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CHAP.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"It is a difficult matter," says Heine, "to write the life history of Immanuel Kant, for he had neither life nor history. He lived a mechanically ordered, abstract, old bachelor kind of existence in a quiet, retired alley in K?nigsberg, an old town in the north-east corner of Germany." The times he lived in were stirring enough. He was born in 1724, and died in 1804. He lived through the Seven Years' War that first made Germany a nation, he followed with sympathy the United States War of Independence, he saw the French Revolution and the beginning of the career of Napoleon. Yet in all his long life he never moved out of the province in which he was born, and nothing was allowed to interrupt the steady course of his lecturing, studying, and writing. "Getting up," continues Heine, "drinking coffee, lecturing, eating, going for a walk, everything had its fixed time; and the neighbours knew that it must be exactly half-past four when Immanuel Kant, in his gray frock-coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand, stepped from his door and walked towards the little lime-tree avenue, which is called after him the Philosopher's Walk." "Strange contrast," reflects Heine, "between the man's outward life and his destructive, world-smashing thoughts." As the political history of the eighteenth century came to an end when the French Revolution spilled over the borders of France and drove Napoleon up and down Europe, breaking up the old political systems and inaugurating modern Europe, so its opposing currents of thought were gathered together in the mind of a weak-chested, half-invalid little man in K?nigsberg, and from their meeting a new era in philosophy began.

Unfortunately this was not easy, for the advance from pure mathematics to physics, from a study of the nature of pure mathematical conceptions to an inquiry into the laws of falling bodies, implied a change whose nature was not clear to the men who had themselves made the advance. A conflict arose between those who thought more of the fact that knowledge, to be certain, must be capable of mathematical expression, and those who thought more of the basis of experiment and observation on which the new sciences depended, who remembered that these sciences began when Galileo, instead of thinking in the abstract how bodies ought to fall, dropped bodies of different weights from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa and observed what actually happened. Descartes was the great representative of the first school. He began by insisting on the difference between mathematical truth which could be, as he said, clearly and distinctly conceived, and ordinary opinion about things which was full of guesswork and imagination. Scientific knowledge was possible, he thought, only by apprehending the real or primary qualities of things which were mathematical, in contradistinction to their secondary qualities--their colour, smell, &c.--which were less real. Thence he came to think that the real world was mathematical in nature, like a huge, intricate geometrical figure. The elements of mere fact, in our present knowledge, its dependence on observation and experiment, he thought of as temporary defects which the progress of science would remove. What we ordinarily call perception, indeed, in the sense of awareness of things in time and space, was described by Descartes' successors as confused thinking. Our knowledge of the world would, it was hoped, become a vast mathematical system, all the detail and complexity of which would be rigorously deducible from a few central truths.

We have here the same general starting point of inquiry as we shall afterwards find in Kant. There are certain, obstinate puzzles which we meet with in discussion which can only be solved by going back and inquiring into the nature of knowledge and the powers of our minds. Unfortunately, as Kant points out, Locke went the wrong way about his task. He describes it as "a plain historical inquiry." He thought that he had only to look into his mind and see what was in it, as he might open a door and look into a room. The result is that he thinks of all knowledge as consisting simply in looking at what is present to the mind. We can know, therefore, whatever can be present to the mind, and the limitations of knowledge are discovered by asking what can be so present to the mind. The conclusions to which he comes as to different spheres of human inquiry are roughly these: We can have knowledge of mathematics because there we are concerned only with ideas present to the mind, and with noting their agreement and disagreement. We can have no knowledge of such questions as the immortality of the soul, or the nature of spirits, for they are beyond our observation. As regards existing things, we can have knowledge of them, in so far as they are present to our minds, and no further. The meaning of "present to the mind" was never clearly analysed by Locke; but he meant, for example, that we can observe that an object which is yellow, and which we call gold, is also heavy, and can be dissolved by Aqua Regia, but we cannot say why that is so, and we ought not, on Locke's principles, to have any ground for supposing that these qualities will go on co-existing.

These difficulties were seen more clearly by Hume, at once the greatest and the most thorough-going of empiricists. He cut the knot in regard to mathematics by asserting that geometry, just because it has clearly an application to the existing world, had no more certainty than any other empirical inquiry, while arithmetic and algebra, he agreed, were certain, but confined their application to the sphere of our own ideas. Both positions are almost obviously inconsistent with the facts. In considering the nature of our judgments about concrete existences he raised a more profound problem. All such judgments, as he said, imply the principle of causation, or of what is called, in modern times, the principle of the uniformity of nature. That principle we take with us in our investigation of the existing world. Yet, as Hume saw, we do not observe causes; we only observe succession and change. We seem, therefore, to put into the world we see a necessity and uniformity which the observed facts do not warrant. How is this to be explained?

Hume's answer is ingenious. The principle of causation cannot be rationally justified, and the necessary connection we predicate of changes in the outside world is not in the things; it is only a feeling in ourselves, and is the result of custom. After seeing the same succession several times, we come somehow to feel differently about it, and that feeling of difference we express by saying that we have before us an instance not of simple succession, but of cause and effect.

This is not the place to discuss the difficulties of Hume's position; it is enough to notice how entirely passive it makes the mind, and how alien such an explanation is from the spirit of inquiry and discovery. If cause is simply the effect of custom on the mind, then the facts either produce that effect or they do not. In neither case is there anything to find out. But the scientist, in investigating causes, however strongly he may hold that he has to observe the facts, knows also that he has a problem to solve, that he has to discover the right way to go about it, must adopt some principle in dealing with the facts. Pure passivity will help him little.

Both the rationalistic and the empirical explanations of science had failed, the one because it could find no room for observation of facts, the other because it could find no room for principles governing that observation; and we shall see that Kant started with a consciousness of this double failure. He saw that Hume's criticism of causation raised problems for which the rationalist had no answer, and yet that the position reached by Hume was incompatible with the existence of science.

The same failure of both rationalism and empiricism had become evident in another sphere--that of morals and religion. The relation of philosophy to science is always twofold. Philosophy is partly concerned with analysing and reflecting on the methods of the different sciences, partly with seeking to adjust the rival and conflicting claims of the two great departments of man's life--science and religion.

It might seem, at first sight, as though in morals and religion rationalism were the only possible method to be approved by philosophy, for, inasmuch as morals are concerned with what ought to be, not with what is, they cannot depend on observation, but must be deduced from some principle above experience; nor are objects of religion, God and the soul, objects of observation. No man can "by searching find out God."

The earlier of the modern thinkers--Descartes among the rationalists, and Bacon among the empiricists--are full of hope. They have confidence in the human spirit. But increased reflection seemed only to bring distrust with it. The history of rationalism in theology showed that, in such matters, reason could prove absolutely opposing positions. Most men were ready to accept Hume's dictum that any one who follows his reason must be a fool and take refuge in an indifferentism which accepts whatever happens to be there.

The remedy for this state of affairs, Kant finds, is the critical method; for disbelief in reason is the reaction from overconfidence in it. Men had thought that reason could prove everything. Because these hopes had been frustrated, they now thought that it could prove nothing. Philosophy, he was convinced, would oscillate between overweening confidence and unwarranted distrust in itself until it had criticised human reason and discovered what it could do and what it could not. This is the task he set before himself. As the failure of eighteenth century philosophy, which had led to distrust of all philosophy, had been twofold--failure to give an intelligible explanation of the processes of scientific thought, and failure to find any standard by which to mediate between the conflicting claims of science and religion--the task of the critical philosophy is twofold. It attempts to explain and to justify the methods and assumptions of the sciences, and to find some solution of the conflict between theories of the world which seem to be based upon these methods and the assumptions and claims of morality and religion.

This last point must be elucidated later. In the meantime we must see how this inquiry into the nature of reason crystalises itself into a seemingly abstract and trivial question: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? It is baffling at first to find an inquiry of the scope we have indicated suddenly take such a narrow form, but a little consideration will show the importance of the question. Knowledge may be regarded as either analysis or synthesis, as a puzzling out or unravelling of what we somehow know already, or as a putting together of what had previously been known or observed separately. The rationalist school, whom we described in the last chapter, were inclined to regard all knowledge as analytical. They thought of progress in knowledge as an advance from obscure to clear apprehension, and as a thinking out or making clear of something which had always been known somehow. Mathematics, the typical form of knowledge for the rationalists, had been thought of as the analysis of what was implied or given in the definitions. The conception of analytic a priori knowledge was thus familiar and simple. On the other hand, the empiricists had thought of knowledge as primarily synthesis--or, as they called it, association--a connecting together of ideas in their nature separate. Knowledge of a thing was thought of as the observing together of several ideas. Judgments about objects were regarded as judgments about the co-existence of separate ideas, ideas which were not thought of as being bound by any logical necessity. We do not understand why a substance with the specific gravity of gold should be yellow; we only observe the co-existence of certain qualities. The judgment, then, gold is yellow, is synthetic; it is an assertion of the co-existence of separate qualities. It is also empirical; it does not express a reasoned insight into the necessary connection of gold and yellow. It seems rather a record of observation. Synthetic knowledge, then, was thought of as in its nature empirical and a posteriori. Hume, who thought of all knowledge of the world in experience as synthetic, denied to such knowledge any necessity or certainty.

Hume, however, had noticed that the principle of causation, the judgment that every event has a cause, is both a priori and synthetic. It is not, he held, derived from experience; rather it is a principle which guides our investigation of experience. It is not got from analysis of the notion of causation, nor is it simply concerned with the agreement or disagreement of our ideas. It asserts the necessary connection of two perfectly separate existing things. Hume himself, as we saw, tried to explain away these uncomfortable facts. He was too wedded to his belief that all knowledge was derived from passively received impressions to face them rightly. Kant, coming to the problem with different prepossessions, with the belief that most knowledge was analytic, was impressed with Hume's proof that the principle of causation could not be derived from analysis. The very basis of all science of nature, then, contradicted the belief that knowledge was analytical. Kant was also, with Hume, convinced that the principle of causation was not derived from experience, for he saw that experience assumed it. At the same time, he was not prepared, like Hume, to explain it away. Further, he saw that the problem raised by the principle of causation was a wide one. For other judgments, he held, are both synthetic and a priori, among them mathematical judgments. As we shall see afterwards, Kant proved the impossibility of arriving at knowledge of God or the soul by mere analysis of concepts. The judgments of metaphysics, about God or the soul, are also synthetic. But the validity of the judgments of metaphysics is under dispute. If we examine the synthetic a priori judgments of mathematics and of science whose validity is certain, we may then discover whether such judgments in metaphysics can or can not have similar certainty. We may thus see that the problem of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments is a restatement in logical terms of the problem of the relation between the a priori sciences and metaphysics.

Something more must be said of the importance of synthetic a priori judgments in Kant's account of knowledge. Their existence, we have seen, exposes the shortcomings of both rationalism, which allowed only for analytic a priori judgments, and empiricism, which allowed only of synthetic a posteriori judgments. Both these theories tended to regard knowledge as an analysis or description of what was present to the mind, and differed really only in their view of what was present. For, though the empiricist thought of empirical knowledge as synthesis, the synthesis was not ascribed to the mind, but to associating ideas; the mind only observed, and knowledge was merely the apprehension of objects by the senses. We see what is before our eyes, and notice the differences and similarities in what is before us. The rationalist conceived of thought as simply apprehending the nature of the real, freed from the illusions of sense perception. The mathematician has before his thought the nature of a triangle, and sees intellectually what that nature implies. We may try to mediate between the two by saying that while all knowing is observing, some is observing of objects of thought and some of objects of sense, the one being called understanding, the other perception. In most scientific judgments, however, we are not simply observing objects either of thought or of sense. Scientific judgments are more than descriptions of what is present to the mind or to the senses; they are essentially anticipations. They go beyond what is immediately given. This is shown by the fact that it is the characteristic of a scientific proposition that it can be verified. If we understand it rightly, we see that it implies that, under such-and-such conditions, such-and-such things will be experienced. Hence the importance of experiment to science. A scientific proposition is, of course, grounded on observation of perceived fact and understanding of universal connection, but it is an assertion of something beyond that.

If, then, all scientific judgments are synthetic, and if both rationalism and empiricism failed to account for the manner in which such judgments go beyond what is immediately given to the mind, ought we not to say that the real problem for Kant is to show not merely how synthetic a priori judgments are possible, but how any synthetic judgments are possible? This seems at first sight plausible, but the suggestion must be rejected; for, when Kant asks how a judgment is possible, he is not asking how we come to make it, but how we know that it is valid. Now, if we consider any empirical judgment about the facts of nature, we must recognise that Locke and Hume were right in denying certainty to such judgments. In all general statements about concrete facts we to a certain extent go beyond our evidence. Empirical scientific statements are not theoretically certain. They may, of course, be certain enough for all practical purposes. They are reasonable expectations of what will happen, but reasonable expectation is a very different thing from the certainty of mathematical insight.

Now Kant maintained that, while such empirical judgments are not certain, they all imply the certainty of a number of general principles on which they depend. These general principles are the synthetic a priori judgments with which he is especially concerned. When we apply the principles of trigonometry to an engineering problem, we know that our measurements are only approximate, and that the result also will only be approximate; but the possibility of arriving at such approximate results depends on the absolute truth of the trigonometrical principles, and on the assumption that they express not simply the agreement or disagreement of ideas, but hold of the real. When we apply the rules of arithmetic to counting objects, there may be a certain arbitrariness in deciding on our unit. There is no such arbitrariness in the rule. All scientific judgments of causation are only approximately certain, but they all imply the certainty of the principle of causation, and are based on the assumption that such a principle is of universal application. This and the other principles assumed in our empirical judgments are, then, the synthetic judgments with which Kant is concerned. Now, it is of the nature of our empirical knowledge that it is fragmentary and not uniform, that we are concerned with an indefinite number of things whose connections we do not wholly understand, and which we cannot therefore anticipate. Yet we assume that all these objects will obey the rules of arithmetic and geometry, and will all be subject in their changes to the principle of causation. On such assumptions all the sciences of applied mathematics depend. How are they justifiable? That is Kant's question.

Kant, when he considers mathematics, is concerned with the assumptions of applied mathematics, of those sciences which, though mathematical, make statements about existing objects, and in which the old distinction between understanding and perception which was based on the difference in the objects of these two faculties breaks down. The sciences which Kant is investigating imply that principles which are clearly not derived from mere observation are yet the basis on which we order and arrange what we observe. Now, if we held that the objects of mathematics were independent entities quite separate from the things we perceive, it would be impossible to explain how we might assume that the things we perceive would be subject to the rules of mathematics. If, on the other hand, we held that in mathematics we were simply concerned with the various objects of the senses, it would be impossible to explain how mathematics can have a generality and necessity which no statements can have which rest on observation of the various things we see. The existence of applied mathematics implies firstly that understanding and perception are distinct, and that neither of them can be reduced to the other, for that would mean that we should have to give up either the element of observation and experiment or the element of necessity and a priority, and secondly, that understanding and perception are combined, and must be combined for any advance in science.

Now, Kant finds his answer to the problem he has raised by concentrating his attention on the fact that, while understanding and perception are distinct, they are both present in all knowledge. His argument is that we are necessarily in a difficulty if we think of understanding and perception as having each its separate objects, and then try to explain their combination. If we begin with their combination, we may see that the reference of principles of thought to objects of sense is not an accident, but that these principles of thought or of understanding, as Kant calls them, are only concerned with objects of sense, and have no other meaning. If we object, But how can principles of thought be universal if they are concerned with the many and varying objects of sense? Kant's answer is that they are not concerned directly with these objects, but with the conditions under which these objects can be understood. They are therefore not statements about objects, but statements of the conditions of possible experience. If we find out that all perceiving and thinking imply certain conditions, then we can affirm the validity of principles based upon these conditions, so long as we do not try to apply the principles beyond our perceiving.

Kant, here, is concerned with reason in its application to experience, and he makes it clear that there is much in all such inquiries which cannot be anticipated a priori. "Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it." The answer to the questions and experiments cannot be known beforehand. The empirical element in science cannot be explained away. Reason dictates not the answer but the question, and so far the form of the answer. Reason, then, it is suggested, is concerned with the principles or conditions, according to which we can understand things. It is not a method of observing or analysing objects; rather it states the methods and principles according to which objects must be observed if they are to be understood. The principles are not statements about the nature of objects, but principles of the possibility of experience. This new attitude to reason Kant describes as the Copernican change in philosophy. It constitutes Kant's idealism. Its nature and importance we must examine in the next chapter.

The great discovery which Kant considered he had made as to the nature of reason was that reason was not a method of observing objects as they really exist, but was concerned directly only with our ways of understanding objects. This discovery is the essence of Kant's idealism, and its main purport is expressed in the distinction Kant so often makes between things in themselves and phenomena. This distinction is used as the key to the solution of all his difficulties. But the doctrine it implies is very easy to misunderstand, partly because idealism is generally used in a very different sense from that in which Kant uses it, partly because Kant's statement of the distinction between things in themselves and phenomena depended on a view of knowledge which he was very much concerned to refute, but with which we are not now familiar. If we are to understand Kant's philosophy, we must know what he means by idealism, and wherein his idealism differs from that of his predecessors.

The word idealism is, naturally, contrasted with realism. It suggests an assertion that something is not real, but only an idea. If we know it to be combined with a distinction between things in themselves, and phenomena, or appearances, it seems to suggest that the objects of knowledge are somehow illusions, or only appearances in the mind, as contrasted with real things. Something like this had been held by Kant's predecessors. For the fundamental principle of the idealism on which most of Kant's predecessors had been agreed, and which is sometimes called Cartesian, and sometimes subjective idealism, is that the mind somehow knows itself and its own actions and states, with more directness and certainty than it knows external objects. The doctrine is commonly based upon a confused view of sense perception.

Locke supposed that, although we knew only ideas, we could somehow refer from our ideas to an outside world. For he thought that truth was concerned with the agreement of our ideas with reality. This form of the doctrine, the commonest, is sometimes called Representationism. For it thinks of the mind as concerned with representations, or pictures, or images which it may compare with the real objects. Its futility is obvious enough. We can only compare a picture with the thing it represents, if we can know both. If we can only know ideas, we can never know that they are only ideas, and can never compare them with anything else.

This difficulty was seen by Berkeley, the most consistent of subjective idealists, and led him to deny the existence of outside objects, and hold that existence or reality meant being perceived and nothing more. But if we take Berkeley's position, it becomes very difficult to say what we mean by judgments being true. If things only exist as we think of them, or perceive them, or rather if they are only our thinking of or perceiving them, the question of the truth or falsity of our statements about them cannot arise.

This idealism Kant is careful to refute, and he points out that there is no evidence for its fundamental proposition that we know our mind more directly than we know objects. We are only conscious of ourselves in knowing something not ourselves. We do not invent the notion of externality or outsideness in space from an experience in which it originally has no part. Externality is implied in our most simple experience. We begin with consciousness of outside things, and only become conscious of our own mental states or processes later. But it is important to observe that, the truth or falsity of subjective idealism has no bearing whatsoever on the question with which Kant was concerned. If I ask how I can lay down rules about what I have not yet experienced, I am not in the least helped by being told that I only experience what is in my mind. For the question will equally arise, How do I know what is going to be in my mind? The question idealism ordinarily discusses, as to whether the objects of our awareness are in our mind or outside, are in their nature mental and dependent on the mind or not, is entirely and absolutely irrelevant to Kant's purposes.

But it is a fact, and one that has got to be explained that in judgment we go beyond what is present to our minds, and that, in so anticipating what we shall experience, we assume that certain principles hold of all that has been or may be present. With that difficulty idealism, as ordinarily understood, has nothing to do. Representationism tried to give some account of this going beyond what is present to our minds by suggesting that truth is a reference from ideas to reality; but, as we saw, if we know only ideas, such a reference is impossible. The doctrines opposed to representationism, that only ideas exist, or that we directly know real objects, allow the existence of nothing contrasted with what we are apprehending to which a reference in judgment can be made. No one who is satisfied with any of these positions can have seen Kant's problem.

In the second place, if we consider our knowledge of objects, we realise that, as we said, at any one moment we only perceive them in part or from one position. What we directly perceive of them is fragmentary and discontinuous, one aspect seen now, and another aspect seen at another time. But we do not think of the things as existing in that discontinuous way; we think of them as having a nature of their own. That does not contradict, but is something very much more than, what we perceive, and our knowledge of any object is got by piecing together the aspects we directly perceive; but that piecing together, or synthesis, is not haphazard. It is governed by rules--rules partly derived from the nature of the particular thing we are concerned with, and partly more general rules, which come from the relation of this work of piecing together to the framework of space and time by help of which it is done.

Kant's conception of knowledge, then, is something like this. Each of us is in direct contact with reality, but we perceive directly only a small part of it, and, as our consciousness moves on in time, and as we change our position in space, we are directly conscious of different small portions of reality. A part of the whole is illumined by direct perception, but the whole stretches beyond that indefinitely in space and time. In the part we directly perceive there is a temporal order and a spatial order. Things are given to us arranged in space and ordered in time, and these arrangements or orders in the space and time that is directly given to us in perception have certain rules, and we think of these principles of arrangement as extending indefinitely beyond the space and time given to us in perception. When we make judgments about reality beyond our perception, we think of things as so arranged in the space and time beyond our perception as we should see them arranged were the range of our perception sufficiently wide. Further, it is most important to remember that we do not remain in one place and at one time and make guesses of what may happen in the darkness beyond. Though our perception at any one moment is limited, we can connect what we see at one time with what we see at another. We can, by means of language and writing, use the perception of others to fill out our experience, until gradually our scientific judgments, our knowledge of what we should perceive under all sorts of possible experience, seems to bulk much more largely than could our individual perceptions. But we are still, Kant would say, getting at our knowledge of what is beyond by piecing together what we and other people have perceived, and the whole is always much more than that.

Now, obviously it is quite possible to hold this position without having thought out what is implied in being present to the mind in perception. This is what Kant did. He describes perception in different and inconsistent ways. The reason for this inconsistency is that Kant is not concerned with the nature of perception, but with the relation of what is immediately perceived to what is not but may be immediately perceived, and he therefore never worked out any consistent account of perception. He sometimes talks of perception reaching objects directly, and refutes the view that we perceive only what is in our mind. But usually he takes the ordinary idealist view that we do not perceive things, but affections produced in us by things. Owing to this inconsistency Kant constantly seems to be stating very much more than he has any right to. This is especially true in all that he says about knowledge being confined to phenomena and not extending to things in themselves. When he talks of our knowing only phenomena, he sometimes seems to mean that we know objects, things in themselves, only in part, in so far as they appear to us. That would make the distinction between the phenomenon and the thing in itself a distinction between the same thing imperfectly and perfectly understood. He sometimes, and this is his more usual view, seems to mean that we are aware of appearances, entities separate and distinguishable from the objects which produce them in our minds. But if we work out in any of Kant's arguments the point of his appeal to the fact that knowledge is only of phenomena, we shall find that in every case the difference between a subjective idealist and a realist view of perception, of what "being present to the mind" means, is irrelevant, and that his argument holds on either theory.

Space and time, then, can be abstracted from things in space and time. Yet, on the other hand, we cannot think that space and time exist independently of things. They do not exist in abstraction; for, though the specific differences of things in space and time are irrelevant to the nature of space and time, if there were no things, or if there were no differences, there could be no space and time as we know them. "The empirical perception," says Kant, "is not compounded of phenomena and space, of the sensation and the empty perception." Space and time, therefore, Kant says, are not things in themselves.

What, then, are they? Kant's answer is that they are forms of our perception. Space is the form of external perception, and time is the form of internal perception, and Kant holds that by this answer we can understand both how our knowledge of space and time may be a priori, how spatial and temporal distinctions may be abstracted from the differences of things, and how we may avoid the difficulties consequent on regarding time and space as independent things.

We can see now what Kant means by saying that time and space are empirically real and transcendentally ideal. Kant does not maintain that space and time are illusions. They are a constant element of what is given us in perception. It is only when we try and go beyond our perceptions, and take space and time as things existing independently of what we perceive, thus trying to transcend the limits of possible perception, that we fall into illusion. Space and time have meaning only as elements in what we perceive, or in connecting what we perceive now with what we may perceive.

The distinction is not really so simple as it appears. For we all know that what we perceive depends, at least to some extent, on the mind's activity. We are familiar with the reflection that men see what they want to see or what they are looking for. This is clearly shown in the case of hearing by the difference in what we hear when we are listening to a language we understand and when we are listening to an unfamiliar language, or in the common experience when, after failing to hear what someone has said, we think what it must have been, and then seem to recall the sound, not as we heard it, but as we should have heard it if we had heard it rightly. Anyone who reflects on the process of fast reading will realise that we do not perceive or notice all the letters on a page; we fill in from our imagination, as we discover when we read words that are not on the page. It is a very hard thing, giving up all interpretation and inference, to describe faithfully just what is there to see.

Most concepts, as we saw, are empirical. We take certain likenesses and differences we observe as the mark of a real unity in the things. The different natures of different things we do not fully know, but we distinguish them by the different uniformities we observe, and in order to explain our experience we assume the unity underlying these perceived likenesses. Iron, dog, fire, are names for the natures of things which we see manifested in our experience. The concept, then, is got from what we perceive, though it stands for something more than we perceive. How, then, can there be any concepts which are not got from the empirical differences of things we perceive? Let us take such a concept as substance, and see whether we can discover where it comes from. Locke had been puzzled by discovering that he could not, in any object, find anything which was its substantiality. Calling anything a substance is not like saying that it is hard, or green, or heavy; we are not concerned with specific differences in things, but we are not therefore saying what is meaningless. There is something, namely substance, which we can distinguish from the hardness, or colour, or weight that we perceive. That something we do not perceive; we assume it whenever we talk of a thing being hard, and green, and heavy. A thing's substantiality is just the unity of its perceivable qualities. But such a unity is implied in the concept of any object. Substance, then, is a name for one of the general principles implied in our assuming that what we perceive are real objects.

Kant generalises the result of this inquiry into particular concepts of this kind. He holds that a priori concepts or categories stand for principles implied in thinking of things as objects or in judging. If we want, therefore, to find out the number of the categories, we must ask how many different kinds of unity are implied in judgment, or what are the conditions of judging any object. Kant does not here help, but rather misleads us in this inquiry. For he unfortunately thought that the different kinds of judgment could be discovered without further ado by taking the list given in formal logic. He therefore first makes a list of categories, based on the logical forms of judgment, and then tries to show the connection between these categories and the principles which were, as he had discovered, assumed in the mathematical sciences.

The actual movement of his thought is, I think, different. He asks if there are any general conditions implied in all judgment. His answer is that all judgments, all statements, that is, which claim to be true, imply determination of time and space. From that determination certain principles can be deduced. If time and space are implied in all judging, then these principles will equally be implied, and will hold of all things which can be objects for us.

The categories which are of importance in Kant's argument are quantity, quality, substance, causation, and reciprocity, and necessity, possibility, and actuality. The last three are less important than the others, and we shall not deal with them.

To the first five of these categories correspond the following principles:

Quantity. "All phenomena are, with reference to their perception, extensive quantities."

Quality. "In all phenomena the real, which is the object of a sensation, has intensive quantity, that is, a degree."

We shall follow Kant's argument more easily if we take his account of one of these principles--the principle of causation. For what is said of that will hold, with necessary changes, of the others, and, as we have noticed, it was Hume's criticism of causation which first led Kant to formulate the critical problem. Hume had pointed out that we had never such insight into causal connection as to be able, from mere inspection of a cause, to foretell the effect without any reference to experience. He declared, on the contrary, that there was no difference between observed succession and causation so far as concerned the objects observed. In each case we see first one thing and then another. The difference, then, between mere succession and causal connection can only be in us, in the way we come to feel about certain successions we observe. In technical language, the necessity of causation is subjective.

How does Kant answer this position? He begins, as is usual with him, by taking the problem a little further back. Causation is a connection we predicate between what we see at one time, and what we see at another. Now if we take into account only the fact that we see one thing at one time and another thing at another, there is no difference between what we see when we successively see two things which we judge to co-exist, and when we see two things one of which we judge to have succeeded the other in time. Hume, therefore, proved too much. His argument would show that we have no grounds for distinguishing between apprehension of succession and succession in apprehending, but such a distinction is the basis of our apprehension and understanding of change or movement. If, then, we examine how we distinguish between apprehension of succession and succession in apprehending, we may see on what the principle of causation is based.

An instance will help to make this point clear. Suppose that I am sitting in a room, and look first at the door and then turn round and look at the window. There are two successive acts of apprehending; the content of the first is the door, of the second, the window, but the succession, I say, is in my apprehending. The door and the window have co-existed all the time. Suppose, again, that I look out of the window and see a cab in front of the house opposite, come back into the room, and then look out again and see the cab in front of a house further down. Here, again, are two successive acts of apprehending, the content of the first houses with cab in front of one house, of the second houses with cab in front of another. This time I say the houses have gone on co-existing, but the cab has moved. The difference in what I see this time is due not to me, but to the cab. The succession is in the thing apprehended. If we just think of the contents apprehended, we have first A, then B, and say A and B co-exist in the first instance, and have CD and CE, and say D and E have been successive in the other. Why in the second case do we not say when we look out of the window the second time: Here is another row of houses, which, though they look exactly the same as the ones I saw last time, have got the cab in a different place? That is the land of thing one does say in a dream. Why would it be inadmissible in waking life?

Let us first ask how we ever come to make the distinction between change in the content of our perception, which is due to change in us, and change in the things we perceive. Look out of a window into a busy street. As we look certain things remain the same, the houses opposite, the lamp-posts, and so on, but other things change. The permanence of part of the contents guarantees us that the change we perceive is not due to us: if it were, these would change also. Therefore it must be in certain of the things. Change is perceived against a background that is permanent and does not change. But any such particular perception is, of course, very limited. We do not see all the world at once, and we only come to know a larger extent of reality by means of memory, which enables us to put together what we see at one time with what we see at another. We have got to try and understand how it is that we make this distinction, which is clear to us in small isolated bits of experience, hold of all experience. Now if reality did not change, and we were conscious of our own movements, we could go from one point to another of reality and back again, and could be aware that the changes in our perception were all due, not to change in reality, but to us--were our history. We should know that the different things we saw were co-existing all the time, and we should, in describing them, try to describe them, as in a map, as we should perceive them if we saw them all at once. The succession would be subjective, the co-existence objective. If we perceived nothing but change, we should be incapable of distinguishing between our changes and the change outside us, for all succession in our experiencing would be experience of what was successive, and there could be no distinction between psychology and science. Our experience of reality is not like either of these suppositions, but like both of them combined. Some succession of our experiencing is experience of the co-existing, some experience of succession.

Reality stretches out beyond us in space, some of it changing and some of it permanent; we cannot tell simply from the difference in what we perceive whether the difference comes from change in us or change in the thing. We can tell that only on the assumption that we are having fragmentary views of a whole that is continuous. The only continuity we know is the continuity of our own experience made possible by memory, and we try to interpret that experience in the light of the larger continuity of the world which our experience breaks up. As we go from one place to another, notice now this thing, now that, we can test interpretations made on this assumption. Wrong interpretations are those which make our experience inconsistent. If we thought that what happened at one time had no relation with what happened at another, that anything might happen any time, our experience and our own life would be the merest jumble. Our experience attains consistency only as we learn more and more to disentangle the differences in experience which come from our changes, from the changes and the variety which are part of the whole connected system of reality, of which we see now one fragment, then another. The distinction between succession in our apprehending and apprehension of succession, which is the basis of all experience of change, implies the recognition of change as not arbitrary but part of a connected system of reality. As Kant puts it in his formulation of the principle of the analogies of experience, "Experience is only possible by means of the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions."

The principle does not tell us of itself what causes what. That can only be discovered by empirical investigation. That is necessary because we do not, as we seem to have assumed above, simply see one thing becoming another. We see parts of all kinds of changes. Hence succession may be objective but not causal. Science has, by observation and experiment, to disentangle and isolate different changes, but it could not do this without assuming the principle of causality.

So far we have been considering the positive side of Kant's argument, his attempt to confirm the validity of the principles of science. We must now notice the negative side, his attempt to limit the application of these principles, and his denial of the possibility of knowledge in certain spheres.

Immortality is the subject of what Kant calls the paralogisms of rational psychology. He argues that all attempts to prove the immortality of the soul by a priori arguments involve an argument of this kind: they begin by noting that death is always dissolution of some kind, that, therefore, what is not made up of parts and cannot be dissolved, cannot die. Then they urge that the soul is not made up of parts, and therefore cannot die. The fallacy in this argument is that it treats the unity of the self as though it were an object of knowledge. We can show that knowledge is only possible if the self has a unity other than that of a spatial whole, but we cannot therefore argue that it must be exactly like a spatial whole, in the sense that death in it can only be brought about by dissolution, but unlike a spatial whole in that in it there is nothing to be dissolved. The real nature of the unity of the self, Kant argues, cannot be known. All we can do is to reject a priori arguments either for or against its immortality.

Freedom is treated in the third antinomy of pure reason, and to that Kant devotes most attention, but others of the antinomies are concerned with the difficulties arising from the application of spatial and temporal determinations to reality as a whole, and to the category of necessity. Kant makes a distinction between the first two and the second two antinomies. It is the first two that express the inadequacy of temporal or spatial determination to reality as a whole. All such determination implies measurement, and measurement is always a relation of part to part. The antitheses of both antinomies express the inadequacy of any number to the expression of the nature of the whole, the thesis the inadequacy of regarding reality as an aggregate or addition of any kind. Each is strong in what it denies, and Kant's solution is that both thesis and antithesis are false, because you cannot apply spatial or temporal determination to the world as a whole.

In contrast the solution of the other antinomies is that both thesis and antithesis are true, and that is possible because they are concerned with different things. The third antinomy arises from the difficulty of applying the category of causation to the world as a whole. The assumption underlying the thesis is not, as is sometimes asserted, merely that the notion of infinity in itself implies a contradiction, but that a determinate result must have a determinate cause. If we think of what actually exists now as having been caused by what has preceded it, we must think of that which has had a determinate result being itself determinate. It is the familiar argument for a first cause. In causation we seem to be relating one event to another event, and are really only putting the question of origination further back. Yet, if we say that therefore we must suppose an absolute origination of change, a beginning of the series, we have to answer the question, How is it possible to think of the originating number of the series? For to think that something can arise from nothing is to contradict the principle of causation.

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