SECTION XXXVIII.

KANT.

Immanuel Kant was born at Königsberg in Prussia, April 22, 1724. His father an honest saddlemaker, and his mother a prudent and pious woman, exerted a good influence upon him in his earliest youth. In the year 1740 he entered the university, where he connected himself with the theological department, but devoted the most of his time to philosophy, mathematics, and physics. He commenced his literary career in his twenty-third year, in 1747, with a treatise entitled "Thoughts concerning the true estimate of Living Forces." He was obliged by his pecuniary circumstances to spend some years as a private tutor in different families in the neighborhood of Königsberg. In 1755 he took a place in the university as "privat-docent," which position he held for fifteen years, during which time he gave lectures upon logic, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, and also, during the latter part of the time, upon ethics, anthropology, and physical geography. At this period he adhered for the most part to the school of Wolff, though early expressing his doubts in respect of dogmatism. From the publication of his first treatise he applied himself to writing with unwearied activity, though his great work, the "Critick of pure Reason," did not appear till his fifty-seventh year, 1781. His "Critick of the practical Reason," was issued in 1787, and his "Religion within the bounds of pure Reason," in 1793. In 1770, in his forty-sixth year, he was chosen ordinary professor of logic and metaphysics, a chair which he continued to fill uninterruptedly till 1794, when the weakness of age obliged him to leave it. Invitations to professorships at Jena, Erlangen, and Halle, were given him and rejected. As soon as he became known, the noblest and most active minds flocked from all parts of Germany to Königsberg, to sit at the feet of the sage who was master there. One of his worshippers, Reuss, professor

of philosophy at Würzburg, who abode but a brief time at Kö nigsberg, entered his chamber, declaring that he had come one. hundred and sixty miles* in order to see Kant and to speak with him. During the last seventeen years of his life he occupied a little house with a garden, in a quiet quarter of the city, where his calm and regular mode of life might be undisturbed. His habits of life were very simple. He never left his native province even to go as far as Dantzic. His longest journeys were to visit some country-seats in the environs of Königsberg, Nevertheless, as his lectures upon physical geography testify, he acquired by reading the most accurate knowledge of the earth. He knew all of Rousseau's works, of which Emile at its first appearance detained him for a number of days from his customary walks. Kant died February 12, 1804, in the eightieth year of his life. He was of medium stature, finely built, with blue eyes, and always enjoyed sound health till in his latter years, when he became childish. He was never married. His character was marked by an earnest love of truth, great candor, and simple modesty.

Though Kant's great work, the "Critick of pure Reason," which created an epoch in the history of philosophy, did not appear till 1781; yet had he previously shown an approach towards the same standpoint in several smaller treatises, and particularly in his inaugural dissertation which appeared in 1770, "Concerning the form and the principles of the Sense-World and that of the Understanding." Kant himself refers the inner genesis of his critical standpoint to Hume. "I freely confess," he says, "that it was David Hume who first roused me from my dogmatic slumber, and gave a different direction to my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy." The critical view therefore first became developed in Kant as he left the dogmatic metaphysical school, the Wolffian philosophy in which he had grown up, and went over to the study of a sceptical empiricism in Hume. Hitherto," says Kant at the close of his Critick of pure Reason, "men have been obliged to choose either a dogmati

A Cerman mile is about four and a half English miles.-TR

zal direction, like Wolff, or a sceptical one, like Hume. The critical road alone is yet open. If the reader has had pleasure and patience in travelling along this in my company, let him now contribute his aid in making this by-path into a highway, in order that that which many centuries could not effect may now be attained before the expiration of the present, and the reason become perfectly content in respect of that which has hitherto, but in vain, engaged its curiosity." Kant had the clearest consciousness respecting the relation of his criticism to the previous philosophy. He compares the revolution which he himself had brought about in philosophy with that wrought by Copernicus in astronomy. "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must regulate itself according to the objects; but all attempts to make any thing out of them apriori, through notions whereby our knowledge might be enlarged, proved, under this supposition, abortive. Let us, then, try for once whether we do not succeed better with the problems of metaphysics, by assuming that the objects must regulate themselves according to our knowledge, a mode of viewing the subject which accords so much better with the desired possibility of a knowledge of them apriori, which must decide something concerning objects before they are given us. The circumstances are in this case precisely the same as with the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, finding that his attempt to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies did not succeed, when he assumed the whole starry host to revolve around the spectator, tried whether he should not succeed better, if he left the spectator himself to turn, and the stars on the contrary at rest." In these words we have the principle of a subjective idealism, most clearly and decidedly expressed.

In the succeeding exposition of the Kantian philosophy we shall most suitably follow the classification adopted by Kant himself. His principle of classification is a psychological one. All the faculties of the soul, he says, may be referred to three, which are incapable of any farther reduction; knowing, feeling, and desire. The first faculty contains the principles, the governing laws for all the three. So far as the faculty of knowledge con

tains the principles of knowledge itself, is it theoretical reason, and so far as it contains the principles of desire and action, is it practical reason, while, so far as it contains the principles which regulate the feelings of pleasure and pain, is it a faculty of judgment. Thus the Kantian philosophy (on its critical side) divides itself into three criticks, (1) Critick of pure i. e. theoretical reason, (2) Critick of practical reason, (3) Critick of the judgment.

I. CRITICK OF PURE REASON.-The critick of pure reason, says Kant, is the inventory in which all our possessions through pure reason are systematically arranged. What are these possessions? When we have a cognition, what is it that we bring thereto? To answer these questions, Kant explores the two chief fields of our theoretical consciousness, the two chief factors of all knowledge, the sensory and the understanding. Firstly: what does our sensory or our faculty of intuition possess apriori? Secondly; what is the apriori. possession of our understanding? The first of these questions is discussed in the transcendental Esthetics (a title which we must take not in the sense now commonly attached to the word, but in its etymological signification as the "science of the apriori principles of the sensory "); and the second in the transcendental Logic or Analytics. Sense and understanding are thus the two factors of all knowledge, the two stalks—as Kant expresses it-of our knowledge, which may spring from a common root, though this is unknown to us: the sensory is the receptivity, and the understanding the spontaneity of our cognitive faculty; by the sensory, which can only furnish intuitions, objects become given to us; by the understanding, which forms conceptions, these objects become thought. Conceptions without intuitions are empty; intuitions without conceptions are blind. Intuitions and conceptions constitute the reciprocally complemental elements of our intellectual activity. What now are the apriori principles respectively of our knowledge, through the sense and through the thought? The first of these questions, as already said, is answered by

1. THE TRANSCENDENTAL ESTHETICS.-To anticipate at once

the answer, we may say that the apriori principles of our knowledge. through the sense, the original forms of sensuous intuition, are space and time. Space is the form of the external sense, by means of which objects are given to us as existing outside of ourselves separately and conjointly; time is the form of the inner sense, by means of which the circumstances of our own soul-life become objects to our consciousness. If we abstract every thing belonging to the matter of our sensations, space remains as the universal form in which all the materials of the external sense must be arranged. If we abstract every thing which belongs to the matter of our inner sense, time remains as the form which the movement of the mind had filled. Space and time are the highest forms of the outer and inner sense. That these forms lie apriori in the human mind, Kant proves, first, directly from the nature of these conceptions themselves; and, secondly, indirectly by showing that without apriori presupposing these conceptions, it were not possible to have any certain science of undoubted validity. The first of these he calls the metaphysical, and the second the transcendental discussion.

(1.) In the metaphysical discussion it is to be shown, (a) that space and time are apriori given, (b) that these notions belong to the sensory (æsthetics) and not to the understanding (logic), i. e. that they are intuitions and not conceptions. (a) That space and time are apriori is clear from the fact that every experience, before it can be, must presuppose already a space and time. I perceive something as external to me; but this external presupposes space. Again, I have two sensations at the same time and successively; this presupposes time. (b) Space and time, however, are by no means conceptions, but forms of intuition, or intuitions themselves. For in every universal conception the individual is comprehended under it, and is not a part of it; but in space and time, all individual spaces and times are parts of and contained within the universal space and the universal time.

(2.) In the transcendental discussion Kant draws his proof indirectly by showing that certain sciences, universally recognized as such, can only be conceived upon the supposition that space