justice to Berkeley, yet they seldom speak | gories of our mind, then the realist would see that the ground under his feet was no longer safe, and that his new ally was more dangerous than his old enemy. of him without a suppressed smile, totally forgetting that the majority of real thinkers, nay, I should almost venture to say, the majority of mankind agree with Berkeley in looking upon the phenomenal or so-called real world as a mere mirage, as mere Māyā or illusion of the thinking Self. In the last century the current of public opinion and we know how powerful, how overwhelming that current can be at times had been decidedly in favour of materialism, when Kant stood forth to stem and to turn the tide. He came so exactly in the nick of time that one almost doubts whether the tide was turning, or whether he turned the tide. But what secures to Kant his position in the history of philosophy is, that he brought the battle back to that point where alone it could be decided, that he took up the thread in the philosophical woof of mankind at the very point where it threatened to ravel and to break. He wrote the whole of his Criticism of Pure Reason with constant reference to Berkeley and Hume; and what I blame in modern philosophers is that, if they wish to go back to the position maintained by Hume, they should attempt to do it without taking into account the work achieved by Kant. To do this is to commit a philosophical anachronism, it is tantamount to removing the questions which now occupy us, from that historical stage on which alone they can be authoritatively decided. Kant's chief object in writing the Criticism of Pure Reason was to determine, once for all, the organs and the limits of our knowledge; and therefore, instead of criticizing, as was then the fashion, the results of our knowledge whether in religion, or in history, or in science, he boldly went to the root of the matter, and subjected Reason, pure and simple, to his searching analysis. In doing this he was certainly far more successful against Locke and Hume than against Berkeley. To call the human mind a tabula rasa was pure metaphor, it was mythology and nothing else. Tabula rasa means a tablet, smoothed and made ready to receive the impressions of the pencil (ypaciov). It makes very little difference whether the mind is called a tabula rasa, or a mirror, or wax, or anything else that the French call impressionable. Nor does it help us much if, instead of impressions, we speak of sensations, or states of consciousness, or manifestations. The question is, how these states of consciousness come to be, whether "to know" is an active or a passive verb, whether there is a knowing Self, and what it is like. If we begin with states of consciousness as ultimate facts, no doubt Hume and his followers are unassailable. Nothing can be more ingenious than the explanation of the process by which the primary impressions, by It has sometimes been supposed that mere twisting and turning, develop at last the rapid success of Kant's philosophy into an intellect, the passive mirror growwas due to its being a philosophy of com- ing into a conscious Self. The sensuous promise, neither spiritualistic, like Berke- impressions, as they are succeeded by ley's, nor materialistic, like Hume's. I new impressions, are supposed to become look upon Kant's philosophy, not as a fainter, and to settle down into what we compromise, but as a reconciliation of call our memory. General ideas are exspiritualism and materialism, or rather of plained as the inevitable result of repeatidealism and realism. But whatever viewed sensuous impressions. For instance, we may take of Kant, it is quite clear that, if we see a green leaf, the green sea, and a at the time when he wrote, neither Berke-green bird, the leaf, the sea, and the bird ley's nor Hume's followers would have accepted his terms. It is true that Kant differed from Berkeley in admitting that the raw material of our sensations and thoughts is given to us, that we accept it from without, not from within. So far the realistic school might claim him as their own. But when Kant demonstrates that we are not merely passive recipients, that the conception of a purely passive recipient involves in fact an absurdity, that what is given us we accept on our own terms, these terms being the forms of our sensuous perception, and the cate leave each but one impression, while the impression of the green colour is repeated three times, and becomes therefore deeper, more permanent, more general. Again, if we see the leaf of an oak tree, of a fig tree, of a rose tree, or of any other plant or shrub, the peculiar outline of each individual leaf is more or less obliterated, and there remains, we are told, the general impression of a leaf. In the same manner, out of innumerable impressions of various trees arises the general impression of tree, out of the impressions of trees, shrubs, and herbs, the gen eral impression of plant, of vegetative | one has seen the splendid feats of arms species, and at last of substance, animate in the truly historical battles of the world, or inanimate. In this manner it was sup- then to be simply told that all this is posed that the whole furniture of the hu- passé, that we now possess evidence man mind could be explained as the in- which Berkeley, Locke, and Kant did not evitable result of repeated sensuous im- possess, and which renders all their lucupressions; and further, as these sensu- brations unnecessary; that, man being ous impressions, which make up the the descendant of some lower animal, the whole of what is called Mind, are received development of the human mind out of by animals as well as by men, it followed, the mind of animals, or out of no mind, as a matter of course, that the difference is a mere question of time, is certainly between the two was a difference of de- enough to make one feel a little impagree only, and that it was a mere ques-tient. tion of time and circumstances for a It is not for one moment maintained man-like ape to develop into an ape-like that, because Kant had proved that sen man. We have now reached a point where the intimate connection between Hume's philosophy and that of the Evolutionist school will begin to be perceived. sations are not the only ingredients of our consciousness, the question of the development of the human mind out of mere sensations is never to be opened again. Far from it. Only, if it is to be opened again, it should be done with a full appreciation of the labours of those who have come before us; otherwise philosophy itself will fall back into a state of prehistoric savagery. If Mr. Darwin is right, if man is either the lineal or lateral descendant of some lower animal, then all the discussions between Locke and Berkeley, between Hume and Kant, have become useless and antiquated. We all agree that ani- What, then, is that tabula rasa, which mals receive their knowledge through sounds so learned, and yet is mere verbal the senses only; and if man was de- jugglery? Let us accept the metaphor, veloped from a lower animal, the human that the mind is like a smooth writing mind, too, must have been developed tablet with nothing on it or in it, and from a lower animal mind. There would what can be clearer even then, than that be an end to all further discussions: the impressions made on it must be deKant, and all who follow him, would sim-termined by the nature of such a tablet? ply be out of court. Impressions made on wax are different from impressions made on sand or water, and impressions made on the human Self must likewise be determined by the nature of the recipient. We see, therefore, that the conditions under which each recipient is capable of receiving impressions, constitute at the same time the conditions or terms to which all impressions must submit, whether they be made on a tabula rasa, or on the human Self, or on anything else. But have the followers of Mr. Darwin no misgivings that possibly Kant's conclusions may be so strong as to resist even the hypothesis of evolution? Do they consider it quite safe in their victorious advance to leave such a fortress as Kant has erected unnoticed in the rear? If no attempt had ever been made at answering Hume, there would be no harm in speaking again of the mind of man and the mind of animals as a tabula rasa on which impressions are made which faint, And here is the place where Kant and spontaneously develop into concep- broke through the phalanx of the sensutions and general ideas. They might re-alistic school. That without which no vive the old watchword of Locke's school -though it is really much older than Locke* -"that there is nothing in the intellect that was not before in the senses," forgetting how it had been silenced by the triumphant answer of Kant's small army, "that there is nothing in the senses that was not at the same time in the intellect." But when one has watched these shouts and counter-shouts, when impressions on the human mind are possible or conceivable, constitutes, he would say, the transcendental side of our knowledge. What, according to Kant, is transcendental is generally identified with what other philosophers call à priori or subjective. But this is true in a very limited sense only. Kant does not mean by transcendental what is merely biographically, i.e. in each individual, or even palæontologically, i.e. in the history of the • Locke, 1632-1704. In a letter from Sir T. Bodley whole race of man, à priori. The à prito Sir F. Bacon, February 1607, we read: "It being a maxim of all men's approving, in intellectu nihil est ori in these two senses has to be discov quod non prius fuit in sensu." ered by experimental and historical psy self to any assertion that some such forms may not belong to the non-ego, the Ding an sich; he only maintains that we have no means of knowing it. That Kant's view is perfectly thinkable, is proved by Berkeley and most Idealists. Secondly, Mr. H. Spencer argues that if Space and Time are forms of thought, they can never be thought of, since it is impossible for anything to be at once the form of thought and the matter of thought. Against this argument it must be remarked that Kant never takes Space and Time as forms of thought. He carefully guards against this view, and calls them "reine Formen sinnlicher Anschauung" (pure forms of sensuous intuition). But even if this distinction between thought and intuition is eliminated by evolution, it remains still to be proved that the forms of thought can never become the matter of thought. The greater part of philosophy makes the forms of thought the matter of thought. chology, and Kant would probably have no objection whatever to any of the conclusions arrived at in this domain of research by the most advanced evolutionist. The à priori which Kant tries to discover is that which makes the two other à priori's possible; it is the ontological & priori. Let all the irritations of the senses, let all the raw material of our sensuous perceptions be given, the fact of our not simply yielding to these inroads, but resisting them, accepting them, realizing them, knowing them, all this shows a reacting and realizing power in the Self. If anything is to be seen, or heard, or felt, or known by us, such as we are and, I suppose, we are something-if all is not to end with disturbances of the retina, or vibrations of the tympanum, or ringing of the bells at the receiving stations of the brain, then what is to be perceived by us, must submit to the conditions of our perceiving, what is to be known by us, must accept the conditions of our knowing. This point is of so much importance for the solution, or, at all events, for the right apprehension of the problem with which we have to deal, that we must examine Kant's view on the seems to me to rest on a misunderstandorigin and on the conditions of our knowl-ing. Though it is true that we do not edge a little more carefully. According to Kant, then, there are, first of all, two fundamental or inevitable conditions of all sensuous manifestations, viz. Space and Time. They are called by Kant pure intuitions, which means à priori forms to which all intuitions if they are to become our intuitions, must submit. By no effort can we do away with these forms of phenomenal existence. If we are to become conscious of anything, whether we call it an impression, or a manifestation, or a phase, we must place all phenomena side by side, or in space; and we can accept them only as following each other in succession, or in time. If we wanted to make it still clearer, that Time and Space are subjective, or at all events determined by the Self, we might say that there can be no There without a Here, there can be no Then without a Now, and both the Here and the Now depend on us as recipients, as measurers, as perceivers. Mr. Herbert Spencer brings three arguments against Kant's view, that Space and Time are à priori forms of our sensuous intuition. He says it is absolutely impossible to think that these forms of intuition belong to the ego, and not to the non-ego. Now Kant does not, according to the nature of his system, commit him Thirdly, Mr. Spencer maintains that some of our sense-perceptions, and more particularly that of hearing, are not necessarily localized. This objection again always know the exact place where sounds come from, we always know, even in the case of our ear ringing, that what we perceive is outside, is somewhere, comes towards us; and that is all that Kant requires. But besides these fundamental forms of sensuous intuition, Space and Time, without which no sensuous perception is possible, Kant, by his analysis of Pure Reason, discovered other conditions of our knowledge, the so-called Categories of the Intellect. While the sensualistic school, beginning with the ordinary a priori of experience, looked upon these forms of thought as mere abstractions, the residue or shadow of repeated observations, Kant made it clear that without them no experience, not even the lowest, would be possible, and that therefore they could not by themselves be acquired by experience. Grant, he would say, that we have, we do not know how, the sensations of colour, sound, taste, smell, or touch. They are given, and we must accept them. But think of the enormous difference between a vibration and a sensation; and again between a succession and agglomeration of the sensations of yellowness, softness, sweetness, and roundness, and what we mean when we speak of an orange! The nerves may vibrate for ever-what would that be to us? The sensations might rush in for ever through the different gates of our senses, the afferent nerves might deliver them to one central point, yet even then they would remain but so many excitations of nervous action, so many sensations, coming and going at pleasure, but they would never by themselves alone produce in us the perception of an orange. The common-sense view of the matter is that we perceive all these sensations together as an orange, because the orange, as such, exists without us as something substantial, and the qualities of yellowness, softness, sweetness, and roundness are inherent in it. This is, no doubt, very unphilosophical, and ignores the positive fact that all that we have consists and can consist only of sensations and phases of consciousness, and that nothing can ever carry us beyond. Yet there is this foundation of truth in the common-sense view, that it shows our utter inability of perceiving any sensations without referring them to something substantial which causes them, and is supposed to possess all those qualities which correspond to our sensations. But if we once know that what is given us consists only of phases of sensation, whatever their origin may be, it then becomes clear that it can only be our Self, or whatever else we like to call it, which adds all the rest, and does this, not consciously or deliberately, but of necessity, and, as it were, in the dark. cause. acquired by repeated perception. The premiss in this argument, viz. that what we mean by cause has no warrant in the Non-ego, is indeed accepted, not only by Kant, but also by Hume; nay, there can be no doubt that on this point Kant owed very much to Hume's scepticism. Kant has nothing to say against Hume's argumentation that the ideas of cause and ef fect, of substance and quality, in that sense in which we use them, are not found in actual experience. But while Hume proceeded to discard those ideas as mere illusions, Kant, on the contrary, reclaimed them as the inevitable forms to which all phenomena must submit, if they are to be phenomena, if they are to be come our phenomena, the perceptions of a human Self. He established their truth, or, what with him is the same, their inevitability in all phenomenal knowledge, and by showing their inapplicability to any but phenomenal knowledge, he once for all determined the limits of what is knowable and what is not. These inevitable forms were reduced by Kant to twelve, and he arranged them systematically in his famous Table of Categories: (2) Affirmation, Negation, Limitation; There is no time, I am afraid, to examine the true character of these categories in detail, or the forms which they take as schemata. What applies to one applies to all, viz. that without them no thought is possible. Take the categories of quantity, and try to think of anything without thinking of it at the same time as one or many, and you will find it is impossible. Nature does not count for us, we must count ourselves, and the talent of counting cannot have been acquired by counting, any more than a stone acquires the talent of swimming by being thrown into the water. We cannot receive sensations without at once referring them to a substantial To say that these sensations may have no origin at all, would be to commit an outrage against ourselves. And why? Simply because our mind is so constituted that to doubt whether anything phenomenal had a cause would be a logical suicide. Call it what you like, a law, a necessity, an unconscious instinct, a category of the understanding, it always remains the fault of our Self, that it cannot receive sensations without referring them Put in the shortest way, I should say to a substance of which they are supposed that the result of Kant's analysis of the to tell us the attributes.* And if this is Categories of the Understanding is, so, we have a clear right to say with "Nihil est in sensu, quod non fuerit in Kant, that that without which even the intellectu." We cannot perceive any oblowest perception of an object is impossi-ject, except by the aid of the intellect. ble must be given, and cannot have been tam Sensus quam Mentis, sunt ex analogia Hominis, *Cf. Bacon, Nov. Org. I. 41. "Omnes perceptiones, non ex analogia universi. Estque Intellectus humanus instar speculi inæqualis ad radíos rerum, qui suam naturam Naturæ rerum immiscet, eamque distorquet et inficet." — Liebmann, Kant, p. 48. It is not easy to give in a few words a true abstract of Kant's philosophy, yet if gressive, or, it may be, retrogressive, we wish to gain a clear view of the promovement of human thought from century to century, we must be satisfied with short abstracts, as long as they contain In Germany, although Kant's system has been succeeded by other systems, his reply to Hume has never been challenged by any leading philosopher. It has been strengthened rather than weakened by subsequent systems which, though widely differing from Kant in their metaphysical conceptions never questioned his success in vindicating certain ingredients of our knowledge as belonging to mind, not to matter; to the subject, not to the object; to the understanding, not to sensation; to the à priori, not to experience. They have disregarded Kant's warning that à priori laws of thought must not be applied to anything outside the limits of sensuous experience, but they have never questioned the true à priori character of those laws themselves." the essence of each system of philosophy. | protest against the use of the categories We may spend years in exploring the with regard to anything not supplied by course of a river, and we may have in our the senses, is the crowning effort of note-books accurate sketches of its bor- Kant's philosophy, but, strange to say, it ders, of every nook and corner through is a protest unheeded by almost all phiwhich it winds. But for practical pur- losophers who follow after Kant. To my poses we want a geographical map, more mind Kant's general solution of the probor less minute, according to the extent lem which divided Hume and Berkeley is of the area which we wish to survey; perfect; and however we may criticize and here the meandering outline of the the exact number of the inevitable forms river must vanish, and be replaced by a of thought, his Table of Categories as a bold line, indicating the general direction whole will for ever remain the Magna of the river from one important point to Charta of true philosophy. another, and nothing else. The same is necessary if we draw, either for our own guidance or for the guidance of others, a map of the streams of philosophic thought. Whole pages, nay, whole volumes, must here be represented by one or two lines, and all that is essential is that we should not lose sight of the salient points in each system. It has been said that every system of philosophy lies in a nut-shell, and this is particularly true of great and decisive systems. They do not wander about much; they go straight to the point. What is really characteristic in them is the attitude which the philosopher assumes towards the old problems of the world that attitude once understood, and everything else follows almost by necessity. In the philosophy of Kant two streams of philosophic thought, which had been running in separate beds for ages, meet for the first time, and we can clearly discover in his system the gradual mingling of the colours of Hume and Berkeley. Turning against the one-sided Course of Hume's philosophy, Kant shows that there is something in our intellect which could never have been supplied by mere sensations; turning against Berkeley, he shows that there is something in our sensations which could never have been supplied by mere intellect. He maintains that Hume's sensations and Berkeley's intellect exist for each other, depend on each other, presuppose each other, form together a whole that should never have been torn asunder. And he likewise shows that the two factors of our knowledge, the matter of our sensations on one side, and their form on the other, are correlative, and that any It is different, however, in England. attempt at using the forms of our intel- Here a new school of British philosophy lect on anything which transcends the has sprung up, not entirely free, perhaps, limits of our sensations is illegal. Hence from the influence of Comte, but suphis famous saying, Begriffe ohne An- ported by far greater learning, and real schauungen sind leer, Anschauungen ohne philosophical powera school which deBegriffe sind blind. ("Conceptions with-liberately denies the correctness of Kant's out Intuitions are empty, Intuitions with-analysis, and falls back in the main on the out Conceptions are blind.") This last position once occupied by Locke or Hume. One · Nor can it be said that in France the step which Kant had made in advance of Hume has ever been retraced by those who represent in that country the historical progress of philosophy. French philosopher only, whose position is in many respects anomalous, Auguste Comte, has ventured to propose a system of philosophy in which Kant's position is not indeed refuted but ignored. Comte did not know Kant's philosophy, and I do not think that it will be ascribed to any national prejudice of mine if I consider that this alone would be sufficient to exclude his name from the historical roll of philosophers. I should say just the same of Kant if he had written in ignorance of Locke and Hume and Berkeley, or of Spinoza if he had ignored the works of Descartes, or of Aristotle if he had ignored the teaching of Plato. |