of the mathematical disciplines, coextensive with the entire realm of the real. This grotesque enterprise is conceived as abstractly possible even by so cautious a thinker as John Locke. His reason for condemning the physical sciences as logically imperfect is that they fail to conform to this rationalistic ideal. Hence those sentences which sound so strangely in the mouth of Locke, the sensationalist.

“It is the contemplation of our abstract ideas that alone is able to afford us general knowledge.”1765 “The true method of advancing knowledge is by considering our abstract ideas.”1766 ”[Did we know the real essence of gold] it would be no more necessary that gold should exist, and that we should make experiments upon it, than it is necessary for the knowing of the properties of a triangle, that a triangle should exist in any matter: the idea in our minds would serve for the one as well as for the other.”1767 “In the knowledge of bodies, we must be content to glean what we can from particular experiments, since we cannot, from a discovery of their real essences, grasp at a time whole sheaves, and in bundles comprehend the nature and the properties of whole species together.”

Locke’s empirical doctrine of knowledge is thus based upon a rationalistic theory of the real. It is not, he holds, the constitution of reality, but the de facto limitations of our human faculties which make empirical induction the only practicable mode of discovery in natural science. Indeed, Locke gives more extreme expression than even Descartes does, to the mystically conceived mathematical method. Being ignorant of mathematics, and not over well-informed even in the physical sciences, Locke was not checked by any too close acquaintance with the real character and necessary limits of this method; and he accordingly makes statements in that unqualified fashion which seldom fails to betray the writer who is expounding views which he has not developed for himself by first-hand study of the relevant facts.

But though the unique character of mathematical knowledge thus forced itself upon the attention of all the Cartesian thinkers, and in the above manner led even the most level-headed of Descartes’ successors to dream strange dreams, no real attempt was made (save in the neglected writings of Leibniz) to examine, in a sober spirit, the grounds and conditions of its possibility. In the English School, Locke’s eulogy of abstract ideas served only to drive his immediate successors to an opposite extreme. Both Berkeley and Hume attempted to explain away, in an impossible manner, those fundamental differences, which, beyond all questioning, profoundly differentiate mathematical from empirical judgments.1768 It is not surprising that Kant, who had no direct acquaintance with Hume’s Treatise, should have asserted that had Hume realised the bearing of his main teaching upon the theory of mathematical science, he would have hesitated to draw his sceptical conclusions. Such, however, was not the case. Hume’s theory of mathematical reasoning undoubtedly forms the least satisfactory part of his philosophy. He did, however, perceive the general bearing of his central teaching. It was in large degree his ignorance of the mathematical disciplines that concealed from him the thorough unsatisfactoriness of his general position, and which prevented him from formulating the logical problem in its full scope—the problem, namely, how judgments which make additions to our previous knowledge, and yet do not rest upon mere sensation, are possible. He treated it only as it presents itself in those judgments which involve the concept of causality.1769 But this analysis of causal judgments awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, and so ultimately led to the raising of the logical problem in its widest form:—how synthetic a priori judgments, whether mathematical, physical, or metaphysical, are possible.

Hume discussed the causal problem both in regard to the general principle of causality and in its bearing upon our particular judgments of causal relation. The problems concerned in these two discussions are essentially distinct. The first involves immensely wider issues, and so far as can be judged from the existing circumstantial evidence,1770 it was this first discussion, not as has been so often assumed by Kant’s commentators the second and more limited problem, which exercised so profound an influence upon Kant at the turning-point of his speculations. In stating it, it will be best to take Hume’s own words.

“To begin with the first question concerning the necessity of a cause: ’Tis a general maxim in philosophy, that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence. This is commonly taken for granted in all reasonings, without any proof given or demanded. ’Tis supposed to be founded on intuition, and to be one of those maxims, which though they may be deny’d with the lips, ’tis impossible for men in their hearts really to doubt of. But if we examine this maxim by the idea of knowledge above explain’d we shall discover in it no mark of any such intuitive certainty; but on the contrary shall find, that ’tis of a nature quite foreign to that species of conviction.”1771

The principle that every event must have a cause, is neither intuitively nor demonstratively certain. So far from there existing a necessary connection between the idea of an event as something happening in time and the idea of a cause, no connection of any kind is discoverable by us. We can conceive an object to be non-existent at this moment, and existent the next, without requiring to conjoin with it the altogether different idea of a productive source.

This had been implicitly recognised by those few philosophers who had attempted to give demonstrations of the principle. By so doing, however, they only reinforce Hume’s contention that it possesses no rational basis. When Hobbes argues that as all the points of time and place in which we can suppose an object to begin to exist, are in themselves equal, there must be some cause determining an event to happen at one moment rather than at another, he is assuming the very principle which he professes to prove. There is no greater difficulty in supposing the time and place to be fixed without a cause, than in supposing the existence to be so determined. If the denial of a cause is not intuitively absurd in the one case, it cannot be so in the other. If the first demands a proof, so likewise must the second. Similarly with the arguments advanced by Locke and Clarke. Locke argues that if anything is produced without a cause, it is produced by nothing, and that that is impossible, since nothing can never be a cause any more than it can be something, or equal to two right angles. Clarke’s contention that if anything were without a cause, it would produce itself, i.e. exist before it existed, is of the same character. These arguments assume the only point which is in question.

“When we exclude all causes we really do exclude them, and neither suppose nothing nor the object itself to be the causes of the existence, and consequently can draw no argument from the absurdity of these suppositions to prove the absurdity of that exclusion.”1772

The remaining argument, that every effect must have a cause, since this is implied in the very idea of an effect, is “still more frivolous.”

“Every effect necessarily presupposes a cause; effect being a relative term, of which cause is the correlative. But this does not prove that every being must be preceded by a cause; no more than it follows, because every husband must have a wife, that therefore every man must be married.”1773

The far-reaching conclusion, that the principle of causality has no possible rational basis, Hume extends and reinforces through his other doctrines, viz. that synthetic reason1774 is merely generalised belief, and that belief is in all cases due to the ultimate instincts and propensities which de facto constitute our human nature. The synthetic principles which lie at the basis of our experience are non-rational in character. Each is due to a ‘blind and powerful instinct,’ which, demanding no evidence, and ignoring theoretical inconsistency for the sake of practical convenience, necessitates belief.

“Nature by an absolute and uncontrollable necessity has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel.”1775 “All these operations are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or to prevent.”1776

Reason is “nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls.”1777 It justifies itself by its practical uses, but can afford no standard to which objective reality must conform.

It is from this point of view that Hume states his answer to the problem of perception. Our natural belief in the permanence and identity of objects, as expressed through the principle of substance and attribute, leads us to interpret the objects of sense-perception as independent realities. We interpret our subjective sensations as being qualities of independent substances. Our other natural belief, in the dynamical interdependence of events, as expressed through the principle of causality, leads, however, to the opposite conclusion, that the known objects are merely mental. For by it we are constrained to interpret sensations, not as objective qualities, but only as subjective effects, expressive of the reactions of our psycho-physical organism. The Cartesian problems owe their origin to the mistaken attempt to harmonise, in a theoretical fashion, these two conflicting principles. The conflict is inevitable and the antinomy is insoluble, so long as the two principles are regarded as objectively valid. The only satisfactory solution comes through recognition that reason is unable to account, save in reference to practical ends, even for its own inevitable demands. The principle of substance and attribute and the principle of causality co-operate in rendering possible such organisation of our sense-experience as is required for practical life. But when we carry this organisation further than practical life itself demands, the two principles at once conflict.

Kant shows no interest in this constructive part of Hume’s philosophy; and must, indeed, have been almost entirely ignorant of it, since it finds only very imperfect expression in the Enquiry, and is ignored in Beattie’s Nature of Truth. Accordingly, Kant does not regard Hume as offering a positive explanation of knowledge, but rather as representing the point of view of thoroughgoing scepticism. But even had he been acquainted at first hand with Hume’s Treatise, he would undoubtedly have felt little sympathy with Hume’s naturalistic view of the function of reason. His training in the mathematical sciences would have enabled him to detect the inadequacy of Hume’s treatment of mathematical knowledge, and his strong moral convictions would have led him to rebel against the naturalistic assumptions which underlie Hume’s entire position. The Berkeley-Hume comedy is thus repeated with reversed rôles. Just as Berkeley’s anti-materialistic philosophy was mainly influential as a step towards the naturalism of Hume, and as such still survives in the philosophies of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Mach and Karl Pearson, so in turn Hume’s anti-metaphysical theory of knowledge was destined to be one of the chief contributory sources of the German speculative movement.

We may now turn to Hume’s treatment of the narrower problem—that of justifying our particular causal judgments. Hume’s attitude towards this question is predetermined by the more fundamental argument, above stated, which precedes it in the Treatise, but which is entirely omitted from the corresponding chapters of the Enquiry. As the general principle of causality is of an irrational character, the same must be true of those particular judgments which are based upon it. Much of Hume’s argument on this question is, indeed, merely a restatement of what had already been pointed out by his predecessors. There is no necessary connection discoverable between any cause and its effect. This is especially evident as regards the connection between brain states and mental experiences. No explanation can be given why a motion in the brain should produce sensations in the mind, or why a mental resolution should produce movements in the body. Such sequences may be empirically verified; they cannot be rationally understood. That this likewise holds, though in less obvious fashion, of the causal interrelations of material bodies, had been emphasised by Geulincx, Malebranche, Locke, and Berkeley. The fact that one billiard ball should communicate motion to another by impact is, when examined, found to be no less incomprehensible than the interaction of mind and body. Hume, in the following passage, is only reinforcing this admitted fact, in terms of his own philosophy.

“We fancy that were we brought on a sudden into this world we could at first have inferred that one billiard ball would communicate motion to another upon impulse; and that we needed not to have waited for the event, in order to pronounce with certainty upon it. Such is the influence of custom, that, where it is strongest, it not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place merely because it is found in the highest degree.”1778

Nor are we conscious of any causal power within the self. When Berkeley claims that mind has the faculty of producing images at will, he is really ascribing to it creative agency. And such creation, as Malebranche had already pointed out, is not even conceivable.

“I deny that my will produces in me my ideas, for I cannot even conceive how it could produce them, since my will, not being able to act or will without knowledge, presupposes my ideas and does not make them.”1779 “Is there not here,” Hume asks, “either in a spiritual or material substance, or both, some secret mechanism or structure of parts, upon which the effect depends, and which, being entirely unknown to us, renders the power or energy of the will equally unknown and incomprehensible?”1780

But the fact that Hume thus restates conclusions already emphasised by his predecessors will not justify us in contending (as certain historians of philosophy seem inclined to do) that in his treatment of the causal problem he failed to make any important advance upon the teaching of the Occasionalists. Hume was the first to perceive the essential falsity of the Cartesian, rationalistic view of the causal nexus. For Descartes, an effect is that which can be deduced with logical necessity from the concept of its cause. The Occasionalists similarly argued that because natural events can never be deduced from one another they must in all cases be due to supernatural agency; like Descartes, they one and all failed to comprehend that since by an effect we mean that which follows in time upon its cause, and since, therefore, the principle of causality is the law of change, the nature of causality cannot be expressed in logical terms. Hume was the first to appreciate the significance of this fundamental fact; and an entirely new set of problems at once came into view. If causal connection is not, as previous thinkers had believed, logical in character, if it does not signify logical dependence of the so-called effect upon its cause, its true connotation must lie elsewhere; and until this has been traced to its hidden source, any attempted solution of metaphysical problems is certain to involve many false assumptions. The answer that is given to the problem of the origin and content of the causal concept must determine our interpretation alike of sense-experience and of pure thought.

The problem presents on examination, however, a most paradoxical aspect. As Hume has already shown, every effect is an event distinct from its cause, and there is never any connection, beyond that of mere sequence, discoverable between them. We observe only sequence; we assert necessary connection. What, then, is in our minds when this latter assertion is made? And how, if the notion of necessitated connection cannot be gained through observation of the external events, is it acquired by us? Hume again propounds a naturalistic solution. Causation, i.e. necessitated sequence in time, is not in any sense a conception; it is not a comprehended relation between events, but a misunderstood feeling in our minds. We cannot form any, even the most remote, conception of how one event can produce another. Neither imagination nor pure thought, however freely they may act, are capable of inventing any such notion. But nature, by the manner in which it has constituted our minds, deludes us into the belief that we are in actual possession of this idea. The repeated sequence of events, in fixed order, generates in us the feeling of a tendency to pass from the perception or idea of the one to the idea of the other. This feeling, thus generated by custom, and often in somewhat confused fashion combined with the feeling of ‘animal nisus,’ which is experienced in bodily effort, is mistaken by the mind for a definite concept of force, causality, necessary connection. As mere feeling it can afford no insight into the relation holding between events, and as merely subjective can justify no inference in regard to that relation. The terms force, causality, necessitated sequence in time, have a practical value, as names for our instinctive, natural expectations; but when employed as instruments for the theoretical interpretation of experience, they lead us off on a false trail.

This is one of the fundamental points upon which Hume reveals a deeper speculative insight than either Malebranche, Geulincx, or Locke. Though these latter insist upon our ignorance of the relation holding between events, they still assume that causation and natural necessity are concepts which have a quite intelligible meaning; and in consequence they fail to draw the all-important conclusion, that the general principle of causality has neither intuitive nor demonstrative validity. For that is the revolutionary outcome of Hume’s analysis of the notion of necessitated connection. The principle of causality is a synthetic judgment in which no connection is discoverable between its subject and its predicate. That is the reason why it is neither self-evident nor capable of being established upon more ultimate grounds.

As has already been stated, the wider problem concerning the principle of causality is developed only in the Treatise; the problem regarding the concept of causality is discussed both in the Treatise and in the Enquiry. An appreciation of the wider problem is required, however, in order to set this second problem in its true light, for it is only through its connection with the wider issue that Hume’s reduction of the concept of causality to a merely instinctive, non-rational expectation acquires its full significance. Hume’s analysis then amounts, as Kant was the first to realise, to an attack upon the objective validity of all constructive thinking. Not only rationalism, but even such metaphysics as may claim to base its conclusions upon the teaching of experience, is thereby rendered altogether impossible. The issue is crucial, and must be honestly faced, before metaphysical conclusions, no matter what their specific character may be, whether a priori or empirical, can legitimately be drawn. If we may not assert that an event must have some cause, even the right to enquire for a cause must first be justified. And if so fundamental a principle as that of causality is not self-evident, are there any principles which can make this claim?

The account which we have so far given of Hume’s argument covers only that part of it which is directed against the rationalist position, and which was therefore so influential in turning Kant on to the line of his Critical speculations. But Hume attacked with equal vigour the empiricist standpoint; and as this aspect of his teaching, constituting as it did an integral part of Kant’s own philosophy, must undoubtedly have helped to confirm Kant in his early rationalist convictions, we may profitably dwell upon it at some length. In opposition to the empiricists, Hume argues that experience is incapable of justifying any inference in regard to matters of fact. It cannot serve as a basis from which we can inductively extend our knowledge of facts beyond what the senses and memory reveal. Inductive inference, when so employed, necessarily involves a petitio principii; we assume the very point we profess to have proved.

The argument by which Hume establishes this important contention is as follows. All inductive reasoning from experience presupposes the validity of belief in causal connection. For when we have no knowledge of causes, we have no justification for asserting the continuance of uniformities. Now it has been shown that we have no experience of any necessary relation between so-called causes and their effects. The most that experience can supply are sequences which repeat themselves. In regarding the sequences as causal, and so as universally constant, we make an assertion for which experience gives no support, and to which no amount of repeated experience, recalled in memory, can add one jot of real evidence. To argue that because the sequences have remained constant in a great number of repeated experiences, they are therefore more likely to remain constant, is to assume that constancy in the past is a ground for inferring it in the future; and that is the very point which demands proof. In drawing the conclusion we virtually assume that there is a necessary connection, i.e. an absolutely constant relation, between events. But since no single experience of causal sequence affords ground for inferring that the sequence will continue in the future, no number of repeated experiences, recalled in memory, can contribute to the strengthening of the inference. It is meaningless to talk even of likelihood or probability. The fact that the sun has without a single known exception arisen each day in the past does not (if we accept the argument disproving all knowledge of necessary connection) constitute proof that it will rise to-morrow.

“None but a fool or a madman will be unaffected in his expectations or natural beliefs by this constancy, but he is no philosopher who accepts this as in the nature of evidence.”1781

Since, for all that we know to the contrary, bodies may change their nature and mode of action at any moment, it is vain to pretend that we are scientifically assured of the future because of the past.

“My practice, you say, refutes my doubts.1782 But you mistake the purport of my question. As an agent, I am quite satisfied in the point; but as a philosopher, who has some share of curiosity, I will not say scepticism, I want to learn the foundation of this inference. No reading, no enquiry has yet been able to remove my difficulty or give me satisfaction in a matter of such importance. Can I do better than propose the difficulty to the public, even though, perhaps, I have small hopes of obtaining a solution? We shall at least, by this means, be sensible of our ignorance, if we do not augment our knowledge.”1783

Kant was the first, after thirty years, to take up this challenge. Experience is no source of evidence until the causal postulate has been independently proved. Only if the principle of causality can be established prior to all specific experience, only if we can predetermine experience as necessarily conforming to it, are empirical arguments valid at all. Hume’s enquiry thus directly leads to the later, no less than to the earlier form of Kant’s epoch-making question.1784 In its earlier formulation it referred only to a priori judgments; in its wider application it was found to arise with equal cogency in connection with empirical judgments. And as thus extended, it generated the problem: How is sense-experience, regarded as a form of knowledge, possible at all?1785 By showing that the principle of causality has neither intuitive nor demonstrative validity, Hume cuts the ground from under the rationalists; by showing that sense-experience cannot by itself yield conclusions which are objectively valid, he at the same time destroys the empiricist position. In this latter contention Kant stands in complete agreement with Hume. That the sensuously given is incapable of grounding even probable inferences, is a fundamental presupposition (never discussed, but always explicitly assumed) of the Critical philosophy. It was by challenging the sufficiency of Hume’s other line of argument, that which is directed against the rationalists, that Kant discovered a way of escape from the sceptical dilemma. The conditions of experience can be proved by a transcendental method, which, though a priori in character, does not lie open to Hume’s sceptical objections. Each single experience involves rational principles, and consequently even a single empirical observation may suffice to justify an inductive inference. Experience conforms to the demands of pure a priori thought; and can legitimately be construed in accordance with them.

We may now pass to the philosophy in which Kant was educated. It gave to his thinking that rationalist trend, to which, in spite of all counter-influences, he never ceased to remain true.1786 It also contributed to his philosophy several of its constructive principles. Only two rationalist systems need be considered, those of Leibniz and of Wolff. Kant, by his own admission,1787 had been baffled in his attempts (probably not very persevering) to master Spinoza’s philosophy. It was with Wolff’s system that he was most familiar; but both directly and indirectly, both in his early years and in the ’seventies, the incomparably deeper teaching of Leibniz must have exercised upon him a profoundly formative influence. In defining the points of agreement and of difference between Hume and Leibniz,1788 we have already outlined Leibniz’s general view of the nature and powers of pure thought, and may therefore at once proceed to the relevant detail of his main tenets.

Upon two fundamental points Leibniz stands in opposition to Spinoza. He seeks to maintain the reality of the contingent or accidental. These terms are indeed, as he conceives them, synonymous with the actual. Necessity rules only in the sphere of the possible. Contingency or freedom is the differentiating characteristic of the real. This point of view is bound up with his second contention, namely, that the real is a kingdom of ends. It is through divine choice of the best among the possible worlds that the actual present order has arisen. There are thus two principles which determine the real: the principle of contradiction which legislates with absolute universality, and the principle of the best, or, otherwise formulated, of sufficient reason, which differentiates reality from truth, limiting thought, in order that, without violating logic, it may freely satisfy the moral needs. Leibniz thus vindicates against Spinoza the reality of freedom and the existence of ends.

Though Leibniz agrees with Spinoza that the philosophically perfect method would be to start from an adequate concept of the Divine Being, and to deduce from His attributes the whole nature of finite reality, he regards our concept of God as being too imperfect to allow of such procedure. We are compelled to resort to experience, and by analysis to search out the various concepts which it involves. By the study of these concepts and their interrelations, we determine, in obedience to the law of contradiction, the nature of the possible. The real, in contradistinction from the possible, involves, however, the notion of ends. The existence of these ends can never be determined by logical, but only by moral considerations. The chief problem of philosophical method is, therefore, to discover the exact relation in which the logical and the teleological, the necessary and the contingent, stand to one another.

The absence of contradiction is in itself a sufficient guarantee of possibility, i.e. even of the possibility of real existence. How very far Leibniz is willing to go on this line is shown by his acceptance of the ontological argument. The whole weight of his system rests, indeed, upon this proof. The notion of God is, he maintains, the sole concept which can determine itself in a purely logical manner not only as possible but also as real. If we are to avoid violating the principle of contradiction, the Ens perfectissimum must be regarded as possessing the perfection of real existence. And since God is perfect in moral as in all other attributes, His actions must be in conformity with moral demands. In creating the natural order God must therefore have chosen that combination of possibilities which constitutes the best of all possible worlds. By means of this conceptual bridge we are enabled to pass by pure a priori thinking from the logically possible to the factually real.

Pure logical thinking is thus an instrument whereby ultimate reality can be defined in a valid manner. Pure thought is speculative and metaphysical in its very essence. It uncovers to us what no experience can reveal, the wider universe which exists eternally in the mind of God. Every concept (whether mathematical, dynamical, or moral), provided only that it is not self-contradictory, is an eternal essence, with the intrinsic nature of which even God must reckon in the creation of things. When, therefore, we are determining the unchanging nature of the eternally possible, there is no necessary reference to Divine existence. The purely logical criterion suffices as a test of truth. Every judgment which is made in regard to such concepts must express only what their content involves. All such judgments must be analytic in order to be true.

When, however, we proceed from the possible to the real, that is to say, from the necessary to the contingent, the logical test is no longer sufficient; and only by appeal to the second principle, that of sufficient reason, can judgments about reality be logically justified. Whether or not the principle of sufficient reason is deducible, as Wolff sought to maintain, from the principle of contradiction, is a point of quite secondary importance. That is a question which does not deserve the emphasis which has been laid upon it. What is chiefly important is that for Leibniz, as for Wolff, both principles are principles of analysis. The principle of sufficient reason is not an instrument for determining necessary relations between independent substances. The sufficient ground of a valid predicate must in all cases be found in the concept of the subject to which it is referred. The difference between the two principles lies elsewhere, namely, in the character of the connection established between subject and predicate. In the one case the denial of the proposition involves a direct self-contradiction. In the other the opposite of the judgment is perfectly conceivable; our reason for asserting it is a moral (employing the term in the eighteenth-century sense), not a logical ground. The subject is so constituted, that in the choice of ends, in pursuit of the good, it must by its very nature so behave. The principle of sufficient reason, which represents in our finite knowledge the divine principle of the best, compels us to recognise the predicate as involved in the subject—as involved through a ground which inclines without necessitating. Often the analysis cannot be carried sufficiently far to enable us thus to transform a judgment empirically given into one which is adequately grounded. None the less, in recognising it as true, we postulate that the predicate is related to the subject in this way. There are not for Leibniz two methods of establishing truth, sense-perception to reveal contingent fact, and general reasoning to establish necessary truth. A proposition can be accepted as true only in so far as we can at least postulate, through absence of contradiction and through sufficient reason, its analytic character. It must express some form of identity. The proposition, Caesar crossed the Rubicon, is given us as historical fact. The more complete our knowledge of Caesar and of his time, the further we can carry the analysis; and that analysis if completely executed would displace the merely factual validity of the judgment by insight into its metaphysical truth. Thus experience, with its assertions of the here and now about particulars inexhaustibly concrete, sets to rational science an inexhaustible task. We can proceed in our analysis indefinitely, pushing out the frontiers of thought further and further into the empirical realm. Only by the Divine Mind can the task be completed, and all things seen as ordered in complete obedience to the two principles of thought.

Leibniz, in propounding this view, develops a genuinely original conception of the relation holding between appearance and reality. Only monads, that is, spiritual beings, exist. Apart from the representative activity of the monads there are no such existences as space and time, as matter and motion. The mathematical and physical sciences, in their present forms, therefore, cannot be interpreted as revealing absolute existences. But, if ideally developed, they would emancipate themselves from mechanical and sensuous notions; and would consist of a body of truths, which, as thus perfected, would be discovered to constitute the very being of thought. Pure thought or reason consists in the apprehension of such truths. To discover and to prove them thought does not require to issue out beyond itself. It creates this conceptual world in the very act of apprehending it; and as this realm of truth thus expresses the necessary character of all thought, whether divine or human, it is universal and unchanging. Each mind apprehends the same eternal truth; but owing to imperfection each finite being apprehends it with some degree of obscurity and confusion, fragmentarily, in terms of sense, and so falls prey to the illusion that the self stands in mechanical relations to a spatial and temporal world of matter and motion.

Leibniz supports this doctrine by his theory of sense-experience as originating spontaneously from within the individual mind. Thereby he is only repeating that pure thought generates its whole content from within itself. Sense-experience, in its intrinsic nature, is nothing but pure thought. Such thought, owing to the inexhaustible wealth of its conceptual significance, so confuses the mind which thus generates it, that only by prolonged analysis can larger and larger portions of it be construed into the conceptual judgments which have all along constituted its sole content. And in the process, space, time, and motion lose all sensuous character, appearing in their true nature as orders of relation which can be adequately apprehended only in conceptual terms. They remain absolutely real as objects of thought, though as sensible existences they are reduced to the level of mere appearance. Such is the view of thought which is unfolded in Leibniz’s writings, in startling contrast to the naturalistic teaching of his Scotch antagonist.

As already indicated, Kant’s first-hand knowledge of Leibniz’s teaching was very limited. He was acquainted with it chiefly through the inadequate channel of Wolff’s somewhat commonplace exposition of its principles. But even from such a source he could derive what was most essential, namely, Leibniz’s view of thought as absolute in its powers and unlimited in its claims. How closely Wolff holds to the main tenet of Leibniz’s system appears from his definition of philosophy as “the science of possible things, so far as they are possible.” He thus retains, though without the deeper suggestiveness of Leibniz’s speculative insight, the view that thought precedes reality and legislates for it. By the possible is not meant the existentially or psychologically possible, but the conceptually necessary, that which, prior to all existence, has objective validity, sharing in the universal and necessary character of thought itself.

As Riehl has very justly pointed out,1789 Wolff’s philosophy had, prior even to the period of Kant’s earliest writings, been displaced by empirical, psychological enquiries and by eclectic, popular philosophy. Owing to the prevailing lack of thoroughness in philosophical thinking, “Problemlosigkeit” characterised the whole period. The two exclusively alternative views of the function of thought stood alongside one another within each of the competing systems, quite unreconciled and in their mutual conflict absolutely destructive of all real consistency and thoroughness of thought. It was Kant who restored rationalism to its rightful place. He reinvigorated the flaccid tone of his day by adopting in his writings, both early and late, the strict method of rational science, and by insisting that the really crucial issues be boldly faced. In essentials Kant holds to Wolff’s definition of philosophy as “the science of possible things, so far as they are possible.” As I have just remarked, the possible is taken in an objective sense, and the definition consequently gives expression to the view of philosophy upon which Kant so frequently insists, as lying wholly in the sphere of pure a priori thought. Its function is to determine prior to specific experience what experience must be; and obviously that is only possible by means of an a priori, purely conceptual method. His Critique, as its title indicates, is a criticism of pure reason by pure reason. Nothing which escapes definition through pure a priori thinking can come within its sphere. The problem of the “possibility of experience” is the problem of discovering the conditions which necessarily determine experience to be what it is. Kant, of course, radically transforms the whole problem, in method of treatment as well as in results, when in defining the subject-matter of enquiry he substitutes experience for things absolutely existent. This modification is primarily due to the influence of Hume. But the constant occurrence in Kant’s philosophy of the term “possibility” marks his continued belief in the Idealist view of thought. Though pure thought never by itself amounts to knowledge—therein Kant departs from the extreme rationalist position—only through it is any knowledge, empirical or a priori, possible at all. Philosophy, in order to exist, must be a system of a priori rational principles. Nothing empirical or hypothetical can find any place in it.1790 Yet at the same time it is the system of the a priori conditions only of experience, not of ultimate reality. Such is the twofold relation of agreement and difference in which Kant stands to his rationalist predecessors.

Notes

¹ Headings not in Kant’s Table of Contents are printed in italics.

2 W. x. p. 323.

3 W. x. p. 316.

4 Cf. Kant’s letter to Lambert, September 2, 1770: W. x. p. 93.

5 Embodied in his edition of the Kritik (1889).

6 From letter to Marcus Herz, June 7, 1777: W. x. pp. 116-17.

7 From letter to Marcus Herz, February 21, 1772: W. x. p. 127.

8 Reflexionen ii. 5.

9 These passages are by no means unambiguous, and are commented upon below, p. 61 ff.

10 For justification of this interpretation of Hume I must refer the reader to my articles on “The Naturalism of Hume” in Mind, vol. xiv. N.S. pp. 149-73, 335-47.

11 To this fact Kant himself draws attention: “But the perpetual hard fate of metaphysics would not allow Hume to be understood. We cannot without a certain sense of pain consider how utterly his opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and even Priestley, missed the point of the problem. For while they were ever assuming as conceded what he doubted, and demonstrating with eagerness and often with arrogance what he never thought of disputing, they so overlooked his inclination towards a better state of things, that everything remained undisturbed in its old condition.”—Prolegomena, p. 6; Mahaffy and Bernard’s trans. p. 5.

12 Sulzer’s translation of Hume’s Essays (including the Enquiries) appeared in 1754-56.

13 The word which Kant uses is Erinnerung (cf. below, p. xxix, n. 4). There are two main reasons for believing that Kant had not himself read the Treatise. He was imperfectly acquainted with the English language, and there was no existing German translation. (Jakob’s translation did not appear till 1790-91. On Kant’s knowledge of English, cf. Erdmann: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Bd. i. (1888) pp. 62 ff., 216 ff.; and K. Groos: Kant-Studien, Bd. v. (1900) p. 177 ff.: and below, p. 156.) And, secondly, Kant’s statements reveal his entire ignorance of Hume’s view of mathematical science as given in the Treatise.

14 Cf. Vaihinger, Commentary, i. p. 344 ff. Beattie does, indeed, refer to Hume’s view of mathematical science as given in the Treatise, but in so indirect and casual a manner that Kant could not possibly gather from the reference any notion of what that treatment was. Cf. Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (sixth edition), pp. 138, 142, 269.

15 These Hume had himself pointed out both in the Treatise and in the Enquiry; and because of them he rejects scepticism as a feasible philosophy of life. Kant’s statement above quoted that Hume’s critics (among whom Beattie is cited) “were ever assuming what Hume doubted, and demonstrating with eagerness and often with arrogance what he never thought of disputing,” undoubtedly refer in a quite especial degree to Beattie.

16 Werke, x. p. 123 ff. It is dated February 21, 1772. Cf. below, pp. 219-20.

17 In Prolegomena, p. 6 (above quoted, p. xxviii, n. 1), and p. 8 (trans. p. 6): “I should think Hume might fairly have laid as much claim to sound sense as Beattie, and besides to a critical understanding (such as the latter did not possess).”

18 Cf. Prolegomena, p. 8: “I honestly confess that my recollection of David Hume’s teaching (die Erinnerung des David Hume) was the very thing which many years ago [Kant is writing in 1783] first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction.” Kant’s employment of the term Erinnerung may perhaps be interpreted in view of the indirect source of his knowledge of Hume’s main position. He would bring to his reading of Beattie’s quotations the memory of Hume’s other sceptical doctrines as expounded in the Enquiry.

19 Kant, it should be noted, classifies philosophies as either dogmatic (= rationalistic) or sceptical. Empiricism he regards as a form of scepticism.

20 Quoted by Beattie (op. cit., sixth edition, p. 295), who, however incapable of appreciating the force of Hume’s arguments, was at least awake to certain of their ultimate consequences.

21 For a more detailed statement of Kant’s relation to his philosophical predecessors, cf. below, Appendix B, p. 583 ff.

22 The term “recognition” is employed by Kant in its widest sense, as covering, for instance, recognition of the past as past, or of an object as being a certain kind of object.

23 Consciousness of time, consciousness of objects in space, consciousness of self, are the three modes of experience which Kant seeks to analyse. They are found to be inseparable from one another and in their union to constitute a form of conscious experience that is equivalent to an act of judgment—i.e. to be a form of awareness that involves relational categories and universal concepts.

24 As we have noted (above, pp. xxvi-xxvii), it was Hume’s insistence upon the synthetic, non-self-evident character of the causal axiom that awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber. Cf. below, pp. 61 ff., 593 ff.

25 Cf. below, pp. lvi ff., 571 ff.

26 Cf. below, pp. 36-7.

27 Cf. below, p. 543 ff.

28 Cf. below, pp. liii-iv.

29 Cf. below, pp. 45, 238-43.

30 Cf. below, pp. 33-6, 181, 183-6.

31 Cf. below, pp. 33-42, 394-5, 398.

32 With the sole exception of Malebranche, who on this point anticipated Kant.

33 This is the position that Kant endeavours to expound in the very unsatisfactory form of a doctrine of “inner sense.” Cf. below, pp. l-ii, 291 ff.

34 This was Kant’s chief reason for omitting the so-called “subjective deduction of the categories” from the second edition. The teaching of the subjective deduction is, however, preserved in almost unmodified form throughout the Critique as a whole, and its “transcendental psychology” forms, as I shall try to show, an essential part of Kant’s central teaching. In this matter I find myself in agreement with Vaihinger, and in complete disagreement with Riehl and the majority of the neo-Kantians. The neo-Kantian attempt to treat epistemology in independence of all psychological considerations is bound to lead to very different conclusions from those which Kant himself reached. Cf. below, pp. 237 ff., 263-70.

35 This subjectivism finds expression in Kant’s doctrine of the “transcendental object” which, as I shall try to prove, is a doctrine of early date and only semi-Critical. That doctrine is especially prominent in the section on the Antinomies. See below p. 204 ff.

36 Cf. pp. 270 ff., 298 ff., 308-21, 373-4, 414-17.

37 That this statement holds of feelings and desires, and therefore of all the emotions, as well as of our sense-contents, is emphasised by Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason. Cf. below, pp. 276, 279-80, 312, 384-5.

38 The connection of this teaching with Kant’s theory of consciousness may be noted. If consciousness in all its forms, however primitive, is already awareness of meaning, its only possible task is to define, modify, reconstruct, and develop such meaning, never to obtain for bare contents or existences objective or other significance. Cf. above, pp. xli-ii, xliv.

39 Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, 207.

40 In sketch of a letter (summer 1792) to Fürst von Beloselsky (W. xi. p. 331).

41 May 26, 1789 (W. xi. p. 52).

42 That Kant has not developed a terminology really adequate to the statement of his meaning, is shown by a parenthesis which I have omitted from the above quotation.

43 This interpretation of Kant appears in a very crude form in James’s references to Kant in his Principles of Psychology. It appears in a more subtle form in Lotze and Green. Caird and Watson, on the other hand, have carefully guarded themselves against this view of Kant’s teaching, and as I have maintained (pp. xliii-v), lie open to criticism only in so far as they tend to ignore those aspects of Kant’s teaching which cannot be stated in terms of logical implication.

44 It may be objected that this is virtually what Kant is doing when he postulates synthetic activities as the source of the categories. Kant would probably have replied that he has not attempted to define these activities save to the extent that is absolutely demanded by the known character of their products, and that he is willing to admit that many different explanations of their nature are possible. They may be due to some kind of personal or spiritual agency, but also they may not. On the whole question of the legitimacy of Kant’s general method of procedure, cf. below, pp. 235-9, 263 ff., 273-4, 277 ff., 461-2, 473-7.

45 Cf. Concerning the Advances made by Metaphysics since Leibniz and Wolff (Werke (Hartenstein), viii. 530-1): “I am conscious to myself of myself—this is a thought which contains a twofold I, the I as subject and the I as object. How it should be possible that I, the I that thinks, should be an object... to myself, and so should be able to distinguish myself from myself, it is altogether beyond our powers to explain. It is, however, an undoubted fact... and has as a consequence the complete distinguishing of us off from the whole animal kingdom, since we have no ground for ascribing to animals the power to say I to themselves.”

46 Cf. above, p. xxxiv; below, pp. 250-3, 260-3, 285-6.

47 Cf. A 651 = B 679: “The law of Reason, which requires us to seek for this unity, is a necessary law, as without it we should have no Reason at all, and without Reason no coherent employment of the understanding, and in the absence of this no sufficient criterion of empirical truth.” Cf. also below, pp. 390-1, 414-17, 429-31, 519-21, 558-61.

48 Regarding a further complication, due to the fact that the Dialectic was written before the teaching of the Analytic was properly matured, cf. above, p. xxiv.

49 Cf. below, pp. 331, 390-1, 414-17.

50 Cf. below, pp. 22, 33, 56, 66 ff.

51 Reflexionen (B. Erdmann’s edition) ii. 204.

52 For an alternative and perhaps more adequate method of describing Kant’s general position, cf. below, p. 571 ff.

53 Above, pp. xxxviii-ix, xlii, xliv.

54 Cf. below, p. 577.

55 Critique of Practical Reason, W. v. p. 32; Abbott’s trans. pp. 120-1.

56 Op. cit. p. 86; Abbott’s trans. p. 180.

57 Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse (Werke (Hartenstein), viii. p. 624). Cf. below, pp. 577-8. Kant claims for all men equality of political rights, and in his treatise on Perpetual Peace maintains that wars are not likely to cease until the republican form of government is universally adopted. He distinguishes, however, between republicanism and democracy. By the former he means a genuinely representative system; the latter he interprets as being the (in principle) unlimited despotism of majority rule. Kant accordingly contends that the smaller the staff of the executive, and the more effective the representation of minorities, the more complete will be the approximation to the ideal constitution. In other words, the less government we can get along with, the better.

58 On the Radical Evil in Human Nature, W. vi. p. 20; Abbott’s trans. p. 326. “This opinion [that the world is constantly advancing from worse to better] is certainly not founded on experience if what is meant is moral good or evil (not civilisation), for the history of all times speaks too powerfully against it. Probably it is merely a good-natured hypothesis... designed to encourage us in the unwearied cultivation of the germ of good that perhaps lies in us....”

59 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, W. iv. p. 407; Abbott’s trans. p. 24.

60 Critique of Practical Reason, W. v. pp. 84-5; Abbott’s trans. pp. 178-9.

61 Cf. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, W. iv. p. 463; Abbott’s trans. p. 84: “While we do not comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, we yet comprehend its incomprehensibility, and this is all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy which strives to carry its principles up to the very limit of human reason.”

62 On the Radical Evil in Human Nature, W. vi. pp. 49-50; Abbott’s trans. pp. 357-8.

63 Cf. Pringle-Pattison: The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, p. 25 ff.

64 Einleitung, i.

65 Henry Home, Lord Kames, published his Elements of Criticism in 1762.

66 W. ii. p. 311. In referring to his course in logic, Kant states that he will consider the training of the power of sound judgment in ordinary life, and adds that “in the Kritik der Vernunft the close kinship of subject-matter gives occasion for casting some glances upon the Kritik des Geschmacks, i.e. upon Aesthetics.” This passage serves to confirm the conjecture that the term Kritik was borrowed from the title of Home’s work.

67 For Kant’s other uses of the term pure, cf. below, p. 55.

68 Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, i. pp. 117-20.

69 For a definition, less exclusively titular, and more adequate to the actual scope of the Critique, cf. below, p. 56. Reason, when distinguished from understanding, I shall hereafter print with a capital letter, to mark the very special sense in which it is being employed.

70 Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon (edited by J. M. Robertson, 1905), p. 247.

71 For Zedlitz’s severe strictures (Dec. 1775) upon the teaching in Königsberg University, and his incidental appreciative reference to Kant, cf. Schubert’s edition of Kant’s Werke, xi. pt. ii. pp. 59-61.

72 Cf. W. x. p. 207.

73 Op. cit. pp. 212-13.

74 Cf. op. cit. pp. 208-9.

75 Op. cit. p. 219.

76 A v.-vi.

77 A v. n.

78 Cf. above on title, pp. 2-3.

79 Cf. below, pp. 543, 576-7.

80 A vii.-viii.

81 A xiv.

82 Cf. below, pp. 543 ff.

83 Cf. A 86 = B 118-19.

84 Morgenstunden; Gesammelte Schriften, 1863 edition, ii. pp. 246, 288. Cf. below, pp. 160-1.

85 Cited by R. A. Sigsbee, Philosophisches System Joseph Priestleys (1912), p. 33.

86 A v. n.

87 A viii.

88 Prolegomena, Anhang, Trans. of Mahaffy and Bernard, p. 147.

89 A 1.

90 B 21. Cf. Prolegomena, § 60 ff., and below, pp. 427-9, 552.

91 A 297-8 = B 353-5. Cf. below, pp. 427-9.

92 A iii.

93 i. p. 50.

94 P. 9.

95 This statement, as we shall find, calls for modification. Kant’s Critical position is more correctly described as phenomenalism than as subjectivism. Cf. above, pp. xlv-vii; below, p. 270 ff.

96 A 769 = B 797.

97 A 761 = B 789-90. Cf. Sections I.-III. in the Methodology.

98 A iii.

99 A v. n.

100 A v. n.

101 Cf. Kant’s Beantwortung der Frage: Was heist Aufklärung? 1784.

102 A v.

103 Cf. above, pp. 2-3.

104 Cf. above, pp. xliv-v; below, pp. 19, 33, 56, 66 ff.

105 A ix.

106 A x.-xi.

107 A xii.-xiii.

108 A xv.

109 A xv. Cf. below, pp. 66-7.

110 B xiv.

111 B ix.

112 B xi.

113 Cf. below, pp. 22-5.

114 Cf. above, p. lvi; below, p. 571 ff.

115 Dissertation, § 7.

116 All these assertions call for later modification and restatement.

117 B xxx.

118 B xxxii.

119 B xxxvii.

120 B xxxviii.

121 B vii.

122 B viii.

123 B xvi.

124 Cf. above, pp. xxvi-vii; below, pp. 594-5.

125 Cf. “Malebranche’s Theory of the Perception of Distance and Magnitude,” in British Journal of Psychology (1905), i. pp. 191-204.

126 Cf. below, pp. 143 ff., 604.

127 B xviii.-xix.

128 Cf. below, pp. 33, 56, 66 ff.

129 B xx.

130 B xxii.

131 B xvi.; B xxii. n.

132 Watson’s The Philosophy of Kant Explained (p. 37) is the only work in which I have found correct and unambiguous indication of the true interpretation of Kant’s analogy.

133 Prolegomena to Ethics, bk i. ch. i. § 11.

134 Text-Book to Kant (1881), p. 29.

135 History of Materialism, Eng. transl., ii. pp. 156, 158, 237.

136 Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (1896), ii. p. 64.

137 Hibbert Journal, October 1910, p. 49.

138 De Revolutionibus, I. v.

139 Ibid. I. x.

140 B xxii. n.

141 Cf. below, p. 543 ff.

142 B xxvi. Cf. above, pp. lv-vi, 20; below, pp. 290-1, 331, 342, 404 ff.

143 This restatement will continue up to p. 33. In pp. 33-43 I shall then give general comment on the Introduction as a whole. In p. 43 ff. I add the necessary detailed treatment of special points.

144 Cf. below, p. 219 ff.

145 Cf. above, p. xxv ff.; below, pp. 61 ff., 593 ff.

146 This statement is first made in the Introduction to the second edition. It is really out of keeping with the argument of the Introduction in either edition. Cf. below, pp. 39-40, 57, 85, 168, 222, 245 ff. (especially pp. 278, 288).

147 This is the argument of the Introduction to the second edition. In the first edition Kant assumes without question the existence of the a priori. He enquires only whether it is also valid in its metaphysical employment beyond the field of possible experience.

148 The argument of the first edition, though briefer, is substantially the same.

149 Quoted below, pp. 219-20.

150 Cf. below, pp. 114, 290, 590.

151 A 6 = B 10. I here follow the wording of the second edition.

152 Kant’s view of the a priori differs from that of Leibniz in two respects. For Kant a priori concepts are merely logical functions, i.e. empty; and secondly, are always synthetic. Cf. above, pp. xxxiii-vi, 186, 195-6, 257-8, 290-1, 404 ff.

153 Cf. above, pp. xxv-vii; below, pp. 61 ff., 593 ff.

154 B 24.

155 Cf. above, pp. xliv-xlv, 22; below, pp. 52-3, 55-6, 66 ff.

156 Needless to say, this “Aristotelian” logic, in the traditional form in which alone Kant was acquainted with it, diverges very widely from Aristotle’s actual teaching.

157 Cf. above, pp. xxxvi-ix; below, pp. 36, 181, 184-6.

158 A vii.

159 B xxiii-iv.

160 Above, pp. xxv-vii, 26; below, p. 593 ff.

161 Cf. above, p. xxxvi ff.

162 Cf. above, pp. xxxvii-viii; below, pp. 238-42.

163 Cf. below, pp. 176 ff., 181, 191, 257.

164 A 6 = B 10.

165 Leibniz’s interpretation of the judgment seems to result in an atomism which is the conceptual counterpart of his metaphysical monadism (cf. Adamson, Development of Modern Philosophy, i. p. 77 ff.; and my Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, p. 160 ff.; also below, p. 603). Each concept is regarded as having exclusive jurisdiction, so to speak, over a content wholly internal to itself. The various concepts are like sovereign states with no mediating tribunals capable of prescribing to them their mutual dealings. Cf. below, pp. 394-400, 418 ff.

166 A 9 = B 13.

167 Erste Betrachtung, §§ 2, 3; dritte Betrachtung, § 1.

168 Cf. below, p. 162.

169 § 12, 15 C.

170 Cf. B 15-16.

171 Cf. below, p. 128 ff., on Kant’s views regarding arithmetical science.

172 Cf. below, p. 117 ff., on Kant and modern geometry, and p. 128 ff., on Kant’s views regarding arithmetical science.

173 Cf. below, pp. 131-3, 338-9, 418 ff.

174 That certain parts of the Introduction were written at different dates is shown below, pp. 71-2. That other parts may be of similarly composite origin is always possible. There is, however, no sufficient evidence to establish this conclusion. Adickes’ attempt to do so (K. pp. 35-7 n.) is not convincing.

175 Cf. above, pp. xxxiii ff., 1-2, 26 ff.

176 i. pp. 317 and 450 ff.

177 i. p. 412 ff.; cf. p. 388 ff.

178 Cf. below, pp. 219-20.

179 Cf. Vaihinger, i. p. 394. Cf. above, p. 28.

180 Cf. Vaihinger, i. pp. 415-17.

181 Paulsen objects that if synthetic a priori judgments are valid without explanation, they do not need it. For two reasons the objection does not hold. (a) Without this explanation it would be impossible to repel the pretensions of transcendent metaphysics (cf. A 209 = B 254-5; A 283 = B 285). (b) This solution of the theoretical problem has also, as above stated, its own intrinsic interest and value. Without such explanation the validity of these judgments might be granted, but could not be understood. (Cf. Prolegomena, §§ 4-5 and § 12 at the end. Cf. Vaihinger, i. p. 394.)

182 Cf. Vaihinger, ii. p. 336. The argument of the Analytic, which is still more complicated, will be considered later.

183 Cf. A 46-9 = B 64-6. The corresponding sections of the Prolegomena, Vaihinger contends, were developed from this first edition passage, and the transcendental exposition of space in the second edition from the argument of the Prolegomena.

184 The synthetic method of argument is, as we shall see later, further extended in the Analytic by being connected with the problem of the validity of ordinary experience. But as the mathematical sciences are proved to have the same conditions as—neither more nor less than—the consciousness of time, this also allows of a corresponding extension of the analytic method. The mathematical sciences can be substituted for the de facto premiss by which these conditions are proved.

185 Cf. above, p. 43.

186 What follows should be read along with p. 235 ff. below, in which this distinction between the “subjective” and “objective” deductions is discussed in greater detail.

187 A x-xi.

188 This is a criticism to which Cohen, Caird, and Riehl lay themselves open.

189 Cf. below, pp. 219-20.

190 Cf. above, pp. 49-50.

191 Cf. Vaihinger, i. p. 405. The existing sciences can, as Vaihinger says, be treated en bloc, whereas each of the principles of the new philosophy must be separately established.

192 A 1.

193 A 1-2.

194 B 6 = A 2.

195 A 2.

196 Cf. above, pp. xxxv, 36 ff.; below, pp. 565-7.

197 A 2.

198 A 2.

199 B 1.

200 Cf. below, p. 55.

201 B 1.

202 Cf. below, p. 54.

203 B 2-3.

204 Cf. below, p. 55.

205 B 1.

206 B 1.

207 B 1.

208 Cf. below, p. 88 ff.

209 Cf. below, p. 237 ff.

210 B 1.

211 Cf. below, pp. 55-6.

212 B 2.

213 Cf. above, p. 27 n.

214 B 2.

215 Cf. above, pp. 39 ff., 53; below, pp. 57-8, 222 ff., 241, 286-9.

216 B 2-3.

217 Cf. above, p. 53.

218 A 9-10 = B 13.

219 Cf. above, p. 39 ff., and below, pp. 286-9.

220 P. 53; cf. also pp. 1-2.

221 Cf. also above, pp. 2-3.

222 B 3.

223 Cf. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe, Hauptstück ii. Lehrs. 8, Zus. 2, in which elasticity and gravity are spoken of as the only universal properties of matter which can be apprehended a priori.

224 B 3-4.

225 Cf. above, p. 27 ff.

226 B 4.

227 Cf. above, pp. xxxiii-iv, 27, 599 ff.

228 Cf. above, pp. xxxv-vi, 30; below, pp. 185-6, 257-9.

229 Loc. cit.

230 B 5.

231 Cf. above, pp. xxx, 599 ff.

232 Cf. above, pp. 39, 54.

233 A 2 = B 6.

234 B 7.

235 Cf. Kritik der Urtheilskraft, § 91, W. v. p. 473. Fortschritte, Werke (Hartenstein), viii. pp. 572-3.

236 Cf. above, pp. 22, 49-50, 52.

237 Cf. Prolegomena, § 40; Fortschritte, pp. 577-8.

238 i. p. 238.

239 P. 579.

240 A 712 ff. = B 740 ff.; cf. also Fortschritte, p. 522.

241 A 4 = B 8; cf. below, p. 563 ff.

242 A 4 = B 8.

243 A 5 = B 9.

244 Cf. B 18.

245 Cf. above, p. 29.

246 A 6 ff. = B 10 ff.

247 Prolegomena, § 2, b, c; Eng. trans, pp. 15-16. On the connection of mathematical reasoning with the principle of contradiction, cf. below, pp. 64-5.

248 P. 582; cf. Logik, § 37.

249 ii. p. 257.

250 Prolegomena, § 4.

251 Cf. B 290.

252 § 2, c.

253 B 161.

254 B 218.

255 A 9 = B 13.

256 Cf. above, pp. xxv ff., 26; below, p. 593 ff.; cf. Vaihinger, i. p. 340 ff.

257 A 9 = B 13, B 11, B 19.

258 In A 9 = B 13, B 11, B 19.

259 Cf. Borowski’s Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Im. Kants (Hoffmann’s edition, 1902), p. 252. The German translation of Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding appeared in 1755, and Kant probably made his first acquaintance with Hume through it. Cf. above, p. xxviii; below, p. 156.

260 Cf. below, Appendix B, p. 593 ff.

261 A 9 = B 13.

262 A 733 = B 761.

263 A 737 = B 764.

264 i. p. 291.

265 B 14.

266 B 14. Cf. above, pp. 59-60.

267 i. p. 294.

268 B 15.

269 B 15. Cf. above, p. 41.

270 Cf. Vaihinger, i. p. 296.

271 A 164.

272 A 164.

273 In Prolegomena and in second edition.

274 B 15.

275 § 2 c.

276 Cf. below, p. 128 ff.

277 Cf. A 713 = B 741.

278 A 140 = B 179. Cf. below, p. 337 ff.

279 B 15.

280 B 17.

281 i. p. 304 ff.

282 § 15.

283 This latter Kant developed in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe (1786).

284 Cf. A 840 = B 869. “Nature” means, in the Kantian terminology, “all that is.”

285 Cf. above, pp. xliv-v, 19, 22, 33, 52-3, 55-6.

286 § 4.

287 The propositions of pure natural science are not separately treated in § 4 of the Prolegomena, though the subsequent argument implies that this has been done. Vaihinger’s inference (i. p. 310) that a paragraph, present in Kant’s manuscript, has been dropped out in the process of printing the fourth section (the section which contains the paragraphs transposed from the end of § 2) seems unavoidable. The missing paragraph was very probably that which is here given in B 17.

288 B 18.

289 In § 4 (at end of paragraphs transposed from § 2).

290 B 19.

291 B 19.

292 B 20.

293 B 20.

294 Cf. B 17.

295 B 20.

296 B 21.

297 B 22.

298 Vaihinger’s analysis (i. p. 371 ff.) is invaluable. I follow it throughout.

299 When corrected as above, pp. 51-2, 66-7.

300 Cf. above, p. 38 ff.

301 By J. Erdmann (cited by Vaihinger, i. p. 371).

302 By B. Erdmann, Kriticismus, p. 183.

303 As above noted, pp. 66-7.

304 Above, p. 66.

305 A 11.

306 A 11 = B 24.

307 Cf. Dissertation, § 23: usus logicus—usus realis.

308 Cf. above, p. 2.

309 A 11 = B 24.

310 i. p. 459 ff.

311 Entwickelungsgeschichte der Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie, p. 113.

312 Cf. A 795 = B 823. Cf. below, pp. 170, 174.

313 Cf. A 796 = B 824.

314 Cf. Vaihinger, i. pp. 461-2 for the very varied meanings in which Kant “capriciously” employs the terms Organon, Canon, Doctrine, and Discipline.

315 A 11 = B 25.

316 Erklärung in Beziehung auf Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1799), Werke (Hartenstein), viii. p. 600.

317 B 25.

318 Cf. A xv.

319 Cf. B xxiv.

320 A 11 = B 25.

321 De vera religione, 72; De civitate Dei, viii. 6. Cited by Eisler, Wörterbuch, p. 1521.

322 Cf. Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, iii. pp. 114, 244-5.

323 Ethica (Vloten and Land), ii. prop. xl. schol. 1.

324 Principles of Human Knowledge, cxviii. The above citations are from Eisler, loc. cit. pp. 1524-5. I have also myself come upon the term in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Dent, 1897, p. 166): “And as to ‘ideas, entities, abstractions, and transcendentals,’ I could never drive the least conception into their heads.”

325 Organon, i. 484, cited by Eucken in Geschichte der philosophischer Terminologie, p. 205.

326 A 11 = B 25, A 56 = B 80.

327 Cited by Vaihinger, i. p. 468.

328 Cf. Text-Book to Kant, p. 13.

329 Cf. Kant Explained, p. 89.

330 Cf. below, p. 238.

331 Cf. below, pp. 116-17, 302.

332 Adickes has taken the liberty in his edition of the Critique of substituting in A 297 = B 354 transcendental for transcendent. The Berlin edition very rightly retains the original reading.

333 B 27.

334 A vi.

335 A 14-15 = B 28. Cf. below, p. 570n.

336 This alteration is not given in Max Müller’s translation.

337 Cf. the corresponding alteration made in the second edition at end of note to A 21 = B 35.

338 A 15 = B 29.

339 Loc. cit.

340 Loc. cit. Cf. A 835 = B 863.

341 Cf. A 124, B 151-2, and below, pp. 225, 265.

342 Cf. A 141 = B 180-1. Cf. Critique of Judgment, § 57: “Thus here [in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment], as also in the Critique of Practical Reason, the antinomies force us against our will to look beyond the sensible and to seek in the supersensible the point of union for all our a priori faculties; because no other expedient is left to make our Reason harmonious with itself.” Cf. also below, p. 473 ff., in comment on A 649 = B 677.

343 A 16 = B 30.

344 Introduction (W. v. p. 16). Cf. below, p. 438.

345 Cf. also above, p. 25.

346 Cf. A 51 = B 75.

347 That thought finds in intuition its sole possible content is, of course, a conclusion first established in the Analytic. Kant is here defining his terms in the light of his later results.

348 A 51 = B 75.

349 Cf. Prolegomena, § 12, Remark ii. at the beginning.

350 Cf. below, p. 88 ff.; B 146-7.

351 Prolegomena, § 8 (Eng. trans. p. 33).

352 Quoted by Vaihinger, ii. p. 4.

353 Cf. Ueber das Organ der Seele (1796) and Anthropologie, § 22.

354 § 3.

355 A 27 = B 43, A 34 = B 51, A 42 = B 59, A 51 = B 75.

356 Cf. B 72.

357 In the second paragraph, A 20 = B 34.

358 Dissertation, § 4.

359 A 320 = B 376.

360 Dissertation, § 4.

361 A 50 = B 74.

362 This view, as I shall endeavour to show, is only semi-Critical, and is profoundly modified by the more revolutionary conclusions to which Kant finally worked his way. Cf. below, p. 274 ff.

363 In this he was anticipated by Tetens, Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur, Bd. i. (1777), Versuch X. v. Cf. below, p. 294.

364 Critique of Judgment, § 3 (Eng. trans, p. 49). Kant was the first to adopt the threefold division of mental powers—“the faculty of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure and pain, and the faculty of desire.” This threefold division is first given in his Ueber Philosophie überhaupt (Hartenstein, vi. p. 379), which was written some time between 1780 and 1790, being originally designed as an Introduction to the Critique of Judgment.

365 A 248 (occurs in a lengthy section omitted in B).

366 This distinction between intuition and appearance practically coincides with that above noted between intuition and its object.

367 For statement of the precise meaning in which these terms are here employed, cf. above, pp. xlv-vii; below, pp. 270 ff., 312 ff.

368 This would harmonise with the view developed in A 166 (in its formulation of the principle of the Anticipations), A 374 ff., B 274 ff., A 723 = B 751.

369 Cf. A 50 = B 74: “We may name sensation the matter of sensuous knowledge.” Similarly in A 42 = B 59; Prolegomena, § 11; Fortschritte, (Hartenstein, viii. p. 527).

370 Cf. below, p. 274 ff.

371 Cf. below, pp. 366-7, 370-2, 377.

372 ii. p. 59.

373 A 42 = B 60.

374 Cf. Reflexionen, ii. note to 469; also note to 357.

375 Cf. above, p. xxxiii ff.

376 A 266 = B 322.

377 In discussing a and b we may for the present identify form with space. The problem has special complications in reference to time.

378 Cf. B 207.

379 Herbart’s doctrine of space, Lotze’s local sign theory, also the empiricist theories of the Mills and Bain, all rest upon this same assumption. It was first effectively called in question by William James. Cf. Bergson: Les Données immédiates, pp. 70-71, Eng. trans. pp. 92-3: “The solution given by Kant does not seem to have been seriously disputed since his time: indeed, it has forced itself, sometimes without their knowledge, on the majority of those who have approached the problem anew, whether nativists or empiricists. Psychologists agree in assigning a Kantian origin to the nativistic explanation of Johann Müller; but Lotze’s hypothesis of local signs, Bain’s theory, and the more comprehensive explanation suggested by Wundt, may seem at first sight quite independent of the Transcendental Aesthetic. The authors of these theories seem indeed to have put aside the problem of the nature of space, in order to investigate simply by what process our sensations come to be situated in space and to be set, so to speak, alongside one another: but this very question shows that they regard sensations as inextensive, and make a radical distinction, just as Kant did, between the matter of representation and its form. The conclusion to be drawn from the theories of Lotze and Bain, and from Wundt’s attempt to reconcile them, is that the sensations by means of which we come to form the notion of space are themselves unextended and simply qualitative: extensity is supposed to result from their synthesis, as water from the combination of two gases. The empirical or genetic explanations have thus taken up the problem of space at the very point where Kant left it: Kant separated space from its contents: the empiricists ask how these contents, which are taken out of space by our thought, manage to get back again.” Bergson proceeds to argue that the analogy of chemical combination is quite inapplicable, and that some “unique act very like what Kant calls an a priori form” must still be appealed to. With the Kantian standpoint in this matter Bergson does not, of course, agree. He is merely pointing out what the consequences must be of this initial assumption of inextensive sensations.

380 Cf. Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume, in its penultimate paragraph.

381 Cf. Dissertation, last sentence of § 4, quoted below, p. 87.

382 A 291 = B 347; A 429 = B 457.

383 Reflexionen, ii. 334.

384 ii. p. 73.

385 Cf. Stout: Manual of Psychology (3rd edition), pp. 465-6. “We find that the definite apprehension of an order of coexistence, as such, arises and develops only in connection with that peculiar aspect of sense-experience which we have called extensity, and more especially the extensity of sight and touch. Two sounds or a sound and a smell may be presented as coexistent in the sense of being simultaneous; but taken by themselves apart from association with experiences of touch and sight, they are not apprehended as spatially juxtaposed or separated by a perceived spatial interval or as having perceived spatial direction and distance relatively to each other. Such relations can only be perceived or imagined, except perhaps in a very rudimentary way, when the external object is determined for us as an extensive whole by the extensity of the same presentation through which we apprehend it.”

386 Principles of Psychology, § 399, cited by Vaihinger.

387 § 4.

388 Sich ordnen has here, in line with common German usage, the force of a passive verb.

389 Riehl: Kriticismus (1876-1879) ii. Erster Theil, p. 104. As already noted, Kant tacitly admits this in regard to time relations of coexistence and sequence. He continues, however, to deny it in regard to space relations.

390 Cf. below, pp. 101-2, 105.

391 A 20 = B 34.

392 A 20 = B 34.

393 A 42 = B 60. Cf. Dissertation, § 12: [“Space and time, the objects of pure mathematics,] are not only formal principles of all intuition, but themselves original intuitions.”

394 A 196 = B 241; A 293 = B 349.

395 That is to say, in his published writings. It finds expression in one, and only one, of the Reflexionen (ii. 410: “Both space and time are nothing but combinations of sensuous impressions”).

396 § 15, Coroll. at the end.

397 Cf. § 12, quoted above, p. 89 n. 2.

398 There also Kant teaches that the representation of space is gained from the space-endowed objects of experience.

399 Cf. B 1.

400 § 43.

401 Ueber eine Entdeckung nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Kritik durch eine ältere entbehrlich gemacht werden soll.

402 Op. cit. W. viii. pp. 221-2.

403 Loc. cit. p. 222.

404 Especially those which he had offered in support of the contention that pure mathematical science is intuitive, not merely conceptual.

405 Cf. below, p. 291 ff., on Kant’s reasons for developing his doctrine of inner sense.

406 As no one passage can be regarded as quite decisively proving Kant’s belief in a pure manifold of intuition, the question can only be decided by a collation of all the relevant statements in the light of the general tendencies of Kant’s thinking.

407 This at least would seem to be implied in the wording of his later positions; it is not explicitly avowed.

408 Cf. A 76-7 = B 102.

409 Cf. above, pp. xlii, 38-42; below, pp. 118-20, 128-34.

410 The last statement may be more freely translated: “Only in this way can I get the intuition before me in visible form.” Cf. below, pp. 135-6, 347-8, 359.

411 B 202-3.

412 Cf. Reflexionen, ii. 393, 409, 465, 630, 649.

413 This, indeed, is Kant’s reason for describing space as an Idea of reason. Cf. below, pp. 97-8.

414 Geometry is for Kant the fundamental and chief mathematical science (cf. A 39 = B 56 and Dissertation, § 15 c). In this respect he is a disciple of Newton, not a follower of Leibniz. His neglect to take adequate account of arithmetic and algebra is due to this cause. Just as in speaking of the manifold of sense he almost invariably has sight alone in view, so in speaking of mathematical science he usually refers only to geometry and the kindred discipline of pure mechanics.

415 A 76-7 = B 102. Cf. B 160-1 n.

416 Cf. above, pp. 90, 92 ff.; below, pp. 171, 226-9, 267-70, 337.

417 Cf. B 160.

418 Metaphysical First Principles, W. iv. p. 559, cf. p. 481.

419 Op. cit. p. 560.

420 Critique of Judgment, §§ 26-7, Eng. trans. pp. 115-16 and 121.

421 Cf. below, pp. 102 n., 165-6, 390-1.

422 The title of this section, and the points raised in the opening paragraph, are commented upon below. Cf. pp. 110, 114-15, 134 ff. I pass at once to the first space argument.

423 Added in second edition.

424 This argument is an almost verbal repetition of the first argument on space in the Dissertation, § 15.

425 Cf. below, pp. 106-7, 126, 132-3, 177-84, 338-9.

426 Cf. above, p. 37 ff.; below, p. 178 ff.

427 That is particularly obvious in Kant’s formulation of his problem in the Introduction. For that is the assumption which underlies his mode of distinguishing between analytic and synthetic judgments. Cf. above, p. 37.

428 Cf. above, p. xxii.

429 Cf. especially, pp. 184, 332-6, 419, 474, 479.

430 I here use the more modern terms. Kant, in Anthropologie, § 14, distinguishes between them as Organenempfindungen and Vitalempfindungen.

431 ii. p. 165.

432 Cf. above, pp. 85-8.

433 Cf. Dissertation, § 15 D: “Space is not anything objective and real. It is neither substance, nor accident, nor relation, but is subjective and ideal, proceeding by a fixed law from the nature of the mind, and being, as it were, a schema for co-ordinating, in the manner which it prescribes, all external sensations whatsoever.” And § 15, corollary at end: “Action of the mind co-ordinating its sensations in accordance with abiding laws.”

434 Especially in view of the third and fourth arguments on space, and of Kant’s teaching in the transcendental exposition.

435 E.g. Cohen, Riehl, Caird, Watson.

436 Cf. Watson, The Philosophy of Kant explained, p. 83: “Kant, therefore, concludes from the logical priority of space that it is a priori.”

437 Upon it Kant bases the assertion that space is an Idea of reason; cf. above, pp. 96-8, and below, pp. 165-6, 390-1.

438 This second argument is not in the Dissertation.

439 Cf. Vaihinger, ii. pp. 196-7. The corresponding argument on time, in the form in which it is given in the second edition, is, as we shall find, seriously misleading. It has caused Herbart and others to misinterpret the connection in which this corollary stands to the main thesis. Herbart’s interpretation is considered below, p. 124.

440 Cf. Vaihinger, ii. p. 220.

441 Reflexionen, ii. 403.

442 “That in space there are no more than three dimensions, that between two points there can be but one straight line, that in a plane surface from a given point with a given straight line a circle is describable, cannot be inferred from any universal notion of space, but can only be discerned in space as in the concrete.” Cf. also Prolegomena, § 12.

443 In the second edition, the third.

444 For a different view cf. Vaihinger, ii. p. 233.

445 Cf. above, pp. 99-100; below, pp. 126, 180-1, 184, 338-9.

446 Cf. below, p. 180.

447 Cf. above, p. xxxvi; below, pp. 176 ff., 191, 195-6, 257, 290-1, 404 ff., 413.

448 This statement occurs in a parenthesis; it has already been dwelt upon in the fourth (third) argument.

449 It has led Kant to substitute erörtern for betrachten in A 23 = B 38.

450 Cf. Vaihinger, ii. p. 151.

451 § 1 (Eng. trans, p. 13). Cf. above, p. 64.

452 This is, no doubt, one reason why Kant employs, in reference to space, the unfortunate and confusing term concept (Begriff) in place of the wider term representation (Vorstellung). Cf. B 37, and above, p. 64.

453 Cf. A 729 = B 757: “In place of the term definition I should prefer to employ the term exposition. For that is a more guarded expression, the claims of which the critic may allow as being in a certain degree valid even though he entertain doubts as to the completeness of the analysis.” Cf. Logic, §§ 99 ff., 105. Cf. also Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze, W. ii. pp. 183-4: “Augustine has said, ‘I know well what time is, but if any one asks me, I cannot tell.’”

454 For explanation of the phrase “construction of concepts” cf. below, pp. 132-3.

455 Cf. below, p. 117. ff.

456 Cf. conclusion of fourth argument on space.

457 A priori is here employed in its ambiguous double sense, as a priori in so far as it precedes experience (as a representation), and in so far as it is valid independently of experience (as a proposition). Cf. Vaihinger, ii. p. 268.

458 Cf. below, p. 114 ff.

459 Cf. below, pp. 115-16.

460 Cf. Lose Blätter, i. p. 18: “This is a proof (Beweis) that space is a subjective condition. For its propositions are synthetic and through them objects can be known a priori. This would be impossible if space were not a subjective condition of the representation of these objects.” Cf. Reflexionen, ii. p. 396, in which this direct proof of the ideality of space is distinguished from the indirect proof by means of the antinomies.

461 By “concepts” Kant seems to mean the five arguments, though as a matter of fact other conclusions and presuppositions are taken into account, and quite new points are raised.

462 This, according to Vaihinger (ii. p. 287), is the first occurrence of the phrase Dinge an sich in Kant’s writings.

463 Cf. Vaihinger’s analysis of this discussion, ii. pp. 290-313.

464 ii. pp. 289-90.

465 Cf. below, pp. 415 ff., 515 ff., 558 ff.

466 In B 166 ff.

467 This is likewise true of the references in the letter to Herz, 21st Feb. 1772. Cf. below, pp. 219-20.

468 The Critical Philosophy of Kant, i. pp. 306-9.

469 Cf. letter to Herz, W. x. p. 126. It is, Kant there says, the most absurd explanation which can be offered of the origin and validity of our knowledge, involving an illegitimate circulus in probando, and also throwing open the door to the wildest speculations. Cf. above, p. 28; below, pp. 141-2, 290, 590.

470 Cf. B 167-8.

471 That is, in the first edition. Cf. above, p. 85 ff.; and below, p. 116.

472 Above, pp. 111-12.

473 ii. p. 335.

474 §§ 6-11.

475 This identification of the two is especially clear in A 39 = B 56.

476 A 27 = B 43.

477 Cf. above, p. xxxv; below, pp. 117-20, 142, 185-6, 241-2, 257, 290-1.

478 A 28 = B 44, cf. A 35 = B 52.

479 Cf. Vaihinger, i. pp. 351-4; and above, p. 76; below, p. 302. Cf. Caird, The Critical Philosophy, i. pp. 298-9, 301; and Watson, Kant Explained, p. 91.

480 Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte (1747), § 10.

481 This important and far-reaching assertion we cannot at this point discuss. Kant’s reasoning is really circular in the bad sense. Kant may legitimately argue from the a priori character of space to the apodictic character of pure mathematical science; but when he proceeds similarly to infer the apodictic character of applied mathematics, he is constrained to make the further assumption that space is a fixed and absolutely uniform mode in which alone members of the human species can intuit objects. That, as we point out below (p. 120), is an assumption which Kant does not really succeed in proving. In any case the requirements of the strict synthetic method preclude him from arguing, as he does both in the Dissertation (§ 15) and in the third space argument of the first edition, that the a priori certitude of applied mathematics affords proof of the necessary uniformity of all space.

482 § 15 D.

483 Cf. above, p. 111.

484 Cf. above, pp. 40-2, 93-4; below, pp. 131-3, 338-9, 418 ff.

485 A 99-100.

486 A 78 = B 104. Cf. A 159 = B 198, B 147.

487 § 38, Eng. trans, p. 81.

488 Cf. p. 241 ff.

489 A 28-9. Cf. B 1; Prolegomena, § 13, Remark II. at the end: “Cinnabar excites the sensation of red in me.” Cf. above, pp. 80-8; below, pp. 146 ff., 274 ff.

490 Kant continues the discussion of this general problem in A 45 ff. = B 62 ff.

491 Kant himself again uses the confusing term conception.

492 § 14, 1.

493 Herbart, Werke, ii. 30. Quoted by Vaihinger, iii. p. 198.

494 The third argument on time will be considered below in its connection with the transcendental exposition.

495 The chief omission goes, as we shall see, to form the concluding argument on time.

496 In the second edition, the third.

497 In the second edition, the third.

498 In the second edition, the fourth.

499 Cf. Vaihinger, ii. pp. 380-1.

500 Cf. second part of fourth (third) argument on space.

501 Kant’s Logik, Einleitung, § 8, Eng. trans, p. 49.

502 Cf. above, pp. 99-100.

503 These axioms are: (1) time has only one dimension; (2) different times are not simultaneous but successive. In the fourth argument the synthetic character of these axioms is taken as further evidence of the intuitive nature of time. This passage also is really part of the transcendental exposition. That exposition has to account for the synthetic character of the axioms as well as for their apodictic character; and as a matter of fact the intuitive and consequent synthetic character of the a priori knowledge which arises from time is much more emphasised in the transcendental exposition than its apodictic nature.

504 Cf. Reflexionen, ii. 374 ff.

505 Vaihinger, ii. p. 387.

506 Cf. A 41 = B 58: “Motion which combines both [space and time] presupposes something empirical.”

507 W. iv. p. 471.

508 Ueber Philosophie überhaupt (Hartenstein, vi. p. 395).

509 § 12.

510 Loc. cit.

511 A 78 = B 104.

512 A 142-3 = B 182. It should be observed that in Kant’s view schemata “exist nowhere but in thought” (A 141 = B 180). It may also be noted that time is taken as conditioning the schemata of all the categories.

513 A 717 ff. = B 745 ff.

514 § 10.

515 Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft (Königsberg, 1784), p. 24. Johann Schulze (or Schultz) was professor of mathematics in Königsberg. He was also Hofprediger, and is frequently referred to as Pastor Schulze. Kant has eulogised him (W. x. p. 128) as “the best philosophical head that I am acquainted with in our part of the world.” In preparing the Erläuterungen, which is a paraphrase or simplified statement of the argument of the Critique, with appended comment, Schulze had the advantage of Kant’s advice in all difficulties. Kant also read his manuscript, and suggested a few modifications (op. cit. pp. 329, 343).

516 Cf. Vaihinger, ii. pp. 388-9.

517 Werke (Frauenstädt’s ed., 1873), i. p. 133.

518 P. 129.

519 W. x. p. 530. Italics not in Kant.

520 Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze: Erste Betrachtung, §§ 2, 3; dritte Betrachtung, § 1; Dissertation, §§ 12, 15 C.

521 P. 128.

522 Dissertation, § 15 C.

523 Cf. above, pp. 40-2, 118-20; below, pp. 338-9.

524 Kant und die moderne Mathematik in Kant-Studien, xii. (1907) p. 34 n.

525 Cf. A 713 ff. = B 741 ff.; A 4 = B 8; B 15-16; A 24; A 47-8 = B 64-5.

526 Cf. below, pp. 337-8.

527 Cf. above, pp. 112 n. 4.

528 The content of the second Conclusion in regard to space.

529 This expresses the matter a little more clearly than Kant himself does. The term representation is ambiguous. In the first paragraph it is made to cover the appearances as well as their representation.

530 Cf. Dissertation, § 15 Coroll.: “Space properly concerns the intuition of the object; time the state, especially the representative state.”

531 Cf. below, pp. 309 ff., 347-8, 359.

532 Cf. Reflexionem, ii. 365 ff.

533 § 14, 5 and note to 5.

534 The opposite is, however, asserted in B 67.

535 Cf. A 427-8 n. = B 456 n.

536 A 99. Cf. A 162 = B 203: “I cannot represent to myself a line, however small, without drawing it in thought, i.e. generating from a point all its parts one after another.” Cf. pp. 94, 347-8.

537 Cf. Lose Blätter, i. 54: “Without space time itself would not be represented as quantity (Grösse), and in general this conception would have no object.” Cf. Dissertation, § 14. 5.

538 Cf. below, p. 365 ff.

539 In the Dissertation time is treated before space.

540 Cf. above, pp. xxxiv, 120; below, pp. 241-2, 365, 367-70, 390-1.

541 Cf. Dissertation, § 15 C.

542 Cf. below, pp. 272 ff., 294-5, 308 ff., 365 ff.

543 A 23 = B 37.

544 They correspond to the third paragraph dealing with space. Cf. above, p. 116.

545 Cf. above, pp. 116-17.

546 Cf. W. x. p. 102. Mendelssohn had also protested; cf. op. cit. x. p. 110.

547 W. x. pp. 128-9. Italics not in Kant. Kant is entirely justified in protesting against the view that in denying things in themselves to be in time he is asserting that they remain eternally the same with themselves. To make a dancer preserve one and the same posture is not to take him out of time, but to bring home to him the reality of time in an extremely unpleasant manner. Duration is one of the modes of time.

548 This is Kant’s reply to Mendelssohn’s objection (December 1770, W. x. p. 110): “Succession is at least a necessary condition of the representations of finite spirits. Now the finite spirits are not only subjects but also objects of representations, both for God and for our fellow-men. The succession must therefore be regarded as something objective.”

549 Cf. A 277 = B 333: “It is not given to us to observe even our own mind with any intuition but that of our inner sense.”

550 Quoted by Vaihinger, ii. p. 406.

551 In the fourth Paralogism, A 366, and in the Refutation of Idealism, B 274.

552 Cf. A 42 = B 59.

553 Above, pp. 113-14.

554 Cf. Vaihinger, ii. p. 114.

555 The date of Kant’s Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume.

556 Cf. below, p. 161 ff.

557 Cf. Dissertation, § 15 D: “Those who defend the reality of space conceive it either as an absolute and immense receptacle of possible things—a view which appeals not only to the English [thinkers] but to most geometricians—or they contend that it is nothing but a relation holding between existing things, which must vanish when the things are removed, and which is thinkable only in actual things. This latter is the teaching of Leibniz and of most of our countrymen.” That the account of Leibniz’s teaching given in the paragraphs under consideration is not altogether accurate, need hardly be pointed out. Kant, following his usual method in the discussion of opposing systems, is stating what he regards as being the logical consequences of certain of Leibniz’s tenets, rather than his avowed positions.

558 Cf. A 275-6 = B 331-2: “Leibniz conceived space as a certain order in the community of substances, and time as the dynamical sequence of their states. But that which both seem to possess as proper to themselves, in independence of things, he ascribed to the confused character of their concepts, asserting this confusion to be the reason why what is a mere form of dynamical relations has come to be regarded as a special intuition, self-subsistent and antecedent to the things themselves. Thus space and time were [for Leibniz] the intelligible form of the connection of things (substances and their states) in themselves.” Cf. also Prolegomena, § 13, Anm. i.

559 Kant has stated that both views conflict with “the principles of experience.” But his criticisms are not altogether on that line. The statement strictly applies only to his criticism of the Leibnizian view. Cf. Dissertation, § 15 D: “That first inane invention of reason, assuming as it does the existence of true infinite relations in the absence of all interrelated entities, belongs to the realm of fable. But those who adopt the other view fall into a much worse error. For whereas the former place an obstacle in the way only of certain rational concepts, i.e. concepts that concern noumena, and which also in themselves are extremely obscure bearing upon questions as to the spiritual world, omnipresence, etc., the latter set themselves in direct antagonism to the phenomena themselves and to geometry, the most faithful interpreter of all phenomena. For—not to dwell upon the obvious circle in which they necessarily become involved in defining space—they cast geometry down from its position at the highest point of certitude, and throw it back into the class of those sciences the principles of which are empirical. For if all modifications of space are derived only through experience from external relations, geometrical axioms can have only comparative universality, like that acquired through induction, in other words, such as extends only as far as observation has gone. They cannot lay claim to any necessity save that of being in accordance with the established laws of nature, nor to any precision except of the artificial sort, resting upon assumptions. And as happens in matters empirical, the possibility is not excluded that a space endowed with other original modifications, and perhaps even a rectilineal figure enclosed by two lines, may sometime be discovered.” Cf. above, p. 114; below, p. 290.

560 In B 155 n. Kant distinguishes between motion of an object in space, and motion as generation of a geometrical figure. The former alone involves experience; the latter is a pure act of the productive imagination, and belongs not only to geometry but also to transcendental philosophy. This note, as Erdmann has pointed out (Kriticismus, pp. 115, 168), was introduced by Kant into the second edition as a reply to a criticism of Schütz. The distinction as thus drawn is only tenable on the assumption of a pure manifold distinct from the manifold of sense.

561 A 230 = B 283. Cf. above, pp. 57, 118; below, pp. 185-6, 257.

562 A 41 = B 58.

563 Cf. below, pp. 359-60.

564 Les Données Immédiates, p. 75.

565 ii. p. 446.

566 §§ 4 and 27.

567 Cf. Ueber eine Entdeckung, etc.: W. viii. p. 220.

568 A 44 = B 61.

569 A 277 = B 334. Cf. A 278-9 = B 335-6.

570 When Kant says that the distinction is not logical (that of relative clearness and obscurity) but transcendental, the latter term is taken as practically equivalent to epistemological. It does not mean ‘relating to the a priori,’ but relating to transcendental philosophy, just as logical here means relating to logic. Cf. Vaihinger, ii. p. 452.

571 Cf. A 270 ff. = B 326 ff.

572 § 7 (I read autem for autor). Cf. below, p. 187.

573 Cf. Prolegomena, § 13, Remark II.

574 Cf. above, pp. 120-1.

575 Cf. A 257 = B 313.

576 A 46 = B 63. This is the first occurrence in the Critique of the phrase transcendental object. Transcendental is employed as synonymous with transcendent. Cf. below, p. 204 ff.

577 Cf. above, pp. 120-2.

578 A 271 = B 327.

579 A 46-9 = B 63-6.

580 A 48 = B 65-6. Vaihinger (ii. pp. 470-2) gives what appears to be a sufficient explanation of what Kant had in mind in its employment.

581 A 46 = B 64. Cf. Dissertation, § 15 C. In the concluding sentence of the first edition’s Aesthetic, Kant for the first time uses the singular Ding an sich in place of the more usual Dinge an sich and also refers to it in problematic terms as what may underlie appearances.

582 B 66-73.

583 a does not contain anything not to be found elsewhere in the first edition. It is a restatement of A 265 ff. = B 321 ff., A 274 = B 330, A 277 ff. = B 333 ff., A 283-5 = B 339-41.

584 An assertion, it may be noted, which conflicts with Kant’s view of it as a pure manifold.

585 Kant was probably influenced by Tetens. Cp. below, p. 294.

586 Cf. below, p. 291 ff. b together with B 152-8 is a more explicit statement of the doctrine of inner sense than Kant had given in the first edition.

587 Vaihinger (ii. p. 486 ff.), who has done more than any other commentator to clear up the ambiguities of this passage, distinguishes only two views.

588 A 38 = B 55.

589 Cf. Prolegomena, W. iv. p. 376 n., Eng. trans. p. 149: “The reviewer often fights his own shadow. When I oppose the truth of experience to dreaming, he never suspects that I am only concerned with the somnium objective sumtum of Wolff’s philosophy, which is merely formal, and has nothing to do with the distinction of dreaming and waking, which indeed has no place in any transcendental philosophy.”

590 Cf. below, p. 270 ff.

591 B 69. For explanation of the references to time and self-consciousness, cf. below, pp. 308, 323.

592 This view of illusion likewise appears in A 293 = B 349, A 377-8, A 396, and Prolegomena, § 13, III., at the beginning.

593 Prolegomena, loc. cit.

594 Cf. in the 1863 edition, Bd. ii. 267 ff. The examples of illusion employed by Mendelssohn are reflection in a mirror and the rainbow.

595 W. x. p. 405.

596 Schein is so used by Kant himself (W. x. p. 105) in a letter to Lambert in 1770.

597 A 38.

598 Cf. above, A 39 = B 57. This is, however, merely asserted by implication; it is not proved. As already noted, Kant does not really show that space and time, viewed as absolute realities, are “inconsistent with the principles of experience.” Nor does Kant here supply sufficient grounds for his description of space and time as Undinge. Kant, it must be observed, does not regard the conception of the actual infinite as in itself self-contradictory. Cf. below, p. 486.

599 B 275.

600 Cf. below, p. 298 ff., on Kant’s Refutations of Idealism. This is also the meaning in which Kant employs the term in his pre-Critical writings. Cf. Dilucidatio (1755), prop. xii. usus; Träume eines Geistersehers (1766), ii. 2, W. ii. p. 364. These citations are given by Janitsch (Kant’s Urtheile über Berkeley, 1879, p. 20), who also points out that the term is already used in this sense by Bülffinger as early as 1725, Dilucidationes philos. This is also the meaning in which the term is employed in B xxxiv. Cf. A 28 = B 44.

601 Prolegomena; Anhang. W. iv. pp. 374-5.

602 In his Kleine Aufsätze (3. Refutation of Problematic Idealism, Hartenstein, v. p. 502) Kant would seem very inconsistently to accuse Berkeley of maintaining a solipsistic position. “Berkeley denies the existence of all things save that of the being who asserts them.” This is probably, however, merely a careless formulation of the statement that thinking beings alone exist. Cf. Prolegomena, § 13, Anm. ii.

603 Prolegomena, W. iv. p. 375; Eng. trans. p. 148.

604 Borowski (Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kant, in Hoffman’s ed. 1902, p. 248 ff.) gives a list of English writers with whom Kant was acquainted. They were, according to Janitsch (loc. cit. p. 35), accessible in translation. Cf. above, pp. xxviii n. 3, 63 n. 1.

605 Cf. W. i. pp. 318, 322. When Kant cites Hume in the Prolegomena (Introduction), the reference is to the German translation.

606 This was the first of Berkeley’s writings to appear in German. The translation was published in Leipzig in 1781.

607 Cf. below, pp. 307-8. The opposite view has, however, been defended by Vaihinger: Philos. Monatshefte, 1883, p. 501 ff.

608 Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding (sec. xii. pt. ii. at the end).

609 Sixth edition, pp. 132, 214, 243 ff.

610 A 38.

611 A 377.

612 A 377-8. Though Kant here distinguishes between perceptions and their “outer objects,” the latter are none the less identified with mental representations.

613 Cf. below, p. 305 ff.

614 Prolegomena, § 13, Remark III.; and Anhang (W. iv. p. 374).

615 Kant’s description of Berkeley’s idealism as visionary and mystical is doubtless partly due to the old-time association of idealism in Kant’s mind with the spiritualistic teaching of Swedenborg (W. ii. p. 372). This association of ideas was further reinforced owing to his having classed Berkeley along with Plato.

616 Prolegomena, Anhang, W. iv. p. 374; Eng. trans. p. 147.

617 Cf. above, pp. 140-1.

618 § 27. In translating Kant’s somewhat difficult Latin I have found helpful the English translation of the Dissertation by W. J. Eckoff (New York, 1894).

619 Besides the internal evidence of the passage before us, we also have Kant’s own mention of Mendelssohn in this connection in notes (to A 43 and A 66) in his private copy of the first edition of the Critique. Cf. Erdmann’s Nachträge zu Kant’s Kritik, xx. and xxxii.; and above, p. 11.

620 Cf. Morgenstunden, Bd. ii. of Gesammelte Schriften (1863), pp. 246, 288.

621 Cf. above, p. 116.

622 B 72.

623 Upon this subject cf. Vaihinger’s exhaustive discussion in ii. p. 518 ff.

624 Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte (1747).

625 Op. cit. § 10. Cf. above, p. 117 ff.

626 Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume.

627 Euler, Réflexions sur l’espace et le temps (1748). Vaihinger (ii. p. 530) points out that Kant may also have been here influenced by certain passages in the controversy between Leibniz and Clarke.

628 Loc. cit., at the end.

629 In the Dorpater manuscript, quoted by Erdmann in his edition of the Prolegomena, p. xcvii n.

630 § 15 C.

631 So also in the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science (1786), Erstes Hauptstück, Erklärung 2, Anmerkung 3.

632 Cf. above, p. 105.

633 A 289 = B 345.

634 More exactly between the writing of the Metaphysical First Principles (in which as above noted the argument of the Prolegomena is endorsed) and 1787.

635 Cf. A 260 ff. = B 316 ff. on the Amphiboly of Reflective Concepts.

636 The Dissertation cites the argument only with this purpose in view. And yet it is only from the Dissertation standpoint that the wider argument of the Prolegomena can be legitimately propounded.

637 Above, pp. 96-8, 102 n. 4; below, pp. 390-1.

638 B 73.

639 A 50 = B 74.

640 Cf. below, p. 176 n. 1.

641 K. p. 99 n.

642 A 64 = B 89.

643 The definition of intuition given in A 19 = B 33 also applies only to empirical intuition.

644 For discussion of Kant’s view of sensation as the matter of sensuous intuition, cf. above, p. 80 ff.

645 Second paragraph, A 51 = B 75.

646 Object (Gegenstand) is here used in the strict sense and no longer as merely equivalent to content (Inhalt).

647 Cf. above, p. 79 ff.

648 P. 85.

649 Third paragraph, A 52 = B 77.

650 K. p. 100.

651 Kant’s Logik: Einleitung, i. (Abbott’s trans. p. 4).

652 Cf. A 796 = B 824; A 130 = B 169; also above, pp. 71-2.

653 A 709 = B 737.

654 Logik: Einleitung, i. (Eng. trans. p. 3).

655 Cf. below, p. 194.

656 Einleitung, i. (Eng. trans. p. 4).

657 Cf. A 796 = B 824.

658 Logik: Einleitung, i. (Eng. trans. p. 5).

659 A 57 = B 81.

660 Einleitung, vii. (Eng. trans. p. 40 ff.).

661 Kant might have added that transcendental logic defines further conditions, those of possible experience, and that by implication it refers us to coherence as the ultimate test even of material truth.

662 A 60-2 = B 84-6.

663 Einleitung, ii. (Eng. trans. pp. 6-7).

664 Cf. above, pp. 71-2, 170; below, pp. 438, 563.

665 Cf. below, p. 425 ff.

666 Kant employs Gegenstand and Object as synonymous terms.

667 Cf. below, p. 426.

668 A 64 = B 89.

669 A 65 = B 90.

670 The opening statement, A 67 = B 92, that hitherto understanding has been defined only negatively, is not correct, and would seem to prove that this section was written prior to the introduction to the Analytic, cf. above, p. 167.

671 See above, pp. 170-1.

672 A 79 = B 105. ‘Element’ translates the misleading term ‘Inhalt.’

673 Kant’s definition of transcendental logic as differing from general logic in that it does not abstract from a priori content must not be taken as implying that the categories of understanding are contents, though of a priori nature. As we shall find, though that is Kant’s view of the forms of sense, it is by no means his view of the categories. They are, he repeatedly insists, merely functions, and are quite indeterminate in meaning save in so far as a content is yielded to them by sense. In A 76-7 = B 102, in distinguishing between the two logics, Kant is careful to make clear that the a priori content of transcendental logic consists exclusively of the a priori manifolds of sense.

674 § 20, Eng. trans. p. 58.

675 The view of the two as co-ordinate reappears in the Prolegomena (§ 20) in a section the general tendency of which runs directly counter to any such standpoint.

676 A 78 = B 103.

677 Cf. below, pp. 196, 204, 226.

678 Einleitung, viii., Eng. trans. p. 48.

679 Cf. above, pp. 37-8.

680 The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762). W. ii. p. 47, Eng. trans. p. 79.

681 Cf. above, pp. 99-100, 106-7.

682 W. ii. pp. 58-9, Eng. trans. pp. 92-3.

683 Cf. Reflexionen, ii. 599.

684 Below, pp. 185-6.

685 The same indefiniteness of statement is discernible in Caird’s (i. p. 322 ff.) and Watson’s (Kant Explained, pp. 121-2) discussions of the principle supposed to be involved.

686 Cf. A 80 = B 106.

687 § 39.

688 P. 176 ff.

689 B 145-6. Cf. above, pp. xxxv-vi, xliv, 57, 142; below, pp. 257, 291.

690 §§ 5-6.

691 §§ 7-8. Cf. above, pp. 144-5.

692 W. x. p. 126. Italics not in Kant.

693 The relevant Reflexionen have been carefully discussed by Adickes (Kant’s Systematik, p. 21 ff.). In what follows I have made extensive use of his results, though not always arriving at quite the same conclusions.

694 § 15, Coroll.

695 In his later writings Kant recognises that the representations of space and time involve an Idea of Reason. Cf. above, pp. 97-8; below, pp. 390-1.

696 § 39.

697 Reflexionen, ii. 513, cf. 502, 525-7.

698 Op. cit. ii. 513.

699 Cf. op. cit. ii. 537.

700 Cf. above, p. 90 ff.

701 Only in one passage, Rechtslehre, i., Anhang 3, 2, cited by Adickes, op. cit. p. 13, does Kant so far depart from his own orthodoxy as to speak of the possibility of an a priori tetrachotomy. But he never wavers in the view that the completeness of a division cannot be guaranteed on empirical grounds.

702 Introduction, § 9 n. Eng. trans. p. 41.

703 §§ 4-6, 9.

704 A 70-6 = B 95-101.

705 Cf. Adickes, Kant’s Systematik, p. 36 ff.

706 Cf. Adickes, op. cit. p. 89 ff.

707 Organon, § 137. Cited by Adickes.

708 i. p. 343 ff.

709 Cf. below, p. 391 ff.

710 A 76-79 = B 102-5.

711 Cf. above, p. 171.

712 A 55.

713 Cf. also B 160.

714 Kant’s Theorie der Erfahrung, 2nd ed. p. 257 ff.

715 The Critical Philosophy of Kant, i. p. 327 ff.

716 Philosophischer Kriticismus, 2nd ed. i. p. 484 ff.

717 Kant explained, p. 124 ff.

718 Cf. below, p. 198.

719 P. 226.

720 A 79 = B 105.

721 Cf. above, p. 177 ff.

722 A 79-80.

723 Cf. above, p. 192.

724 Cf. B 111.

725 Cf. Adickes, Systematik, pp. 42-3.

726 Kant Explained, p. 128.

727 Cf. above, p. 37.

728 Cf. Dissertation, §§ 16 to 28, and below, p. 381 ff.

729 Cf. Reflexionen, ii. 795.

730 B 111-13.

731 World as Will and Idea, Werke (Frauenstädt), ii. p. 544; Eng. trans. ii. p. 61.

732 Cf. Stadler, Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntnisstheorie(1876), p. 122. Cf. also below, pp. 387-9.

733 Cf. below, p. 391 ff.

734 A 81.

735 Cf. Prolegomena, § 39.

736 Cf. above, p. 186 ff.

737 Kant Explained, p. 120.

738 A 81.

739 A 82.

740 A 82.

741 B 110.

742 B 110-11.

743 Cf. below, pp. 199-200.

744 W. x. p. 344-5.

745 Cf. below, p. 382 ff.

746 Cf. below, pp. 433-4, 451, 480, 529, 559-60.

747 B 114.

748 Cf. 904-5.

749 Cf. 907-10.

750 Cf. B. Erdmann, Mittheilungen in Phil. Monatshefte, 1884, p. 80, and Adickes, Systematik, pp. 55-9.

751 Reflexionen, ii. p. 252 n.

752 “Die transcendentale Deduktion der Kategorien” in the Gedenkschrift für Rudolf Haym. Published separately in 1902.

753 Readers who are not immediately interested in the analysis of the text or in the history of Kant’s earlier semi-Critical views may omit pp. 203-34, with exception of pp. 204-19, on Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental object, which should be read.

754 The reader is recommended to mark off the passages in a copy of the Critique.

755 Its first occurrence in the Critique is in the Aesthetic A 46 = B 63. It there signifies the thing in itself.

756 A 104.

757 A 109.

758 A 109.

759 A 104.

760 Cf. above, p. 28; below, pp. 219-20.

761 W. x. pp. 124-5.

762 Cf. below, pp. 209-10.

763 Hume’s view of the self is not developed in the Enquiry, and is not mentioned by Beattie.

764 A 107.

765 Cf. Reflexionen, ii. 952 (belonging, as Erdmann notes, to the earliest Critical period): “Appearances are representations whereby we are affected. The representation of our free self-activity (Selbsttätigkeit) does not involve affection, and accordingly is not appearance, but apperception.” Cf. below, p. 296.

766 § 8. Cf. above, pp. l-ii; below, pp. 243, 260-3, 272-3, 327-8, 473-7, 515.

767 A 107. It is significant that Kant in A 107 uses, in reference to apperception, the very unusual phrase, “unwandelbares Bewusstsein.”

768 A 108.

769 A 107.

770 Reicke, Lose Blätter, p. 19. The bearing and date of this passage is discussed below, p. 233.

771 Op. cit. p. 20.

772 Op. cit. p. 22 (written on a letter dated May 20, 1775).

773 This last statement cannot possibly be taken literally. In view of the manner in which the transcendental object is spoken of elsewhere in this section, and also in the Dialectic, we must regard it as standing for an independent existence, and the relation of representations to it as being, therefore, something else than simply the unity of consciousness.

774 It may be observed that when Kant in A 107, quoted above, refers to “a priori concepts,” he adds in explanation, and within brackets, “space and time.”

775 A 105-6.

776 The actual nature of Kant’s teaching as to the origin and constitution of the notion of the transcendental object is largely masked by the fact that he places this proof of its validity so prominently in the foreground. The general nature of this proof is, of course, identical with that of his later positions.

777 A 109.

778 As in the Lose Blätter. Cf. below, p. 233.

779 Cf. below, pp. 227, 233-4, 268-9.

780 Cf. below, pp. 322-8; also pp. 260-3.

781 As above noted (p. 204 n.) it also occurs in the Aesthetic (A 46 = B 63), as signifying the thing in itself.

782 A 238 = B 298.

783 Cf. below, p. 238.

784 A 238 ff. = B 298 ff.

785 A 250-1.

786 Cf. below, p. 407 ff.

787 A 253.

788 A 191 = B 236.

789 A 277-8 = B 333-4; A 288 = B 344.

790 Cf. mundus phaenomenon in A 272 = B 328.

791 It is so dated by Adickes (K. p. 272 n.), owing to a single reference to schemata in A 286 = B 342.

792 A 358 and A 361 (cf. A 355); A 366; A 372 and A 379-80; A 390-1, A 393, and A 394.

793 A 366.

794 “Transcendental” here means “transcendent.” Cf. A 379.

795 A 372; so also in A 613-14 = B 641-2.

796 The passage in A 393 is given below, p. 464.

797 A 494 = B 522. Cf. A 492 = B 521: “The true self (das eigentliche Selbst) as it exists in itself, i.e. the transcendental subject.”

798 A 495 = B 523.

799 A 496 = B 524.

800 Loc. cit.

801 Cf. also A 538 = B 566; A 540 = B 568; A 557 = B 585; A 564 = B 592; A 565-6 = B 593-4; A 613 = B 641-2.

802 Above, p. 206.

803 Cf. above, pp. liii-v; below, pp. 280, 331, 373-4, 390-1, 414-17, 429-31, 558-61.

804 Viz. the first layer of the deduction of the first edition, the relevant sections in the chapter on phenomena and noumena (A 250 ff.), and the Paralogisms with the subsequent Reflection.

805 Viz. the Note on Amphiboly, the chapter on the Antinomies, and the chapter on the Ideal.

806 To the statement that the alterations in the second edition cease at the close of the chapter on the Paralogisms, there is only one single exception, namely, the very brief note appended to A 491 = B 519. This exception, however, supports our general thesis. It is of polemical origin, referring to the nature of the distinction between transcendental and subjective idealism, and was demanded by the new Refutation of Idealism which in the second edition he had attached to the Postulates.

807 It follows immediately upon the passage quoted above, p. 206.

808 W. x. pp. 125-6.

809 A 89 = B 121. I adopt B. Erdmann’s reading of auf for als.

810 A 88 = B 120.

811 A 90.

812 As we have already found (above, p. 27 n. 1), it had not been attained at the time when the Introduction to the first edition was written.

813 A 95-96.

814 A 97.

815 A. 95; cf. A 96.

816 A 111.

817 Loc. cit.

818 A 112.

819 A 111.

820 A 112-14.

821 A 110-14.

822 I. § 14 C Vaihinger regards as intermediate in date, but it is a comparatively unimportant paragraph, and may for the present be left out of account. Cf. below, pp. 225-6.

823 A 118-19.

824 A 124.

825 Loc. cit.

826 A 115.

827 A 76-9 = B 102-4. Not yet commented upon.

828 Cf. Vaihinger, loc. cit. p. 63.

829 A 77 = B 102. Cf. above, pp. 96-7.

830 Loc. cit.

831 For explanation of the exact meaning in which these terms are employed and for discussion of the complicated issues involved, cf. below, p. 270 ff.

832 Cf. A 118.

833 A 102.

834 A 99-100.

835 A 102.

836 A 100.

837 A 101. Cf. below, p. 255.

838 Pp. 238, 263 ff.

839 Cf. above, p. 211.

840 For Vaihinger’s own statement of it, cf. op. cit. pp. 79-98.

841 Nos. 64-5, 117, 140-5.

842 No. 146.

843 Nos. 41, 81.

844 No. 104.

845 Cf. Nos. 964-5.

846 No. 947.

847 No. 948.

848 No. 949.

849 No. 952.

850 This is Erdmann’s reading. Vaihinger substitutes allgemein for allein, but without reason given.

851 No. 935. The translation is literal. Kant in the last sentence changes from singular to plural.

852 No. 964.

853 Cf. also Nos. 957, 961. The latter shows how Kant already connected the categories of relation with the logical functions of judgment.

854 Reicke, Nos. 7, 8, 10-18 (pp. 16-26, 29-49).

855 The chief relevant passages have been quoted above, p. 209.

856 The letter is given in W. x. p. 173.

857 Reicke, pp. 113-16.

858 According to Adickes the Critique was “brought to completion” in the first half of 1780; in Vaihinger’s view, on the other hand, Kant was occupied with it from April to September. Cf. above, p. xx.

859 In two respects, however, fragment B 12 anticipates the teaching of the fourth stage: (a) in suggesting (p. 114) the necessity of a pure synthesis of pure intuition, and (b) in equating (p. 115) synthesis of apprehension with synthesis of imagination.

860 Pp. 231-3.

861 Cf. below, pp. 268-9.

862 In B 160 Kant states that the synthesis of apprehension is only empirical; and in B 152 we find the following emphatic sentence: “In so far as the faculty of imagination is spontaneously active I sometimes also name it [i.e. in addition to entitling it transcendental and figurative] productive, and thereby distinguish it from the reproductive imagination whose synthesis is subject only to empirical laws, i.e. those of association, and which therefore contributes nothing in explanation of the possibility of a priori knowledge. Hence it belongs, not to transcendental philosophy, but to psychology.” Cf. the directly counter statement in A 102: “The reproductive synthesis of the faculty of imagination must be counted among the transcendental actions of the mind.”

863 Though, as we shall find, the deduction of the second edition is in certain respects more mature, it is in other respects less complete.

864 A 314 = B 370.

865 A x-xi. Cf. above, pp. 50-1.

866 Cf. below, pp. 543 ff., 576-7.

867 Whether it was the chief reason is decidedly open to question. The un-Critical character of its teaching as regards the function of empirical concepts and of the transcendental object, and the unsatisfactoriness of its doctrine of a threefold synthesis, would of themselves account for the omission. The passage in the chapter on phenomena and noumena (A 250 ff.) in which the doctrine of the transcendental object is again developed was likewise omitted in the second edition.

868 Cf. below, pp. 238, 263 ff.

869 Cf. also in Methodology, below, p. 543 ff.

870 Cf. above, pp. xxxvi, xxxvii-viii, 36; below, pp. 241-3.

871 Cf. below, p. 543 ff.

872 A xi.

873 A 100-1.

874 Kant’s failure either to distinguish or to connect the two deductions in any really clear and consistent manner is a defect which is accentuated rather than diminished in the second edition. Though the sections devoted to the subjective enquiry are omitted, and the argument of the objective deduction is so recast as to increase the emphasis laid upon its more strictly logical aspects, the teaching of the subjective deduction is retained and influences the argument at every point. For the new deduction, no less than that of the first edition, rests throughout upon the initial assumption that though connection or synthesis can never be given, it is yet the generative source of all consciousness of order and relation.

875 It appears most clearly in Kant’s proof of the category of causality in the second Analogy. Cf. below, p. 364 ff.

876 Cf. below, pp. 252-3, 258, 287, 333, 343.

877 Cf. above, p. 208 ff.

878 Cf. above, pp. l-ii, 207-12; below, pp. 260-3, 272-3, 327-8, 473-7, 515.

879 P. 239.

880 A 99.

881 A 102.

882 A 103.

883 Loc. cit.

884 Loc. cit.

885 A 100-1.

886 A 106.

887 A 101.

888 Such statements are in direct conflict with his own repeated assertions in other passages that reproduction and recognition are always merely empirical. Cf. above, pp. 227-31, and below, pp. 264, 268-9.

889 B 139-40.

890 In the first edition the subjective and objective deductions shade into one another; and this question is raised in the section on synthesis of recognition (A 104), where, as above noted (p. 204 ff.), Kant’s argument is largely pre-Critical, empirical concepts exercising the functions which Kant later ascribed to the categories. But as we have already considered the resulting doctrine of the transcendental object both in its earlier and in its subsequent form, we may at once pass to the more mature teaching of the other sections.

891 Cf. above, p. 204 ff.

892 Memory is only one particular mode in which recognition presents itself in our experience; Kant’s purpose is to show that it is not more fundamental, nor more truly constitutive of apperception, than is recognition in any of its other manifestations. Indeed the central contention of the objective deduction is that it is through consciousness of objects, i.e. through consciousness of objective meanings, that self-consciousness comes to be actualised at all. Only in contrast with, and through relation to, an objective system is consciousness of inner experience, past or present, and therefore self-consciousness in its contingent empirical forms, possible to the mind. Cf. above, pp. li-ii; below, pp. 260-3.

893 B 134.

894 A 116.

895 Cf. above, p. 242; below, pp. 258, 332-3.

896 Cf. A 111.

897 A 117 n.

898 This transcendental psychology is considered below (p. 263 ff.), in its connection with the later stages of the subjective deduction. Cf. above, p. 238.

899 A 113-14.

900 Cf. above, p. 229.

901 Cf. A 100-1.

902 A 122-3.

903 Cf. B 140-3; B 151-2; B 164-5 5 and below, p. 286.

904 Here again the second edition text is more explicit than the first: “This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgment, or why space and time are the sole forms of our possible intuition.”—B 145-6. Cf. above, pp. xxxiii-vi, xliv, 57, 142, 186; below, pp. 291, 411.

905 Cf. above, pp. 252-3.

906 The second Analogy embodies the argument which is implied in, and necessary to, the establishment of the assertions dogmatically made in A 111-12.

907 A 119.

908 Cf. A 128. On this whole question cf. above, p. 242; below, pp. 287-8.

909 Cf. A 113, 125-9.

910 A 107, 111.

911 The explanation given in the second edition (B 132) is artificial, and does not reveal Kant’s real reasons. It is also obscure owing to its employment of dynamical terms to denote the relation of apperception to self-consciousness.

912 Cf. above, pp. 251-3.

913 Cf. A 112, 113, 128.

914 A 114.

915 A 94, 115, 118. Cf. also end of note to B 134.

916 Cf. above, pp. lii, 207-12, 243; below, pp. 327-8, 473-7, 515.

917 This is shown, not only by Kant’s ethical writings, but also by his less formal utterances, especially in his Lectures on Metaphysics and on Religion, in his Reflexionen, and in his Lose Blätter.

918 Cf. below, pp. 277-8.

919 Cf. above, pp. l-lii; below, pp. 277 ff., 461-2, 473-7.

920 In note to B 162 they are indeed identified.

921 Kant’s vacillating attitude appears in the added phrase “of whose activity we are hardly ever conscious.” Cf. A 78: it is a “blind” power.

922 Cf. above, p. 225; below, p. 337.

923 A 138 = B 177.

924 A 118.

925 Cf. above, p. 253 ff.

926 A 123.

927 A 121-3.

928 A 125-6.

929 Above, pp. 74 ff., 238, 252.

930 Cf. above, pp. 96-7.

931 Cf. below, pp. 367, 371-2.

932 Cf. above, pp. 211, 227, 233-4.

933 In direct contradiction of his previous view of transcendental imagination as purely productive, it is now stated that it is reproductive. Cf. A 102.

934 Cf. above, pp. 225 ff., 264.

935 It must be remembered that this was also rendered necessary by the archaic character of their teaching in regard to the transcendental object and the function of empirical concepts.

936 Cf. B 151-2. There is no mention, however, of objective affinity.

937 B 160-1. Cf. above, pp. 226-9.

938 In what follows I make use of an article, entitled “The Problem of Knowledge,” which I have contributed to the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (1912), vol. ix. pp. 113-28.

939 The same wide sense in which Kant employs “empirical idealism.”

940 Cf. above, pp. xliii-v, 208; below, pp. 295-6, 298 ff. Hume and Spinoza are the only pre-Kantian thinkers of whose position the last statement is not strictly descriptive, but even they failed to escape its entangling influence.

941 Cf. A 28-9; also Lectures on Metaphysics (Pölitz’s edition, 1821), p. 188 ff. In Kant’s posthumously published work, his Transition from the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science to Physics, it is asserted in at least twenty-six distinct passages that sensations are due to the action of “the moving forces of matter” upon the sense-organs. Cf. below, p. 283 n. 2. In his Ueber das Organ der Seele (1796) (Hartenstein, vi. p. 457 ff.), Kant agrees with Sömmerring in holding that the soul has virtual, i.e. dynamical, though not local, presence in the fluid contained in the cavity of the brain.

942 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, Bk. i. ch. i. § iii.

943 Cf. below, pp. 279 ff., 293-6, 312 ff., 321, 361 n. 3, 384-5, 464-5, 476.

944 Cf. below, pp. 279-80, and pp. 293-4, on inner sense.

945 i. p. 339: “Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each Thought, dies away and is replaced by another.... Each later Thought, knowing and including thus the Thoughts which went before, is the final receptacle—and appropriating them is the final owner—of all that they contain and own. Each Thought is thus born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor. As Kant says [cf. below, pp. 461-2], it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion but knowledge of it, and a first ball were to transmit both its motion and its consciousness to a second, which took both up into its consciousness and passed them to a third, until the last ball held all that the other balls had held, and realized it as its own.”

946 I here use “objective” in its modern meaning: I am not concerned with the special meaning which Descartes himself attached to the terms objective and formaliter.

947 Pp. 277-8.

948 On this whole matter cf. above, p. xlv; below, pp. 312-21 on Kant’s Refutation of Idealism; pp. 373-4 on the Second Analogy; pp. 407 ff., 414 ff. on Phenomena and Noumena; p. 461 ff. on the Paralogisms; and p. 546. Cf. also A 277-8 = B 334.

949 P. 267 ff.

950 Though the posthumously published work of Kant’s old age, his Transition from the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science to Physics, bears the marks of weakening powers, and is much too incomplete and obscure to allow of any very assured deductions from its teaching, it is none the less significant that it is largely occupied in attempting to define the relation in which the objective world of physical science stands to the sensible world of ordinary consciousness. As above noted (p. 275 n.), it is there asserted in at least twenty-six distinct passages that sensations are due to the action of “the moving forces of matter” upon the sense-organs. What is even more significant is the adoption and frequent occurrence (Altpreussische Monatsschrift (1882), pp. 236, 287, 289, 290, 292, 294, 295-6, 300, 308, 429, 436, 439) of the phrase “Erscheinung von der Erscheinung.” Kant would seem to mean by “Erscheinung vom ersten Range” (op. cit. p. 436) (i.e. appearance as such), the objective world as determined by physical science; and by “Erscheinung vom zweiten Range” (i.e. appearance of the appearance), this same objective world as known in terms of the sensations which material bodies generate by acting on the sense-organs. Kant adds that the former is known directly, and the latter indirectly—meaning, apparently, that the former is known through a priori forms native to the understanding, and the latter only in terms of sense-data which are mechanically conditioned (cf. loc. cit. pp. 286, 292, and 444 n. The terms latter and former on p. 300 have got transposed).

951 Cf. below pp. 312-21, 373-4, 414 ff., 425 ff., 558 ff.

952 B 129.

953 B 161 n.

954 B 130-1.

955 B 131.

956 B 131-4.

957 B 131.

958 Cf. B 138.

959 B 135.

960 B 136-40.

961 B 140-2.

962 B 143.

963 §§ 21-27.

964 Above, pp. 252-3, 258, 287.

965 Prolegomena, § 18.

966 Op. cit. § 20.

967 Op. cit. §§ 18-19; Eng. trans. pp. 54-5.

968 Cf. above, pp. 39-40, 286-7.

969 Cf. below, p. 370.

970 Op. cit. § 22. Cf. below, p. 311 n. 4.

971 §§ 21-7.

972 B 143.

973 This leads on in the second paragraph of § 21 to further statements, already commented upon above, pp. 186, 257-8. Cf. also § 23.

974 Cf. also § 24.

975 Cf. above, pp. 90 ff., 171, 226-9, 267-70; below, p. 337.

976 Cf. above, pp. 28, 47, 114, 141-2.

977 Cf. § 21, second paragraph.

978 Cf. above, pp. 160, 186, 257, and below, pp. 325-6, 330-1, 390-1, 404 ff.

979 Cf. below, pp. 324, 329.

980 Above, p. 148.

981 Cf. above, pp. xliii-v, l-ii, 238, 261-2, 263 ff., 273 ff.; below, pp. 295 ff., 322 ff.

982 Cf. B 67-8; A 33 = B 49.

983 B 67.

984 B xxxix n.

985 Kant very probably arrived at this view of inner sense under the influence of Tetens who teaches a similar doctrine in his Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung. Cf. Bd. i.; Versuch i. 7, 8. The first volume of Tetens’ work was published in 1777 (re-issued by the Kantgesellschaft in 1913), and had been carefully read by Kant prior to the final preparation of the Critique. Cf. B. Erdmann, Kriticismus, p. 51.

986 Cf. A. 128-9.

987 As just noted, it is in the second edition that the above view of the content of inner sense is first definitely formulated.

988 A 33 = B 49-50.

989 A 34 = B 50.

990 Cf. above, pp. 208-9, 251-2, 260-4; below, 311 n. 4. It may be observed that Caird (i. pp. 625-7) interprets inner sense as equivalent to inner reflection. This is one of the respects in which Caird’s Hegelian standpoint has led him to misrepresent even Kant’s most central doctrines.

991 Cf. below, pp. 399-400, and A 277-8 = B 333-4.

992 Above, p. 292.

993 Cf. above, p. 155.

994 Cf. Vaihinger in Strassburger Abhandlungen zur Philosophie (1884), p. 106 ff.

995 Section III., Prop. XII Usus.

996 Theil II. Hauptstück II. W. ii. p. 364.

997 § 11.

998 Pölitz’s edition (1821), pp. 100-2.

999 W. iv. p. 373 ff.

1000 It may be noted that in the Aesthetic (A 38 = B 55) Kant employs the term idealism, without descriptive epithet, in the same manner as in his pre-Critical writings, as signifying a position that must be rejected.

1001 Cf. below, p. 301 ff.

1002 Pp. 307-8.

1003 Cf. A 368-9 and 372.

1004 A 377: a passage which bears signs of being a later interpolation.

1005 B 274.

1006 A 368-9.

1007 A 369.

1008 A 28 = B 44. Cf. above, pp. 76, 116-17.

1009 A 370.

1010 Loc. cit.

1011 A 372.

1012 A 373: Weil indessen, etc.

1013 Adickes regards them as later additions. To judge by their content (cf. above, pp. 204 ff., 215-16, on Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental object), they are more probably of quite early origin.

1014 A 377-8.

1015 Adickes argues that this paragraph is subsequent to the main body of the Analytic, but that is in keeping with the tendency which he seems to show of dating passages, which cannot belong to the “Brief Outline,” later rather than earlier.

1016 A 375.

1017 The remaining passages in the fourth Paralogism, together with the corresponding passages in B 274 ff., in Kant’s note to B xxxix, and in B 291-3, are separately dealt with below, pp. 308 ff., 322 ff., 462-3.

1018 A 377.

1019 Loc. cit.

1020 E.g. Garve.

1021 § 13, W. iv. pp. 288-9: Eng. trans. p. 42.

1022 Loc. cit.

1023 Op. cit. pp. 289-90: Eng. trans. pp. 43-4.

1024 In Note II.

1025 § 49, W. iv. 336: Eng. trans. p. 99.

1026 Anhang, W. iv. p. 375 n.

1027 W. iv. p. 374: Eng. trans. p. 147.

1028 Cf. above, p. 155 ff.

1029 W. iv. p. 375.

1030 W. iv. p. 375: Eng. trans. p. 147-8.

1031 Cf. above, p. 156.

1032 As already noted above, p. 299, it is employed by Kant in his lectures on Metaphysics.

1033 Kant’s phrase “in space outside me” is on Kant’s principles really pleonastic. Cf. Prolegomena, § 49; Eng. trans, p. 101: “the notion ‘outside me’ only signifies existence in space.” Cf. A 373.

1034 Cf. text as altered by note to B xxxviii.

1035 B xxxix.

1036 B 291-2. The remaining points in B 274 ff. as well as in B xxxix n. are separately dealt with below, p. 322 ff.

1037 The nearest approach to such teaching in the first edition is in A 33 = B 50. Cf. above, pp. 135-8.

1038 Cf. below, pp. 333, 341, 360, 384-5.

1039 Adamson (Development of Modern Philosophy, i. p. 241) takes the opposite view as to what is Kant’s intended teaching, but remarks upon its inconsistency with Kant’s own fundamental principles. “Now, in truth, Kant grievously endangers his own doctrine by insisting on the absence of a priori elements from our apprehension of the mental life; for it follows from that, if taken rigorously, that according to Kant sense and understanding are not so much sources which unite in producing knowledge, as, severally, sources of distinct kinds of apprehension. If we admit at all, in respect to inner sense, that there is some kind of apprehension without the work of understanding, then it has been acknowledged that sense is per se adequate to furnish a kind of apprehension.” As pointed out above (p. 296), by the same line of reasoning Kant is disabled from viewing inner consciousness as merely reflective. In other words it can neither be more immediate nor less sensuous than outer perception. Cf. below, pp. 361, n. 3, 384-5.

1040 Above, pp. xlvi, 275-82; below, pp. 313-14, 384-5.

1041 Above, pp. 276, 279-80; below, pp. 312, 384-5.

1042 Cf. below, p. 361.

1043 Cf. Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science (1786), W. iv. pp. 470-1. It should be observed, however, that the reasons which Kant gives in this treatise for denying that psychology can ever become more than a merely historical or descriptive discipline are not that the objects of inner sense fall outside the realm of mechanically determined existence. Kant makes no assertion that even distantly implies any such view. His reasons are—(1) that, as time has only one dimension, the main body of mathematical science is not applicable to the phenomena of inner sense and their laws; (2) that such phenomena are capable only of a merely ideal, not of an experimental, analysis; (3) that, as the objects of inner sense do not consist of parts outside each other, their parts are not substances, and may therefore be conceived as diminishing in intensity or passing out of existence without prejudice to the principle of the permanence of substance (op. cit. p. 542, quoted below, p. 361, n. 2); (4) that inner observation is limited to the individual’s own existence; (5) that the very act of introspection alters the state of the object observed.

1044 A 370.

1045 B 275. These two sentences are cited in this connection by Vaihinger: Strassburger Abhandlungen zur Philosophie (1884), p. 131.

1046 Above, pp. xlv-vii, 279 ff.

1047 Cf. also above, pp. 275-7.

1048 § 13, Anmerkung II.

1049 Kriticismus, p. 197 ff.

1050 Mind (1879), iv. p. 408 ff.; (1880), v. p. 111.

1051 A Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879), p. 107 ff.; Mind (1878), iii. p. 481; iv. p. 115; vi. p. 260.

1052 Op. cit. p. 128 ff.

1053 Critical Philosophy, i. 632 ff.; Mind (1879), iv. pp. 112, 560-1; v. p. 115.

1054 The Philosophy of Kant, p. 249 ff.

1055 The one fundamental question to which Erdmann would seem to allow that Kant gives conflicting answers is as to whether or not categories can be transcendently employed. The assumption of a uniform teaching is especially obvious in Sidgwick’s comments; cf. Mind (1880), v. p. 113; Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant (1905), p. 28.

1056 Cf. above, pp. 303-4.

1057 A 491 = B 520.

1058 A 225-6 = B 273.

1059 A 495-6 = B 523-4.

1060 Cf. below, p. 506.

1061 Viz. A 225-6 = B 273.

1062 B 277.

1063 Above, p. 208 ff.

1064 A 346 = B 404.

1065 A 224-5 = B 272-3.

1066 Cf. B 277.

1067 Quoted by B. Erdmann: Kriticismus, p. 107.

1068 B xxxix n., 67-8, 70, 157-8 with appended note, 276-8, 422 n., 427-9.

1069 B 70, 157, 428.

1070 B 157.

1071 B 157 n. Regarding the un-Critical character of Kant’s language in this passage, and of the tendencies which inspire it, cf. below, p. 329.

1072 B 157.

1073 B 429.

1074 Cf. B 277-8 and B 157.

1075 B 278.

1076 B 420 and B 422 n.

1077 B 422 n.

1078 Cf. above, pp. 204 ff., 404 ff.

1079 Cf. above, p. 204 ff.

1080 B 406.

1081 B 422 n. Though both concepts are denoted by the same term, they may not—such is the implication—be for that reason identified.

1082 B 429. Kant does not, however, even in the second edition, hold consistently to this position. In the sentence immediately preceding that just quoted he equates the transcendental self with the notion of “object in general.” “I represent myself to myself neither as I am nor as I appear to myself, but think myself only as I do any object in general from whose mode of intuition I abstract.”

1083 The broader bearing of this view may be noted. If consistently developed, it must involve the assertion that noumenal reality is apprehended in terms of the Ideas of reason, for these are the only other concepts at the disposal of the mind. Cf. above, pp. liii-v, 217-18; below, pp. 331, 390-1, 414-17, 426 ff., 558-61.

1084 A 402.

1085 It is doubtful whether A 401-2 represents a genuinely Critical position. Several of its phrases seem reminiscent of Kant’s semi-Critical view of the nature of apperception. This is especially true of the assertion that self-consciousness is “itself unconditioned.”

1086 A 346 = B 404. Cf. below, pp. 456, 461-2.

1087 Cf. A 345.

1088 That he does not really do so is clear from the context and also from the manner in which he restated this argument in the second edition (B 421-2).

1089 A 401-2, B 421-2; below, pp. 461-2.

1090 A 402; cf. B 407.

1091 Cf. B 421-2.

1092 Cf. above, pp. l-ii, 208-9, 260-3.

1093 Cf. above, loc. cit.

1094 Cf. B 157-8 and 157 n., B 278, B 428-9.

1095 Above, pp. 295-6, 311 n. 4.

1096 There is this difference between the category of existence and the categories of relation, namely, that it would seem to be impossible to distinguish between a determinate and an indeterminate application of it. Either we assert existence or we do not; there is no such third alternative as in the case of the categories of substance and causality. The category of substance, determinately used, signifies material existence in space and time; indeterminately applied it is the purely problematic and merely logical notion of something that is always a subject and never a predicate. The determinate category of causality is the conception of events conditioning one another in time; indeterminately employed it signifies only the quite indefinite notion of a ground or condition. Also, Kant’s explicit teaching (A 597 ff. = B 625 ff.) is that the notion of existence stands in an altogether different position from other predicates. It is not an attribute constitutive of the concept of the subject to which it is applied, but is simply the positing of the content of that concept as a whole. Nor, again, is it a relational form for the articulation of content. These would seem to be the reasons why no distinction is possible between a determinate and an indeterminate application of the notion of existence, and why, therefore, Kant, in defending the possible dual employment of it, has difficulty in holding consistently to the doctrines expounded in the Postulates. He is, by his own explicit teaching, interdicted from declaring that the notion of existence is both a category and not a category, or, in other words, that it may vary in meaning according as empirical or noumenal reality is referred to, and that only in the former case is it definite and precise. Yet such a view would, perhaps, better harmonise with certain other lines of thought which first obtain statement in the Dialectic. For though it is in the Dialectic that Kant expounds his grounds for holding that existence and content are separate and independent, it is there also that he first begins to realise the part which the Ideas of Reason are called upon to play in the drawing of the distinction between appearance and reality.

1097 In the Fortschritte (Werke (Hartenstein), viii. p. 548 ff.) this final step is quite definitely taken. Cf. below, pp. 390-1, 414-17, 426 ff., 558-61. We have, as we shall find, to recognise a second fundamental conflict in Kant’s thinking, additional to that between subjectivism and phenomenalism. He alternates between what may be entitled the sceptical and the Idealist views of the function of Reason and of its relation to the understanding, or otherwise stated, between the regulative and the absolutist view of the nature of thought. But this conflict first gains explicit expression in the Dialectic.

1098 For Kant’s use of the terms ‘canon’ and ‘dialectic’ cf. above, pp. 72, 77-8, 173-4, and below, p. 425 ff.

1099 Above, pp. 181-2.

1100 As we shall have occasion to observe below (p. 336), when Kant defines judgment as “the faculty of subsumption under rules,” he is really defining it in terms of the process of reasoning, and thus violating the principle which he is professedly following in dividing the Transcendental Logic into the Analytic of Concepts, the Analytic of Judgment, and the Dialectic of Reasoning.

1101 A 132 = B 171.

1102 Pp. 252-3, 258-9, 287-8.

1103 The passages that have gone to constitute this chapter are probably quite late in date of writing. This would seem to be proved by the view taken of productive imagination, and also by the fact that in the Reflexionen there is no mention of schematism.

1104 Cf. above, p. 176 ff.

1105 Cf. A 137 = B 176. “The empirical concept of a plate is homogeneous with the pure geometrical concept of a circle, since the roundness which is thought in the former can be intuited in the latter.”

1106 A 138 = B 177.

1107 Above, p. 334.

1108 Cf. E. Curtius, Das Schematismuskapitel in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Kantstudien, Bd. xix. p. 348 ff.).

1109 Op. cit. § 58.

1110 A 138 = B 177. Cf. above, pp. 96-7.

1111 A 141 = B 180.

1112 Cf. above, pp. 268-9.

1113 Cf. above, pp. 133-4.

1114 A 140 = B 179.

1115 Loc. cit.

1116 Cf. E. Curtius, op. cit. p. 356.

1117 Kant’s other definition of the schema as “a rule for the determination of our intuition in accordance with a certain universal concept” (A 141 = B 180) is open to similar objections. When, however, Kant states that “schemata, and not images, underlie our pure sensuous concepts,” he seems to be inclining to the truer view that the schema is the concept.

1118 Above, pp. 131-3.

1119 Cf. Riehl, Philos. Krit. 2nd ed. i. pp. 488, 533. Cf. above, pp. 195-6, 198; below, pp. 404-5.

1120 Critical Philosophy, i. bk. i. chap. v., especially pp. 437 and 440.

1121 Theorie der Erfahrung, second edition, p. 384.

1122 Op. cit. p. 532.

1123 Cf. above, pp. 240-3.

1124 For comment upon the definition of number, which Kant takes as being the schema of quantity, and upon the view of arithmetic which this definition may seem to imply, cf. above, p. 128 ff.

1125 Cf. above, p. 192.

1126 Cf. above, pp. 339-40, and below, pp. 357, 404 ff.

1127 Cf. above, pp. 20, 25, 290-1; below, pp. 407, 412, 414-17.

1128 E.g. Riehl, Philos. Krit. 2nd ed. i. pp. 535-6.

1129 Above, pp. 258, 332-3.

1130 A 148 = B 188.

1131 A 156 = B 195.

1132 A 157 = B 196.

1133 A 24.

1134 § 13, Anmerkung i.

1135 B 40-1.

1136 B 110.

1137 A 160 = B 199-200.

1138 Cf. above, pp. 288-9.

1139 A 161-2 = B 201-2.

1140 Cf. below, pp. 510-11.

1141 A 178-9 = B 221.

1142 Cf. above, pp. 94-5.

1143 Cf. below, pp. 358-9, 367-8, 371-2, 381-2.

1144 Above, p. 309 ff.

1145 Cf. Adickes, K. p. 190 n.

1146 Cf. above, p. 127 ff.

1147 That is to say, in the first edition.

1148 The phrase is followed, it may be observed, by a verb in the irregular.

1149 A 143 = B 182.

1150 Loc. cit. in the chapter on Schematism.

1151 Loc. cit. Italics not in Kant.

1152 Cf. A 175 = B 217. Cf. above, pp. 350-1.

1153 B 217-18.

1154 Cf. above, pp. 192, 341.

1155 A 169-70 = B 211-12. For comment upon Kant’s view of the point as a limit, cf. below, p. 489 ff.

1156 Though Kant maintains in A 171 = B 212-13 that owing to our dependence upon empirical data and our necessary ignorance of the nature of the causal relation we cannot similarly demonstrate the principle of the continuity of change, he has himself, in characteristically inconsistent fashion, given three such demonstrations. Cf. below, pp. 380-1.

1157 Cf. Kant’s Monadologia physica (1756), and New Doctrine of Motion and Rest (1758). Kant’s final statement of this dynamical theory is given in his Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science (1786).

1158 In this matter Kant regards himself as defending the Newtonian theory of an attractive gravitational force. The mechanistic view admits only one form of action, viz. transference of motion through impact and pressure. “From... Democritus to Descartes, indeed up to our own day, the mechanistic method of explanation... has, under the title of atomism or corpuscular philosophy, maintained its authority with but slight modification; and has continued to exercise its influence upon the principles of natural science. Its essential teaching consists in the assumption of the absolute impenetrability of primitive matter, in the absolute homogeneity of its constitution (difference of shape being the sole remaining difference), and in the absolutely indestructible coherence of matter in its fundamental corpuscles” (Metaphysical First Principles, W. vol. iv. p. 533; ii. Allgemeine Anmerkung, 4).

1159 This is additional to its other correlative assumption of the absolute void. “The absolute void and the absolutely full are in the doctrine of nature very much what blind chance and blind fate are in metaphysical cosmology, namely, a barrier to the enquiring reason, which either causes its place to be taken by arbitrary fictions, or lays it to rest on the pillow of obscure qualities” (Metaphysical First Principles, W. vol. iv. p. 532 (I read forschende for herrschende)). “There are only two methods of procedure...: the mechanistic, through combination of the absolutely full with the absolute void, or an opposite dynamical method, that of explaining all material differences through mere differences in the combination of the original forces of repulsion and attraction” (loc. cit.).

1160 In the first edition Kant formulates this principle in the light of his extremely misleading distinction between mathematical and dynamical principles (cf. above, pp. 345-7): “All appearances, as regards their existence, are subject a priori to rules determining their relation to one another in one time.”

1161 Cf. below, p. 358.

1162 In A 182 = B 225 the stronger term change (Wechsel) is employed.

1163 A 178-80 = B 221-3 (on the distinction between mathematical and dynamical principles) has been commented upon above, pp. 345-7.

1164 Philos. Krit. 2nd ed. i. p. 545. Caird adopts a similar view, i. pp. 540, 580.

1165 A 181 = B 224.

1166 Cf. below, pp. 373-4.

1167 That is to say, in the first edition.

1168 Cf. above, pp. 332-3, 343-4.

1169 Cf. above, p. 348; below, pp. 367-8, 371-2, 381-2.

1170 Cf. above, pp. 94, 135-8, 309 ff., 347-8.

1171 That is to say, in the first edition.

1172 The new proof added in the second edition calls for no special comment. In all essentials it agrees with this second proof of the first edition. It differs only in such ways as are called for by the mode of formulating the principle in the second edition.

1173 This statement, as Caird has pointed out (i. p. 541), is extremely questionable. “It may be objected that to say that ‘time itself does not change’ is like saying that passing away does not itself pass away. So far the endurance of time and the permanence of the changing might even seem to mean only that the moments of time never cease to pass away, and the changing never ceases to change. A perpetual flux would therefore sufficiently ’represent’ all the permanence that is in time.” This is not, however, in itself a vital objection to Kant’s argument. For he is here stating more than his argument really requires. Events are dated in a single time, not in an unchanging time. Kant’s statement betrays the extent to which, as Bergson has very justly pointed out, Kant spatialises time, i.e. interprets it on the analogy of space. It is based on “the mixed idea of a measurable time, which is space in so far as it is homogeneity, and duration in so far as it is succession; that is to say, at bottom, the contradictory idea of succession in simultaneity” (Les Données immédiates, p. 173, Eng. trans. p. 228).

1174 Cf. A 184 = B 227: “the proposition, that substance is permanent, is tautological.”

1175 Cf. A 188 = B 231.

1176 Above, p. 341.

1177 Cf. above, p. 309 ff.

1178 B. Erdmann’s edition of the Nachträge, lxxx. p. 32. Cited by Caird, i. pp. 541-2.

1179 Op. cit. pp. 33-4.

1180 That Kant does not mean to imply that the category of substance has no application to the contents of inner sense is made clear by a curious argument in the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science (1786), W. iv. p. 542: “What in this proof essentially characterises substance, which is possible only in space and under spatial conditions, and therefore only as object of the outer senses, is that its quantity cannot be increased or diminished without substance coming into being or ceasing to be. For the quantity of an object which is possible only in space must consist of parts which are external to one another, and these, therefore, if they are real (something movable), must necessarily be substances. On the other hand, that which is viewed as object of inner sense can, as substance, have a quantity which does not consist of parts external to one another. Its parts are therefore not substances, and their coming into being and ceasing to be must not be regarded as creation or annihilation of a substance. Their increase or diminution is therefore possible without prejudice to the principle of the permanence of substance.” (Italics not in Kant.) Cf. also Prolegomena, § 49, and below, pp. 367, 377 n. 3.

1181 A 187 = B 230.

1182 K. p. 211 n.

1183 C. A 205-7 = B 252.

1184 Werke (Frauenstädt, 1873), i. p. 85 ff.

1185 As evidence of this failure I may cite Schopenhauer’s comment upon A 371 and 372: “From these passages it is quite clear that for Kant the perception of outer things in space is antecedent to all application of the causal law, and that this law does not therefore enter into it as its element and condition: mere sensation amounts in Kant’s view to perception” (Werke, i. p. 81). Even when, as in the passages referred to, Kant is speaking in his most subjectivist vein, he gives no justification for any such assertion. Schopenhauer, notwithstanding his sincere admiration for Kant—“I owe what is best in my own system to the impression made upon me by the works of Kant, by the sacred writings of the Hindoos, and by Plato” (World as Will and Idea, Werke, ii. p. 493, Eng. trans. ii. p. 5)—is one of the most unreliable of Kant’s critics. His comments are extremely misleading, and largely for the reason that he was interested in Kant only as he could obtain from him confirmation of his own philosophical tenets. Several of these tenets he certainly derived directly from the Critique; but they are placed by him in so entirely different a setting that their essential meaning is greatly altered. We have already noted (above, p. 41) Schopenhauer’s exaggerated statement of Kant’s intuitive theory of mathematics. Kant’s subjectivism is similarly expounded in a one-sided and quite unrepresentative manner (cf. below, p. 407 n.). Hutchison Stirling’s criticisms of Kant in his Text Book to Kant are vitiated by a similar failure to recognise the completely un-Critical character of the occasional passages in which Kant admits a distinction between “judgments of perception” and “judgments of experience” (cf. above, pp. 288-9). Stirling (cf. below, p. 377) has amplified his criticism of Kant in Princeton Review (Jan. 1879, pp. 178-210), Fortnightly Review (July 1872), and in Mind (ix., 1884, p. 531, and x., 1885, p. 45).

1186 Cf. above, pp. 240-2, 365, and below, p. 377.

1187 Cf. Stout, Manual of Psychology, third edition, pp. 444-6: “Unless we assume from the outset that the primitive mind treats a perceived change which challenges its interest and attention, not as something self-existent in isolation, but as something conditioned by and conditioning other changes, it seems hopeless to attempt to show how this causal point of view could have arisen through any extension of knowledge in accordance with ascertained psychological laws and conditions.... There is good reason for denying that customary repetition is even required to furnish a first occasion or opportunity for the first emergence of the apprehension of causal relations. For, as we have already insisted, the process of learning by experience is from the first experimental.... Regularities are only found because they are sought. But it is in the seeking that the category of causal unity is primarily involved.” Cf. below, pp. 371-2.

1188 A 193 = B 238.

1189 A 191 = B 236.

1190 By an “arbitrary” order Kant does not, of course, mean an order of succession that is not determined, but only one that is determined by subjectively conditioned direction of attention. Cf. below, p. 377.

1191 Cf. A 199 = B 244, and above, pp. 133, 288-9; below, p. 377.

1192 Cf. A 195-6 = B 240-1, and above, pp. 172, 176 ff., 182-3, 263 ff., 277-8.

1193 A 736-7 = B 765. Italics of last sentence not in Kant.

1194 A 189-94 = B 234-9: first to fourth paragraphs (first edition).

1195 Cf. above, pp. 348, 358.

1196 Cf. A 192-3 = B 238-9.

1197 Cf. Riehl, Philosophischer Kriticismus (second edition), i. pp. 551-2. While recognising the above main point, Riehl seems to assert that empirical sequence determines the application of the causal concept. It would be truer, and more in accordance with the position which Kant is endeavouring to establish, to assert that appeal to constancy of sequence enables us to determine which antecedents of any given event are causal conditions. The principle of causality is already applied when the sequent experiences are apprehended as sequent events. This ambiguity, however, would seem to be due only to Riehl’s mode of expression. For, as he himself says (p. 551), the law of causality is a ground of experience, and cannot therefore be derived from it. Cf. above, pp. 267-8, 367.

1198 Pp. 365-71, 377.

1199 A 191 = B 236. Cf. above, pp. 216-18.

1200 As pointed out above, this is really a secondary meaning which Kant reads into the term analogy; it is not the true explanation of his choice of the term.

1201 Critical Philosophy of Kant, vol. i. pp. 540, 580.

1202 Kant, p. 198: trans. by Creighton and Lefevre, p. 196.

1203 Cf. above, pp. 270 ff., 313-21.

1204 Kant, of course, recognises that we cannot make any such positive assertion; to do so would be to transcend the limits imposed by Critical principles. Cf. below, p. 382.

1205 A 194-6 = B 239-41: fifth to seventh paragraphs (first edition).

1206 A 196-9 = B 241-4: eighth to tenth paragraphs (first edition).

1207 A 199-201 = B 244-6: eleventh to thirteenth paragraphs (first edition).

1208 Cf. above, pp. 224 ff., 264 ff.; below, 377.

1209 A 201-2 = B 246-7: fourteenth paragraph (first edition).

1210 B 233-4: second paragraph (second edition).

1211 B 233-4.

1212 From A 202 = B 247 to the end.

1213 Kant’s phenomenalist substitute for the Cartesian subjectivism (cf. above, pp. 270 ff., 312 ff.) enables him to develop this thesis in a consistent and thoroughgoing manner. The subjective is a subspecies within the class of what is determined by natural law; and the principle of causality is therefore applicable to subjective change in the same rigorous fashion as to the objectively sequent.

1214 A 204 = B 249.

1215 W. i. pp. 87-92.

1216 Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntniss-Theorie, p. 151. Quoted and translated by Caird, i. p. 572. Caird sums up the matter in a sentence (p. 571): “Kant is showing, not that objective succession is always causal, but that the determination of a succession of perceptions as referring to a succession of states in an object, involves the principle of causality.”

1217 Loc. cit.

1218 The connected question how we can determine the ball and the cushion as objectively coexistent is the problem of the third Analogy.

1219 III. Erklärung 1 and 2, Lehrsatz 1 (especially Anmerkung thereto). Cf. also II. Erklärung 1 and 5, and the last pages of the Allgemeine Anmerkung.

1220 Pp. 351, 373-4. Cf. pp. 318-21.

1221 A 170-1 = B 212-13, above, p. 353, n. 2.

1222 A 208 = B 253-4.

1223 Metaphysical First Principles, II. Lehrsatz 4, Anmerkung 2.

1224 A 209-10 = B 255-6.

1225 A 210 = B 256.

1226 W. ii. p. 22.

1227 W. ii. p. 168.

1228 Loc. cit.

1229 For lack of a more suitable English equivalent I have translated Gemeinschaft as “communion.” As Kant points out in A 213 = B 260, the German term is itself ambiguous, signifying commercium (i.e. dynamical interaction) as well as communio.

1230 Cf. above, pp. 348, 358-9, 367-8, 371-2.

1231 § 17 ff. Cf. Nachträge zu Kants Kritik, lxxxvi, with B. Erdmann’s comment, p. 35.

1232 A 211-12 = B 258. Cf. A 211 = B 257.

1233 A 211 = B 257.

1234 A 211-13 = B 258-60: first three paragraphs (first edition).

1235 A 213-14 = B 260-1: fourth paragraph (first edition).

1236 A 214-15 = B 261-2: fifth paragraph (first edition).

1237 Cf. above, pp. 189-90, 208 ff.

1238 B 257-8: first paragraph (second edition).

1239 Cf. B 291-3, partially quoted above, pp. 310-11. In the Metaphysical First Principles (III. Lehrsatz, 4) the principle that action and reaction are always equal is similarly limited to the outer relations of material bodies in space, and Kant adds that all change in bodies is motion. Cf. W. xi. p. 234; and above, p. 147.

1240 Above pp. 311-12; below, pp. 473-7.

1241 A 213 = B 260.

1242 The inconsistency of Kant’s view of pure manifolds of time and space with the argument of the Analytic of Principles is too obvious to call for detailed comment.

1243 Cf. B 257.

1244 A 213-14 = B 260-1.

1245 B 257.

1246 Third edition, p. 438.

1247 Stout does not himself offer it as complete.

1248 World as Will and Idea, W. ii. pp. 544-5: Eng. trans. ii. pp. 61-3.

1249 Cf. above, p. 197.

1250 A 212-13 = B 259.

1251 B 258.

1252 Op. cit. pp. 545-6: Eng. trans. p. 63.

1253 Op. cit. pp. 546-7: Eng. trans. pp. 63-5.

1254 Cf. above, p. 379.

1255 Cf. Stadler, Grundsätze, p. 124.

1256 Op. cit. p. 546: Eng. trans. p. 63.

1257 Cf. above, pp. 97-8, 102 n., 165-6; below, pp. 429 ff., 447 ff., 547 ff.

1258 Cf. Adickes, K. p. 233 n.

1259 A 222 = B 269. Cf. A 220 = B 268.

1260 A 148 ff. = B 187 ff.

1261 A 219 = B 266.

1262 This, by Kant’s own account (A 232-4 = B 285-7), is what led him to adopt the title ‘postulates.’ A geometrical postulate does not add anything to the concept of its object but only defines the conditions of its production.

1263 Cf. above, pp. 38-9; below, pp. 398-9, 418 ff.

1264 Cf. A 220-3 = B 267-71.

1265 A 223 = B 270.

1266 Cf. A 220 = B 268.

1267 A 223 = B 270-1.

1268 K. p. 223 n.

1269 A 224 = B 272.

1270 Cf. above, pp. 288-9.

1271 A 225 = B 272. Cf. above, pp. 394-6.

1272 A 225 = B 273. Italics not in Kant.

1273 The Critical Philosophy of Kant, i. p. 591.

1274 Op. cit. p. 595.

1275 A 226 = B 273-4.

1276 A 226 ff. = B 279 ff.

1277 A 218 = B 281.

1278 A 232 = B 284.

1279 A 231 = B 284.

1280 Cf. above, p. 309 ff.

1281 Kant’s argument in the note to B 290 is that of his early essay on Negative Quantity. Cf. below, pp. 527 ff., 533 ff., 536.

1282 A 236 = B 295.

1283 Cf. above, pp. xxxv-vi, xxxviii, 185-6, 191, 195-6, 257-8, 290-1, 325 ff., 339.

1284 The mathematical illustrations which Kant proceeds to give (A 239 = B 299) are peculiarly crude and off-hand in manner of statement. Cf. per contra A 140 = B 179 for Kant’s real view of the distinction between image, schema, and concept.

1285 Cf. above, pp. 195-6, 198, 339-42.

1286 A 243 = B 301.

1287 A 242 = B 302.

1288 Cf. A 248 = B 305.

1289 A 246-7 = B 303-4. A 247-8 = B 304-5 (beginning “Thought is the action,” etc.) is merely a repetition of the preceding argument, and probably represents a later intercalation.

1290 Beginning “Appearances, so far as...,” which was omitted in the second edition. It probably constitutes, as Adickes maintains (K. p. 254 n.), the original beginning of this chapter. The “as we have hitherto maintained” of its second paragraph, which obviously cannot apply to the pages which precede it in its present position, must refer to the argument of the Analytic.

1291 A 249, 251.

1292 Above, p. 204 ff.

1293 In large part it represents the Critical position as understood by Schopenhauer, who never succeeded in acquiring any genuine understanding of Kant’s more mature teaching (cf. above, p. 366 n.). Schopenhauer is correct in maintaining that one chief ground of Kant’s belief in the existence of things in themselves lies in his initial assumption that they must be postulated in order to account for the given manifold. Schopenhauer is also justified in stating that Kant, though starting from the dualistic Cartesian standpoint, so far modified it as to conclude that the origin of this manifold must be “objective, since there is no ground for regarding it as subjective” (Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851 ed., p. 74 ff.). But for two reasons this is a very incomplete, and therefore extremely misleading, account of Kant’s final teaching. In the first place, Schopenhauer fails to take account of Kant’s implied distinction between the sensations of the special senses and the manifold of outer sense. When Kant recognises that the sensations of the special senses are empirically conditioned, he is constrained in consistency to distinguish between them and the manifold which constitutes the matter of all experiences (cf. above, p. 275 ff.). Things in themselves, in accounting for the latter, account also, but in quite indirect fashion, for the former. Though sensations are empirically conditioned, the entire natural world is noumenally grounded. Secondly, Kant’s subjectivism undergoes a similar transformation on its inner or mental side. The analysis of self-consciousness, which is given both in the Deductions and in the Paralogisms, indicates with sufficient clearness Kant’s recognition that the form of experience is as little self-explanatory as its content, and that it must not, without such proof as, owing to the limitations of our experience, we are debarred from giving, be regarded as more ultimate in nature. The realities which constitute and condition our mental processes are not apprehended in any more direct manner than the thing in itself. When, therefore, Schopenhauer asserts in the World as Will and Idea (Werke, Frauenstädt, ii. p. 494, Eng. trans, ii. p. 6) that Kant proves the world to be merely phenomenal by demonstrating that it is conditioned by the intellect, he is emphasising what is least characteristic in Kant’s teaching. Schopenhauer’s occasional identification of the intellect with the brain—the nearest approximation in his writings to what may be described as phenomenalism—itself suffices to show how entirely he is lacking in any firm grasp of Critical principles.

1294 As we have noted (above, p. 204 ff.), the doctrine of the transcendental object was entirely eliminated from those main sections that were rewritten or substantially altered in the second edition, namely, the chapters on the Transcendental Deduction, on Phenomena and Noumena, and on the Paralogisms. That it remained in the section on Amphiboly, in the Second Analogy, and in the Antinomies is sufficiently explained by Kant’s unwillingness to make the very extensive alterations which such further rewriting would have involved.

1295 A 251.

1296 Not even, as Kant teaches in his doctrine of inner sense, in the inner world of apperception, cf. above, p. 295 ff.

1297 Kant claims in the Dialectic that this process is also unavoidable, constituting what he calls “transcendental illusion.”

1298 A 254-7 = B 310-12.

1299 A 255 = B 310-11.

1300 Cf. below, p. 412 ff.

1301 A 256 = B 312. For A 257 = B 312 on the empirical manner of distinguishing between the sensuous and the intelligible, cf. above, pp. 143 ff., 149 ff.

1302 Cf. above, pp. 143-4, 147, 214-15, 291 ff.

1303 Kant here (A 286 = B 342) speaks of this concept of the noumenon as an object of non-sensuous intuition as being “merely negative.” This is apt to confuse the reader, as he usually comes to it after having read the passage introduced into the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena in the second edition, in which, as above noted (p. 409), Kant describes this meaning of the term as positive, in distinction from its more negative meaning as signifying a thing merely so far as it is not an object of our sense-intuition. Cf. below, p. 413.

1304 Kant’s meaning here is not quite clear. He may mean either that the categories as such are inapplicable to things in themselves, or that, as this form of intuition is altogether different from our own, it will not help in giving meaning to the categories. What follows would seem to point to the former view.

1305 A 286 = B 343.

1306 A 287-8 = B 344.

1307 A 288 = B 345.

1308 A 288 = B 344. Kant allowed the section within which this passage occurs to remain, without the least modification, in the second edition.

1309 Benno Erdmann’s explanation (Kriticismus, p. 194) of Kant’s omission of all references to the transcendental object, namely, because of their being likely to conduce to a mistaken idealistic interpretation of his teaching, we cannot accept. As already argued (above, p. 204 ff.), they represent a view which he had quite definitely and consciously outgrown.

1310 B 306. Cf. above, pp. 290-1.

1311 B 308. This, it may be noted, is in keeping with the passages above quoted from the section on Amphiboly.

1312 A 255 = B 311.

1313 Cf. above, p. 404 ff., especially pp. 409-10; also above, p. 331.

1314 In order to form an adequate judgment upon Kant’s justification for distinguishing between appearance and reality the reader must bear in mind (1) the results obtained in the Transcendental Deduction (above, p. 270 ff.); (2) the discussions developed in the Paralogisms (below, p. 457 ff.); (3) the treatment of noumenal causality, that is of freedom, in the Third and Fourth Antinomies; (4) the many connected issues raised in the Ideal (below, pp. 534-7, 541-2), and in the Appendix to the Dialectic (below, p. 543 ff.). Professor Dawes Hicks is justified in maintaining in his book, die Begriffe Phänomenon und Noumenon in ihrem Verhältniss zu einander bei Kant (Leipzig, 1897, p. 167)—a work which unfortunately is not accessible to the English reader—that “the thing in itself is by no means a mere excrescence or addendum of the Kantian system, but forms a thoroughly necessary completion to the doctrine of appearances. At every turn in Kant’s thought the doctrine of the noumenon, in one form or another, plays an essential part.” Indeed it may be said that to state Kant’s reasons for asserting the existence of things in themselves, is to expound his philosophy as a whole. Upon this question there appears in Kant the same alternation of view as in regard to his other main tenets. On Kant’s discussion of the applicability of the category of existence to things in themselves, cf. above, p. 322 ff. Also, on Kant’s extension of the concepts possibility and actuality to noumena, cf. above, pp. 391 ff., 401-3.

1315 ‘Ideal’ and ‘Idealist’ are printed with capitals, to mark the very special sense in which these terms are being used. As already noted (above, p. 3), the same remark applies to the term ‘Reason.’

1316 Cf. above, pp. xli-ii, xliv, liii-v, 331.

1317 A 260 ff. = B 316 ff.

1318 Cf. above, pp. 38-9, 119, 131-3, 338-9, 394-400.

1319 Above, p. xxx ff., and below, p. 601 ff.

1320 Cf. A 267 = B 323.

1321 Cf. Adickes’ Systematik, pp. 60, 70, 72, and 111-12.

1322 A 270 = B 326.

1323 Cf. A 264 = B 319, and A 266 = B 322.

1324 Cf. below, pp. 563-5, 589 ff., 601 ff.

1325 I have dwelt upon this at length in my Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy.

1326 A 271 = B 327.

1327 The un-Critical character of Kant’s doctrine of the pure concept has already been noted (above, pp. 418-19), and need not be further discussed.

1328 A 272 = B 328.

1329 A 273 = B 329.

1330 This is Leibniz’s mode of stating the absolutist view of thought (cf. above, p. xxx ff.) to which, as we shall find, Kant gives much more adequate and incomparably deeper formulation in the Dialectic. Cf. pp. 430, 547 ff., 558 ff.

1331 Adickes, K. p. 272 n., allows that the passage may be of earlier origin than the passages which precede and follow it.

1332 Pp. 214-15.

1333 As such it is commented on above, p. 410 ff.

1334 Loc. cit.

1335 A 290 = B 347.

1336 Cf. above, p. 409 ff.

1337 Kant’s commentators have frequently misrepresented this aspect of his teaching. Cf. below, pp. 498, 520-1, 527-37, 541-2, 543 ff., 555, 558-61.

1338 A 490 = B 518.

1339 Cf. above, pp. 416-17.

1340 Those readers who are not already well acquainted with the argument of the Dialectic may be recommended to pass at once to p. 441. What here follows presupposes acquaintance with the nature and purposes of the main divisions of the Dialectic.

1341 Introd. to Reflexionen, Bd. ii.

1342 W. x. p. 123 ff. Cf. above, pp. 219-20.

1343 Cf. Dissertation, § 27 n.

1344 Op. cit. Cf. § 24 with § 27.

1345 Op. cit. § 27.

1346 Cf. ii. 567, 571, 584, 585.

1347 Cf. ii. 1251 and 586.

1348 Cf. below, pp. 458, 488 ff.

1349 In Reflexionen ii. 573, 576, and 582 we find Kant in the very act of so doing. Compositio, co-ordinatio, and commercium are treated as synonymous terms.

1350 The problem of freedom is first met with in Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics (Pölitz, edition of 1821, pp. 89, 330), but is not there given as an antinomy, and is treated as falling within the field of theology. In Reflexion ii. 585, also, it is equated in terms of the category of ground and consequence, with the concept of Divine Existence, the “absolute or primum contingens (libertas).” Upon elimination of theology, and therefore of the cosmological argument, from the sphere of antinomy, Kant raised freedom to the rank of an independent problem.

1351 A 462 = B 490.

1352 Cf. below, pp. 498-9, 571 ff.

1353 Cf. below, p. 454, with references in n. 1.

1354 A 507 = B 535. Cf. below, pp. 481, 545-6.

1355 Cf. ii. 93, 94, 95, 1233, 1247.

1356 This is the view represented in Reflexionen ii. 94, 95.

1357 Cf. Reflexionen ii. 124.

1358 Cf. Reflexionen ii. 95.

1359 Cf. below, p. 457.

1360 Cf. ii. 86 ff.

1361 Cf. Reflexionen ii. 114-15.

1362 B 394 n. Immortality is here taken as representing the Idea of the soul as unconditioned substance.

1363 Cf. below, p. 454, with further references in n. 1.

1364 Systematik, pp. 115-16.

1365 Above, p. 334.

1366 This conclusion is supported by the evidence of the Reflexionen: they contain not a single reference to schematism.

1367 A 293 = B 349.

1368 Pp. 173-4.

1369 Cf. A 61 = B 85.

1370 Adickes, Systematik, p. 77 ff.

1371 Cf. Kant’s caveat in A 293 = B 349 against identifying dialectic with the doctrine of probable reasoning.

1372 Pp. 427-8.

1373 A 298 = B 355.

1374 Cf. above, p. 332.

1375 Reicke, i. p. 105.

1376 Op. cit. i. pp. 109-10.

1377 A 301-2 = B 358.

1378 A 303 = B 359.

1379 A 305 = B 362.

1380 The wording of the concluding sentence of the third paragraph (A 307 = B 363-4) is so condensed as to be misleading. “It [viz. the principle of causality] makes the unity of experience possible, and borrows nothing from the Reason. The latter, if it were not for this [its indirect] reference [through mediation of the understanding] to possible experience, could never [of itself], from mere concepts, have imposed a synthetic unity of that kind.”

1381 A 310 = B 366.

1382 Schein des Schliessens would seem to be here used in that sense.

1383 Cf. above, p. 424.

1384 Cf. also A 669 = B 697; A 680 = B 709.

1385 Cf. Vaihinger, “Kant—ein Metaphysiker?” in Philosophische Abhandlungen (Sigwart Gedenkschrift), p. 144.

1386 A 312 = B 368.

1387 A 313 = B 370.

1388 A 316-17 = B 373. The context of this passage is a defence of Plato’s Republic against the charge that it is Utopian, because unrealisable.

1389 A 317-18 = B 374-5.

1390 Reflexionen ii. 1240. Cf. Schopenhauer: World as Will and Idea (Werke, ii. p. 277: Eng. trans. i. p. 303): “The Idea is the unity that falls into multiplicity on account of the temporal and spatial form of our intuitive apprehension; the concept, on the contrary, is the unity reconstructed out of multiplicity by the abstraction of our reason; the latter may be defined as unitas post rem, the former as unitas ante rem.”

1391 Lectures on Metaphysics (Pölitz, 1821), p. 79.

1392 Reflexionen ii. 1243.

1393 Lectures on Metaphysics, pp. 308-9.

1394 Reflexionen ii. 1244.

1395 Reflexionen ii. 1254.

1396 Reflexionen ii. 1258.

1397 Reflexionen ii. 1259.

1398 Reflexionen ii. 1260.

1399 A 320 = B 376-7.

1400 A 321 = B 377.

1401 A 323-4 = B 380-1. Cf. below, pp. 480, 529, 559-60.

1402 Regarding the progressive series from the conditioned to its consequences, cf. A 336-7 = B 393-4, A 410-11 = B 437-8, A 511 = B 539.

1403 A 333 = B 390.

1404 Cf. above, pp. 418, 436, 439-40; below, pp. 473-7, 520-1, 537, 543 ff., 575.

1405 Cf. A 335.

1406 Cf. A 337-8 = B 394-6 and note appended to B 394.

1407 A 336 = B 393.

1408 Cf. A 671 = B 699; above, pp. 426, 430, 436; below, pp. 552-4, 572 ff.

1409 On the difference between the ascending and the descending series, cf. A 331-2 = B 338 and A 410-11 = B 437-8.

¹⁴¹⁰ The questions raised in the two introductory paragraphs (A 336-40 = B 396-8) as to the content of the Ideas, their problematic character, and their possibility as concepts, are first adequately discussed in later chapters. The three new terms here introduced, Paralogism, Antinomy, and Ideal, can also best be commented upon in their own special context.

1411 A 341 = B 399.

1412 Cf. below, pp. 466, 470.

1413 A 347.

1414 A 345-6 = B 403-4.

1415 Cf. A 354-5.

1416 Cf. above, p. 437.

1417 A 348.

1418 A 351.

1419 A 363-4.

1420 A 351.

1421 K. 688 n.

1422 A similar criticism holds true of the conception of identity employed in the third Paralogism, and arbitrarily equated with the categories of quantity.

1423 Cf. A 355-6.

1424 It is very forcibly developed in Mendelssohn’s “Phädon” (1767) (Gesammelte Schriften, 1843, ii. p. 151 ff.). This is a work with which Kant was familiar. Cf. below, p. 470.

1425 This is the argument which William James has expounded in his characteristically picturesque style. “Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence” (Principles of Psychology, i. p. 160).

1426 A 363 n. Cf. below, pp. 461-2.

1427 A 356. Cf. Adickes, K. p. 688 n.

1428 The argument is here in harmony with Kant’s definition of transcendental illusion.

1429 A 358.

1430 A 361.

1431 A 364.

1432 William James’s psychological description of self-consciousness is simply an extension of this illustration. Cf. Principles of Psychology, i. p. 339; quoted above, p. 278 n.

1433 A 363 n.

1434 A 362-3 and A 364. We must also, however, bear in mind that in this chapter Kant occasionally argues in ad hominem fashion from the point of view of the position criticised.

1435 Cf. A 353-4.

1436 Cf. Adickes, K. p. 695 n.

1437 A 366.

1438 P. 301 ff.

1439 The note to A 344 has evidently got displaced; it must, as Adickes points out, belong to A 404.

1440 Cf. above, pp. 320, 455.

1441 A 371-2.

1442 A 380-1.

1443 Cf. A 383.

1444 A 383.

1445 A 383.

1446 A 381.

1447 The first four paragraphs are probably a later intercalation (Adickes, K. p. 708 n.), since they connect both with the introductory sections of the Dialectic and with the Introduction to the Critique. Also, the opening words of the fifth paragraph seem to refer us not to anything antecedent in this section, but directly to the concluding passages of the fourth Paralogism.

1448 A 385.

1449 A 393.

1450 A 387.

1451 Cf. above, pp. 215-16.

1452 A 393-4.

1453 A 394.

1454 Pp. 326-7.

1455 Pp. 327-8.

1456 A 402. Cf. B 407.

1457 K. p. 717 n.

1458 Cf. below, p. 470.

1459 B 406 ff.

1460 Kriticismus, p. 227, cf. p. 106 ff.

1461 A. H. Ulrichs, Institutiones logicae et metaphysicae (1785).

1462 In his review of Kant’s Prolegomena in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek (1784).

1463 Obviously by categories Kant here really means schemata. Cf. A 348, where Kant states that “pure categories... have in themselves no objective meaning.... Apart from intuition they are merely functions of a judgment, without content.”

1464 Above, pp. 404 ff., 413 ff.

1465 B 408.

1466 Critical Philosophy, ii. p. 34. So also in Watson’s Kant Explained, p. 244.

1467 Caird (op. cit. p. 35) takes account of Kant’s conception of a possible intuitive understanding, but illegitimately assumes that by it he must mean a creative understanding.

1468 Cf. above, p. 295 ff.

1469 Cf. B 415 n. In B xxxix. n. (at the end), quoted above pp. 309-10, Kant is careful to point out that the representation of something permanent is by no means identical with permanent representation.

1470 P. 463.

1471 Namely, as Refutation of Idealism, B 274 ff. Cf. above, p. 308 ff.

1472 Cf. above, pp. 457, 462-3.

1473 A 402.

1474 Cf. above, p. 466.

1475 B 413-15.

1476 Gesammelte Schriften, ii. p. 151 ff.

1477 Op. cit. p. 121 ff.

1478 Op. cit. pp. 128 ff., 168.

1479 Op. cit. p. 125 ff.

1480 Regarding the value of the hypotheses propounded by Kant in his note to B 415, cf. below, p. 543 ff.

1481 P. 321 ff.

1482 Cf. above, p. 467.

1483 Pp. 473-7.

1484 Kriticismus, p. 226.

1485 B 424.

1486 B 421.

1487 B 424-5.

1488 B 425-6. Cf. above, pp. lvi-lxi; below, p. 570 ff.

1489 The only approach to such a reference is in B 426-7, noted above, p. 471.

1490 A 672 = B 700. Cf. below, p. 554.

1491 A 649 = B 677-8. Tetens in his Philosophische Versuche (1777) had devoted an entire chapter to this question. His term Grundkraft is that which Kant here employs. Cf. Philosophische Versuche, Bd. i., Elfter Versuch: “Concerning the fundamental power of the human soul.” Incidentally Tetens discusses Rousseau’s suggestion that this fundamental power consists in man’s capacity for perfecting himself. Cf. Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics (Pölitz, 1821, p. 192 ff.).

1492 A 682-4 = B 710-12. A 771-2 = B 799 in the Methodology is similarly ambiguous, though tending to the spiritualist mode of formulation.

1493 Cf. above, pp. 275-6, 279 ff., 312 ff., 384-5, 464-5.

1494 Cf. end of B xxxix. n., quoted above, pp. 309-10.

1495 A 405 = B 432.

1496 A 408 = B 435.

1497 Cf. A 414 = B 441, where it is stated that there is no transcendental Idea of the substantial.

1498 Cf. above, p. 434 ff.

1499 A 419 = B 447.

1500 A 420 = B 447.

1501 A very curious sentence in Kant’s letter to Schulze (W. x. pp. 344-5, quoted above, p. 199) seems to be traceable to this source.

1502 Cf. below, pp. 529, 559-60, and above, pp. 199-200, 433-4, 451. For A 410-11 = B 439-40 on the difference between the ascending and descending series, cf. A 331-2 = B 387-8 and A 336-7 = B 393-4.

1503 A 420 = B 448.

1504 Cf. per contra A 486 = B 514.

1505 The limitation of Kant’s discussion to space, time, and causality is, of course, due to his acceptance of the current view that the concepts of infinity and continuity are derived from our intuitions of space and time. As we have already noted in discussing his intuitional theory of mathematical reasoning (above, pp. 40-1, 117 ff., 128 ff.), he fails to extend to mathematical concepts his own “transcendental” view of the categories, namely, as conditioning the possibility of intuitional experience. Such concepts as order, plurality, whole and part, continuity, infinity, are prior to time and space in the logical order of thought; and to be adequately treated must be considered in their widest application.

1506 Cf. A 507 = B 535, and above, p. 431 ff.; below, pp. 501, 545-6.

1507 Cf. Kant’s posthumously published Transition from the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science to Physics (Altpreussische Monatsschrift, 1882), pp. 279-80: “If we take in regard to space, not its definition, but only an a priori proposition, e.g. that space is a whole which must be thought only as part of a still greater whole, it is clear... that it is an irrational magnitude, measurable indeed, but in its comparison with unity transcending all number.” “If space is something objectively existent, it is a magnitude which can exist only as part of another given magnitude.”

1508 Cf. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea (Werke, Frauenstädt, ii. pp. 585-6; Eng. trans, ii. pp. 107-8). “I find and assert that the whole antinomy is a mere delusion, a sham fight. Only the assertions of the antitheses really rest upon the forms of our faculty of knowledge, i.e. if we express it objectively, on the necessary, a priori certain, most universal laws of nature. Their proofs alone are therefore drawn from objective grounds. On the other hand, the assertions and proofs of the theses have no other than a subjective ground, rest solely on the weakness of the reasoning individual; for his imagination becomes tired with an endless regression, and therefore he puts an end to it by arbitrary assumptions, which he tries to smooth over as well as he can; and his judgment, moreover, is in this case paralysed by early and deeply imprinted prejudices. On this account the proof of the thesis in all the four conflicts is throughout a mere sophism, while that of the antithesis is a necessary inference of the reason from the laws of the world as idea known to us a priori. It is, moreover, only with great pains and skill that Kant is able to sustain the thesis, and make it appear to attack its opponent, which is endowed with native power.... I shall show that the proofs which Kant adduces of the individual theses are sophisms, while those of the antitheses are quite fairly and correctly drawn from objective grounds.”

1509 Cf. F. Erhardt’s Kritik der Kantischen Antinomienlehre (1888), a brief but excellent analysis of this section of the Critique.

1510 § 1 n.

1511 Cf. A 431-2 = B 460-1: “...the concept [of the infinite] is not the concept of a maximum; by it we think only its relation to any assignable unit, in respect to which it is greater than all number.”

1512 Cf. Kant’s statement in the Observation to this antithesis, A 431-3 = B 459-61.

1513 Kant regarded the point as a limit, i.e. as a boundary (Dissertation, § 14, 4; § 15, C: “The simple in space is not a part but a limit”; A 169-70 = B 211); whereas certain modern mathematicians take the point as one of the undefined elements. When the point is regarded in this latter manner, space may perhaps be satisfactorily defined as a set of points. In arguing for the antithesis, and in the passages just cited, Kant also assumes that, in the case of space, the properties of the class are determined by the properties of its elements. This questionable assumption is involved in his assertion that space can consist only of spaces.

1514 A 438 = B 466.

1515 A 439-41 = B 467-9.

1516 A 441 = B 469.

1517 Developed in the Dissertation (1770).

1518 Zweites Hauptstück, Lehrsatz 4, Anmerkung 1. Cf. also Anmerkung 2.

1519 Principles of Mathematics, i. p. 460.

1520 Cf. above, p. 481 n. 2.

1521 P. 489 n.

1522 Cf. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea (Werke, Frauenstädt, ii. p. 590; Eng. trans. ii. pp. 111-12). “The argument for the third thesis is a very fine sophism, and is really Kant’s pretended principle of pure reason itself entirely unadulterated and unchanged. It tries to prove the finiteness of the series of causes by saying that, in order to be sufficient, a cause must contain the complete sum of the conditions from which the succeeding state, the effect, proceeds. For the completeness of the determinations present together in the state which is the cause, the argument now substitutes the completeness of the series of causes by which that state itself was brought to actuality; and because completeness presupposes the condition of being rounded off or closed in, and this again presupposes finiteness, the argument infers from this a first cause, closing the series and therefore unconditioned. But the juggling is obvious. In order to conceive the state A as the sufficient cause of the state B, I assume that it contains the sum of the necessary determinations from the coexistence of which the state B inevitably follows. Now by this my demand upon it as a sufficient cause is entirely satisfied, and has no direct connection with the question how the state A itself came to be; this rather belongs to an entirely different consideration, in which I regard the said state A no more as cause, but as itself an effect; in which case another state again must be related to it, just as it was related to B. The assumption of the finiteness of the series of causes and effects, and accordingly of a first beginning, appears nowhere in this as necessary, any more than the presentness of the present moment requires us to assume a beginning of time itself.”

1523 Op. cit. p. 24.

1524 For comment upon Kant’s defence of his procedure cf. below, p. 496.

1525 Cf. Kant’s Observation on the thesis.

1526 A 451 = B 479.

1527 Cf. also A 451 = B 479.

1528 Cf. Schopenhauer, op. cit. p. 591; Eng. trans. p. 113. “The fourth conflict is... really tautological with the third; and the proof of the thesis is also essentially the same as that of the preceding one. Kant’s assertion that every conditioned presupposes a complete series of conditions, and therefore a series which ends with an unconditioned, is a petitio principii which must simply be denied. Everything conditioned presupposes nothing but its condition; that this is again conditioned raises a new consideration which is not directly contained in the first.”

1529 Above, p. 494.

1530 A 459 = B 487.

1531 Jean Jacques Dortous de Mairan (1678-1771), physicist and mathematician. In 1740 he succeeded Fontenelle as perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.

1532 Cf. above, pp. 435, 495 n. 4.

1533 A 448-50 = B 476-8.

1534 Cf. above, p. 427 ff.; below, pp. 520-1, 527-37, 541 ff.

1535 A 462 = B 490.

1536 Cf. above, pp. 434 ff., 479.

1537 A 476 = B 504.

1538 A 484 = B 512.

1539 Ibid.

1540 A 483 = B 511.

1541 A 485 = B 513.

1542 Cf. above, p. 481; below, pp. 545-6.

1543 Kant is here playing on the double meaning of the German “sinnleeres”—“empty of sense” and “non-sense.”

1544 A 489 = B 517.

1545 A 490 = B 518.

1546 Above, p. 426 ff.

1547 A 490 = B 518.

1548 Cf. above p. 204 ff.

1549 A 494 = B 522-3.

1550 A 495 = B 523.

1551 Cf. A 494 = B 522-3: “...we can say of the transcendental object that it is given in itself prior to all experience.”

1552 A 496 = B 524.

1553 A 491 = B 519.

1554 Pp. 306-7.

1555 A 497 = B 525.

1556 A 501-2 = B 529-30.

1557 A 506 = B 534.

1558 Cf. end of passage: “There can be no lack of conditions that are given through this regress.”

1559 Cf. below, pp. 507-8.

1560 Cf. below, pp. 507-9.

1561 K. p. 414 n. The two last paragraphs of Section VII., which correct its argument, that of the Transcendental Aesthetic, are probably later additions.

1562 A 508 = B 536.

1563 Loc. cit.

1564 As to the distinction between the ascending and the descending series, cf. above, pp. 453 n., 484.

1565 Cf. A 522 = B 549-50.

1566 A 514 = B 542.

1567 Above, p. 506.

1568 Cf. A 522 = B 550.

1569 A 515 = B 543.

1570 A 519-20 = B 547-8.

1571 When Kant adds (A 521 = B 549), “and therefore absolutely also,” he inconsistently reverts to the position ambiguously suggested in A 499 = B 527. Cf. above, p. 506.

1572 A 523-6 = B 551-4.

1573 The assertion of infinite divisibility is not applicable, Kant states (A 526-7 = B 554-5), to bodies as organised, but only to bodies as mere occupants of space. Organisation involves distinction of parts, and therefore discreteness. How far organisation can go in organised bodies, experience alone can show us.

1574 P. 508.

1575 A 528 = B 556.

1576 Cf. above, pp. 345-7.

1577 A 535-6 = B 563-4.

1578 Cf. A 537 = B 564-5; also A 546 = B 574-5, in which Kant asserts that man knows himself not only through the senses but “also through pure apperception, and indeed in actions and inner determinations which cannot be reckoned as impressions of the senses.” Such statements would seem to show that, at the time of writing, Kant had not yet developed his doctrine of inner sense.

1579 A 532 = B 560.

1580 A 536-7 = B 564-5.

1581 A 533 = B 561.

1582 A 536 = B 564.

1583 A 538 = B 566.

1584 Cf. Kant’s Uebergang von der metaph. Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft zur Physik (Altpreussische Monatsschrift (1882), pp. 272-3).

1585 A 549 = B 577. Italics not in Kant.

1586 In A 540 = B 568 a different and less satisfactory view finds expression.

1587 A 542 = B 570.

1588 A 544 = B 572.

1589 A 546-7 = B 574-5.

1590 A 548 = B 576.

1591 A 552 = B 580.

1592 A 553 = B 581.

1593 A 557 = B 585.

1594 A 553-4 = B 581-2.

1595 Cf. A 537-41 = B 565-9 and A 544 = B 572.

1596 Cf. A 566 = B 594.

1597 Cf. above, p. 204 ff.

1598 A 559 = B 587.

1599 A 561 = B 589.

1600 A 565 = B 593.

1601 A 567 = B 593.

1602 For Kant’s comparison of his Ideas with those of Plato, cf. above, pp. 447-9.

1603 §§ 803 ff. in 5th edition (Halle, 1763).

1604 A 578 = B 606.

1605 A 580 = B 608.

1606 Cf. above, p. 418 ff.

1607 A 272-4 = B 328-30.

1608 Cf. Kant’s distinction between distributive and collective unity in A 582-3 = B 610 with A 644 = B 672.

1609 A 583 = B 611.

1610 A 603 = B 631.

1611 A 603-4 = B 631-2.

1612 Cf. below, pp. 533, 536.

1613 A 592 = B 620.

1614 A 593 = B 621.

1615 Cf. A 4-5 = B 8-9; A 735-8 = B 763-6.

1616 Cf. above, pp. 427-8, and references there given.

1617 Cf. above, p. 424.

1618 Cf. above, p. 392 ff.

1619 K. p. 475 n.

1620 A 603 = B 631.

1621 Cf. above, p. 527. The concluding paragraphs A 613-14 = B 641-2 can best be treated later in another connection. Cf. below, p. 536.

1622 A 614 = B 642.

1623 A 613 = B 641.

1624 A 616 = B 644.

1625 A 619-20 = B 647-8.

1626 Cf. below, pp. 541-2, 552 ff.

1627 A 620 = B 648.

1628 A 624 = B 652.

1629 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755).

1630 Critique of Judgment, §§ 64, 65.

1631 Hamann completed his translation of Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion on August 7, 1780 (cf. Hamann’s Werke, vi. 154 ff.): and Kant, notwithstanding his being occupied in finishing the Critique, read through the manuscript. It is highly likely that this first perusal of Hume’s Dialogues not only confirmed Kant in his negative attitude towards natural theology, but also enabled him to define more clearly than he otherwise would have done, the negative consequences of his own Critical principles. The chapter on the Ideal, as we have already observed (above, pp. 434-5, 527-9, 531), was probably one of the last parts of the Critique to be brought into final form. It does not seem possible, however, to establish in any specific manner the exact influence which Hume’s Dialogues may thus have exercised upon the argument of this portion of the Critique. When Schreiter’s translation of the Dialogues appeared in 1781, Hamann, not unwilling to escape the notoriety of seeming to father so sceptical a work, withdrew his own translation.

1632 This is the main point of Hume’s argument in Section XI. of his Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding.

1633 A 631 = B 659.

1634 A 641 = B 669.

1635 Cf. above, p. 407 ff., and below, p. 552 ff.

1636 Cf. above, p. 454, with further references in n. 1.

1637 Cf. above, pp. 536-7.

1638 A 642 = B 670.

1639 A 769-82 = B 797-810.

1640 A xiv, B xxiii-iv, and Reflexionen ii. 1451: “In metaphysics there can be no such thing as uncertainty.” Cf. above, pp. 10, 35.

1641 A 770-1 = B 798-9.

1642 A 772 = B 800.

1643 A 775 = B 803.

1644 Cf. A 781-2 = B 809-10.

1645 Cf. above, pp. 481, 501.

1646 A 777-8 = B 805-6.

1647 A 782 = B 810.

1648 Cf. above, pp. 97-8, 102, 390-1, 426 ff., 447 ff.

1649 A 651 = B 679.

1650 Loc. cit.

1651 A 653 = B 681.

1652 Dissertation, § 30.

1653 The extremely un-Critical reason which Kant here (A 647 = B 675) gives for its necessarily remaining hypothetical is the “impossibility of knowing all possible consequences.” This use of the term hypothetical is also confusing in view of Kant’s criticism of the hypothetical employment of Reason in A 769 ff. = B 797 ff.

1654 A 647 = B 675.

1655 Loc. cit. and A 649 = B 677.

1656 A 648 = B 676.

1657 A 652 = B 680.

1658 A 660-1 = B 688-9.

1659 A 656 = B 684.

1660 A 656 = B 684.

1661 A 658 = B 686.

1662 A 660 = B 688.

1663 The opening paragraphs of the section, A 642-5 = B 670-3, may be of the same date as the concluding paragraphs.

1664 Cf. per contra A 669-70 = B 697-8.

1665 A 666 = B 694.

1666 A 669 = B 697.

1667 Cf. above, pp. 446-7.

1668 Cf. A 681 = B 709.

1669 Cf. per contra A 663-4 = B 691-2.

1670 A 670 = B 698.

1671 I may here guard against misunderstanding. Though the Ideas of Reason condition the experience which they regulate, this must not be taken as nullifying Kant’s fundamental distinction between the regulative and the constitutive. Even when he is developing his less sceptical view, he adopts, in metaphysics as in ethics, a position which is radically distinct from that of Hegel. Though the moral ideal represents reality of the highest order, it transcends all possible realisation of itself in human life. Though it conditions all our morality, it at the same time condemns it. The Christian virtue of humility defines the only attitude proper to the human soul. In an exactly similar manner, the fact that the Ideas of Reason have to be regarded as conditioning the possibility of sense-experience need not prevent us from also recognising that they likewise make possible our consciousness of its limitations.

1672 Cf. above, pp. 473-7.

1673 A 679 = B 707.

1674 A 678 = B 706.

1675 A 674 = B 702. Cf. A 678-9 = B 706-7.

1676 A 680 = B 708.

1677 As above noted (pp. 499 ff.), when we find Kant thus insisting upon the completely soluble character of all problems of pure Reason, the sceptical, subjectivist tendency is dominant.

1678 A 669 = B 697.

1679 Cf. above, pp. 536-7, 541-2.

1680 A 686-7 = B 714-15.

1681 A 693 = B 721.

1682 A 699-700 = B 727-8.

1683 A 701 = B 729.

1684 Nearly all the important points raised in the Methodology, and several of its chief sections, I have commented upon in their connection with the earlier parts of the Critique. Also, the Methodology is extremely diffuse. For these reasons I have found it advisable to give such additional comment as seems necessary in the form of this Appendix.

1685 On Kant’s use of the terms ‘discipline’ and ‘canon,’ cf. above, pp. 71-2, 170, 174, 438.

1686 Cf. above, p. 438.

1687 A 4-5 = B 8-9.

1688 Untersuchung: Zweite Betrachtung, W. ii. p. 283.

1689 Kant here disavows the position of the Untersuchung in which (Erste Betrachtung, § 4) he had asserted that mathematics deals with quantity and philosophy with qualities.

1690 For comment upon this distinction, cf. above, pp. 131-3, 338-9.

1691 Untersuchung: Erste Betrachtung, § 2.

1692 A 728 = B 756.

1693 Untersuchung: Zweite Betrachtung, W. ii. p. 283.

1694 Untersuchung: Erste Betrachtung, § 1, W. ii. p. 276: “Mathematics proceeds to all its definitions by a synthetic procedure, philosophy by an analytic procedure.”

1695 In the Untersuchung Kant’s statements are more cautious, and also more adequate. Cf. Erste Betrachtung, § 3, W. ii. p. 279: “In mathematics there are only a few but in philosophy there are innumerable irresolvable concepts....”

1696 A 731 n. = B 759 n.

1697 The phrases which Kant employs (A 732-3 = B 760-1) are: “unmittelbargewiss,” “evident,” “augenscheinlich.” Cf. above, pp. xxxv-vi, 36 ff., 53.

1698 Cf. above, pp. 118, 142, 185-6.

1699 Cf. above, p. 117 ff.

1700 Cf. above, pp. 38-42, 93-4, 118-20, 133.

1701 Cf. above, pp. 111-12, 114-15.

1702 Cf. above, p. 131 ff.

1703 A 737 = B 765.

1704 Cf. above, pp. 36 ff., 117 ff., 128 ff., 565-6.

1705 A 743-4 = B 771-2.

1706 A 753 = B 781. In A 745 = B 773 Kant’s mention of Hume can hardly refer to Hume’s Dialogues (cf. above, pp. 539-40 n.). Kant probably has in mind Section XI. of the Enquiry. The important discussion of Hume’s position in A 760 ff. = B 788 ff. has been commented upon above, p. 61 ff. With Priestley’s teaching (A 745-6 = B 773-4) Kant probably became acquainted through some indirect source. The first of Priestley’s philosophical writings to appear in German was his History of the Corruptions of Christianity. The translation was published in 1782. In A 747-8 = B 775-6 Kant quite obviously has Rousseau in mind.

1707 Section III., on The Discipline of Pure Reason in Regard to Hypotheses, has been commented on above, pp. 543-6.

1708 A 782 = B 810.

1709 Even in mathematics the indirect method is not always available. Cf. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, i. p. 15.

1710 A 794 = B 822.

1711 Cf. above, p. 563 n. 2.

1712 A 797 = B 825.

1713 Cf. Critique of Judgment, W. v. p. 473; Bernard’s trans. p. 411: “God, freedom, and immortality are the problems at the solution of which all the preparations of Metaphysics aim, as their ultimate and unique purpose.”

1714 A 800-1 = B 829.

1715 The statement in A 801 = B 829 that morals is a subject foreign to transcendental philosophy is in line with that of A 14-15 = B 28, and conflicts with the position later adopted in the Critique of Practical Reason. Cf. above, p. 77.

1716 A 803 = B 831-2.

1717 Cf. below, pp. 571-5.

1718 A 804 = B 832.

1719 Cf. above, p. lvi.

1720 These statements are subject to modification, if the distinction (not clearly recognised by Kant, but really essential to his position) between immanent and transcendent metaphysics is insisted upon. Cf. above, pp. liv-v, 22, 56, 66-70.

1721 Cf. above, p. 541.

1722 W. v. pp. 47-8; Abbott’s trans. (3rd edition) p. 136.

1723 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, W. v. pp. 31-7; Abbott’s trans. p. 120.

1724 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, W. v. p. 43; Abbott’s trans. p. 132: “The moral law, although it gives no view, yet gives us a fact absolutely inexplicable from any data of the sensible world, or from the whole compass of our theoretical use of reason, a fact which points to a pure world of the understanding, nay, even defines it positively, and enables us to know something of it, namely, a law.”

1725 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, in note to Preface.

1726 Op. cit., Preface, at the beginning, Abbott’s trans. pp. 87-8. Cf. also the concluding pages of Book I., W. v. pp. 103-6, Abbott, pp. 197-200.

1727 Critique of Judgment, W. v. p. 468; Bernard’s trans. p. 406.

1728 Op. cit. p. 474; Bernard’s trans. p. 413.

1729 A 815 = B 843.

1730 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, W. v. pp. 143-4 n.; Abbott’s trans. p. 242: “It is a duty to realise the Summum Bonum to the utmost of our power, therefore it must be possible, consequently it is unavoidable for every rational being in the world to assume what is necessary for its objective possibility. The assumption is as necessary as the moral law, in connexion with which alone it is valid.”

1731 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, W. v. p. 142 ff.; Abbott’s trans. p. 240 ff.; Critique of Judgment, W. v. pp. 469-70; Bernard’s trans. pp. 406-8.

1732 Critique of Judgment, W. v. pp. 369-72; Bernard’s trans. pp. 407-10. Cf. note in same section: “It is a trust in the promise of the moral law; not, however, such as is contained in it, but such as I put into it, and that on morally adequate grounds.”

1733 A 819 = B 847.

1734 A 820 = B 848.

1735 The distinction is less harshly drawn in Kant’s Logic, Einleitung, ix. (Hartenstein), viii. p. 73; Eng. trans, p. 63: “Conviction is opposed to persuasion. Persuasion is an assent from inadequate reasons, in respect to which we do not know whether they are only subjective or are also objective. Persuasion often precedes conviction.”

1736 Cf. above, pp. 10, 543. Cf. Fortschritte; Werke (Hartenstein), viii. p. 561.

1737 Cf. Logic, loc. cit. Cf. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, W. iv. pp. 416-17: Abbott’s trans. pp. 33-34.

1738 Regarding Kant’s distinction in A 827 = B 855 between Ideas and hypotheses cf. above, p. 543 ff. Cf. also Critique of Judgment, W. v. pp. 392 ff., 461 ff.; Bernard’s trans. pp. 302 ff., 395 ff.

1739 A 829 = B 857.

1740 Cf. Kant’s Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason, W. v. p. 8 n.; Abbott’s trans. p. 93 n. “A reviewer who wanted to find some fault with this work—[the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals]—has hit the truth better, perhaps, than he thought, when he says that no new principle of morality is set forth in it, but only a new formula. But who would think of introducing a new principle of all morality, and making himself as it were the first inventor of it, just as if all the world before him were ignorant what duty was, or had been in thorough-going error? But whoever knows of what importance to a mathematician a formula is, which defines accurately what is to be done to work out a problem, will not think that a formula is insignificant and useless which does the same for all duty in general.” Cf. Fortschritte, Werke (Hartenstein), viii. p. 563.

1741 Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse, Werke (Hartenstein), viii. p. 624, already quoted above, p. lvii. Cf. also op. cit. p. 630.

1742 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, Conclusion, W. v. pp. 161-2; Abbott’s trans. p. 260.

1743 A 832 = B 860.

1744 K. p. 633 n. Cf. above, p. xxii.

1745 Cf. Adickes, K. p. 635 n., and Vaihinger, i. p. 306. In this table Critique is distinguished from the System of pure Reason (cf. above, pp. 71-2). The transcendental philosophy of pure Reason of this table corresponds to the Analytic of the Critique, and to “pure natural science” in the absolute sense (cf. above, pp. 66-7). The rational physics of this table corresponds to the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science.

¹⁷⁴⁶ When Kant in A 840 = B 868 takes philosophy as including empirical knowledge he contradicts the spirit, though not the letter of his own preceding statements. In his Introduction to Logic (Hartenstein, viii. p. 22, Abbott’s trans. p. 12) the empirical is identified with the historical.

¹⁷⁴⁷ Fortschritte, Werke (Hartenstein), viii. p. 554.

¹⁷⁴⁸ Op. cit. p. 520.

1749 I.e. between the conception of philosophy as Schulbegriff and as Weltbegriff (conceptus cosmicus). He explains in a note to A 839 = B 868 that he employs these latter terms as indicating that philosophy in the traditional or humanistic sense is concerned with “that which must necessarily interest every one.” I have translated Weltbegriff as ‘universal concept.’ By conceptus cosmicus Kant means ‘concept shared by the whole world,’ or ‘common to all mankind.’

1750 Cf. Kant’s Logic, Introduction, § iii.: Abbott’s trans. pp. 14-15: “In this scholastic signification of the word, philosophy aims only at skill; in reference to the higher concept common to all mankind, on the contrary, it aims at utility. In the former aspect, therefore, it is a doctrine of skill; in the latter a doctrine of wisdom; it is the lawgiver of reason; and hence the philosopher is not a master of the art of reason, but a lawgiver. The master of the art of reason, or as Socrates calls him, the philodoxus, strives merely for speculative knowledge, without concerning himself how much this knowledge contributes to the ultimate end of human reason: he gives rules for the use of reason for all kinds of ends. The practical philosopher, the teacher of wisdom by doctrine and example, is the true philosopher. For philosophy is the Ideal of a perfect wisdom, which shows us the ultimate ends of all human reason.”

1751 A 839 = B 867.

1752 A 851 = B 879.

1753 A 850 = B 878.

1754 A 848-9 = B 876-7. Cf. above, pp. 237, 311 n., 312 n., 384-5, 473-7, 554.

1755 A 852 = B 880.

1756 Cf. A 313 ff. = B 370 ff., above, pp. 498-9.

1757 Cf. above, pp. xxviii-xxix.

1758 Einleitung, § iv.: Abbott’s trans, pp. 17-23.

1759 Supplementary to pp. xxv-xxxiii. Throughout I shall make use of my Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, and may refer the reader to them for further justification of the positions adopted.

1760 For recognition of this distinction, cf. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, vol. i., 3rd ed., pp. 620-3.

1761 Cf. Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, pp. 80-2, 106-7.

1762 This distinction is due to Galileo, though the terms “primary” and “secondary” were first employed by Locke.

1763 I have dealt with Avenarius’ criticism in “Avenarius’ Philosophy of Pure Experience” (Mind, vol. xv. N.S., pp. 13-31, 149-160); with Bergson’s criticism in “Subjectivism and Realism in Modern Philosophy” (Philosophical Review, vol. xvii. pp. 138-148); and with the general issue as a whole in “The Problem of Knowledge” (Journal of Philosophy, vol. ix. pp. 113-128).

1764 On Descartes’ failure to distinguish between the mathematical and the dynamical aspects of motion, cf. above, p. 584.

1765 Essay concerning Human Understanding, IV. vi. 16.

1766 Op. cit. IV. xii. 7.

1767 Op. cit. IV. vi. 11.

1768 Cf. above, pp. 27-8.

1769 Though the concept of substance is also discussed by Hume, his treatment of it is quite perfunctory.

1770 Cf. above, pp. xxv ff., 61 ff.

1771 Treatise on Human Nature (Green and Grose), i. p. 380.

1772 Op. cit. p. 383.

1773 Loc. cit.

1774 For justification of the phrase “synthetic reason,” I must refer to my articles in Mind, vol. xiv. N.S. pp. 149-73, 335-47, on “The Naturalism of Hume.”

1775 Treatise (Green and Grose), i. pp. 474-5.

1776 Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Green and Grose), p. 40.

1777 Treatise, p. 471.

1778 Enquiry (Green and Grose), pp. 25-6.

1779 Éclaircissement sur chap. iii. pt. ii. liv. vi. de la Recherche: tome iv. (1712) p. 381.

1780 Enquiry, p. 57.

1781 Enquiry, p. 32.

1782 This is the objection upon which Beattie chiefly insists.

1783 Op. cit. pp. 33-4.

1784 Cf. above, pp. 39 ff., 54, 222 ff., 241, 286-9.

1785 How far Hume’s criticism of empiricism really influenced Kant in his appreciation of this deeper problem, it seems impossible to decide. Very probably Kant proceeded to it by independent development of his own standpoint, after the initial impulse received on the more strictly logical issue.

1786 The assertion, by Kuno Fischer and Paulsen, of an empirical period in Kant’s development, has been challenged by Adickes, B. Erdmann, Riehl, and Vaihinger.

1787 Cf. B. Erdmann’s Kriticismus, p. 147; Critique of Judgment, W. v. p. 391 (Bernard’s trans, p. 301).

1788 Above, pp. xxx-iii.

1789 Philosophischer Kriticismus, 2nd ed. p. 209.

1790 Cf. above, pp. lv-vi, lxi, 543 ff.