The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3)

It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a distinct and full exposition of its value. For the faults are particular and finite, and can therefore be fully comprehended; while, on the contrary, the very stamp which genius impresses upon its works is that their excellence is unfathomable and inexhaustible. Therefore they do not grow old, but become the instructor of many succeeding centuries. The perfected masterpiece of a truly great mind will always produce a deep and powerful effect upon the whole human race, so much so that it is impossible to calculate to what distant centuries and lands its enlightening influence may extend. This is always the case; for however cultivated and rich the age may be in which such a masterpiece appears, genius always rises like a palm-tree above the soil in which it is rooted.

But a deep-reaching and widespread effect of this kind cannot take place suddenly, because of the great difference between the genius and ordinary men. The knowledge which that one man in one lifetime drew directly from life and the world, won and presented to others as won and arranged, cannot yet at once become the possession of mankind; for mankind has not so much power to receive as the genius has power to give. But even after a successful battle with unworthy opponents, who at its very birth contest the life of what is immortal and desire to nip in the bud the salvation of man (like the serpents in the cradle of Hercules), that knowledge must then traverse the circuitous paths of innumerable false constructions and distorted applications, must overcome the [pg 004] attempts to unite it with old errors, and so live in conflict till a new and unprejudiced generation grows up to meet it. Little by little, even in youth, this new generation partially receives the contents of that spring through a thousand indirect channels, gradually assimilates it, and so participates in the benefit which was destined to flow to mankind from that great mind. So slowly does the education of the human race, the weak yet refractory pupil of genius, advance. Thus with Kant's teaching also; its full strength and importance will only be revealed through time, when the spirit of the age, itself gradually transformed and altered in the most important and essential respects by the influence of that teaching, will afford convincing evidence of the power of that giant mind. I have, however, no intention of presumptuously anticipating the spirit of the age and assuming here the thankless rÔle of Calchas and Cassandra. Only I must be allowed, in accordance with what has been said, to regard Kant's works as still very new, while many at the present day look upon them as already antiquated, and indeed have laid them aside as done with, or, as they express it, have left them behind; and others, emboldened by this, ignore them altogether, and with brazen face go on philosophising about God and the soul on the assumption of the old realistic dogmatism and its scholastic teaching, which is as if one sought to introduce the doctrines of the alchemists into modern chemistry. For the rest, the works of Kant do not stand in need of my feeble eulogy, but will themselves for ever praise their author, and though perhaps not in the letter, yet in the spirit they will live for ever upon earth.

Certainly, however, if we look back at the first result of his teaching, at the efforts and events in the sphere of philosophy during the period that has elapsed since he wrote, a very depressing saying of Goethe obtains confirmation: “As the water that is displaced by a ship immediately flows in again behind it, so when great minds [pg 005] have driven error aside and made room for themselves, it very quickly closes in behind them again by the law of its nature” (Wahrheit und Dichtung, Theil 3, s. 521). Yet this period has been only an episode, which is to be reckoned as part of the lot referred to above that befalls all new and great knowledge; an episode which is now unmistakably near its end, for the bubble so long blown out yet bursts at last. Men generally are beginning to be conscious that true and serious philosophy still stands where Kant left it. At any rate, I cannot see that between Kant and myself anything has been done in philosophy; therefore I regard myself as his immediate successor.

What I have in view in this Appendix to my work is really only a defence of the doctrine I have set forth in it, inasmuch as in many points that doctrine does not agree with the Kantian philosophy, but indeed contradicts it. A discussion of this philosophy is, however, necessary, for it is clear that my train of thought, different as its content is from that of Kant, is yet throughout under its influence, necessarily presupposes it, starts from it; and I confess that, next to the impression of the world of perception, 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 Hindus, and by Plato. But I can only justify the contradictions of Kant which are nevertheless present in my work by accusing him of error in these points, and exposing mistakes which he committed. Therefore in this Appendix I must proceed against Kant in a thoroughly polemical manner, and indeed seriously and with every effort; for it is only thus that his doctrine can be freed from the error that clings to it, and its truth shine out the more clearly and stand the more firmly. It must not, therefore, be expected that the sincere reverence for Kant which I certainly feel shall extend to his weaknesses and errors also, and that I shall consequently refrain from exposing these except with the most careful [pg 006] indulgence, whereby my language would necessarily become weak and insipid through circumlocution. Towards a living writer such indulgence is needed, for human frailty cannot endure even the most just refutation of an error, unless tempered by soothing and flattery, and hardly even then; and a teacher of the age and benefactor of mankind deserves at least that the human weakness he also has should be indulged, so that he may not be caused pain. But he who is dead has thrown off this weakness; his merit stands firm; time will purify it more and more from all exaggeration and detraction. His mistakes must be separated from it, rendered harmless, and then given over to oblivion. Therefore in the polemic against Kant I am about to begin, I have only his mistakes and weak points in view. I oppose them with hostility, and wage a relentless war of extermination against them, always mindful not to conceal them indulgently, but rather to place them in the clearest light, in order to extirpate them the more surely. For the reasons given above, I am not conscious either of injustice or ingratitude towards Kant in doing this. However, in order that, in the eyes of others also, I may remove every appearance of malice, I wish first to bring out clearly my sincere reverence for Kant and gratitude to him, by expressing shortly what in my eyes appears to be his chief merit; and I shall do this from a standpoint so general that I shall not require to touch upon the points in which I must afterwards controvert him.

Kant's greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself, based upon the proof that between things and us there still always stands the intellect, so that they cannot be known as they may be in themselves. He was led into this path through Locke (see Prolegomena zu jeder Metaph., § 13, Anm. 2). The latter had shown that the secondary qualities of things, such as sound, [pg 007] smell, colour, hardness, softness, smoothness, and the like, as founded on the affections of the senses, do not belong to the objective body, to the thing in itself. To this he attributed only the primary qualities, i.e., such as only presuppose space and impenetrability; thus extension, figure, solidity, number, mobility. But this easily discovered Lockeian distinction was, as it were, only a youthful introduction to the distinction of Kant. The latter, starting from an incomparably higher standpoint, explains all that Locke had accepted as primary qualities, i.e., qualities of the thing in itself, as also belonging only to its phenomenal appearance in our faculty of apprehension, and this just because the conditions of this faculty, space, time, and causality, are known by us All this, however, rests on the fundamental distinction between dogmatic and critical or transcendental philosophy. Whoever wishes to make this quite clear to himself, and realise it by means of an example, may do so very briefly by reading, as a specimen of dogmatic philosophy, an essay of Leibnitz entitled “De Rerum Originatione Radicali,” and printed for the first time in the edition of the philosophical works of Leibnitz by Erdmann (vol. i. p. 147). Here the origin and excellence of the world is demonstrated Kant, indeed, did not attain to the knowledge that the phenomenon is the world as idea, and the thing in itself is the will. But he showed that the phenomenal world is conditioned just as much through the subject as through the object, and because he isolated the most universal forms of its phenomenal appearance, i.e., of the idea, he proved that we may know these forms and consider them in their whole constitution, not only by starting from the object, but also just as well by starting from the subject, because they are really the limits between object and subject which are common to them both; and he concluded that by following these limits we never penetrate to the inner nature either of the object or of the subject, consequently never know the true nature of the world, the thing in itself.

He did not deduce the thing in itself in the right way, as I shall show presently, but by means of an inconsistency, and he had to pay the penalty of this in frequent and irresistible attacks upon this important part of his teaching. He did not recognise the thing in itself directly in the will; but he made a great initial step towards this knowledge in that he explained the undeniable moral significance of human action as quite different from and not dependent upon the laws of the phenomenon, nor even explicable in accordance with them, but as something which touches the thing in itself directly: this is the second important point of view for estimating his services.

We may regard as the third the complete overthrow of the Scholastic philosophy, a name by which I wish here to denote generally the whole period beginning with Augustine, the Church Father, and ending just before Kant. For the chief characteristic of Scholasticism is, indeed, that which is very correctly stated by Tennemann, the guardianship of the prevailing national religion over philosophy, which had really nothing left for it to do but to prove and embellish the cardinal dogmas prescribed [pg 013] to it by religion. The Schoolmen proper, down to Suarez, confess this openly; the succeeding philosophers do it more unconsciously, or at least unavowedly. It is held that Scholastic philosophy only extends to about a hundred years before Descartes, and that then with him there begins an entirely new epoch of free investigation independent of all positive theological doctrine. Such investigation, however, is in fact not to be attributed to Descartes and his successors,1 but only an appearance of it, and in any case an effort after it. Descartes was a man of supreme ability, and if we take account of the age he lived in, he accomplished a great deal. But if we set aside this consideration and measure him with reference to the freeing of thought from all fetters and the commencement of a new period of untrammelled original investigation with which he is credited, we are obliged to find that with his doubt still wanting in true seriousness, and therefore surrendering so quickly and so entirely, he has, indeed, the appearance of wishing to throw off at once all the early implanted opinions belonging to his age and nation, but does so only apparently and for a moment, to assume them again immediately and hold them all the more firmly; and so is it with all his successors down to Kant. [pg 014] Goethe's lines are, therefore, very applicable to a free independent thinker of this kind:

“Saving Thy gracious presence, he to me

A long-legged grasshopper appears to be,

That springing flies, and flying springs,

And in the grass the same old ditty sings.”2

Kant had reasons for assuming the air of also intending nothing more. But the pretended spring, which was permitted because it was known that it leads back to the grass, this time became a flight, and now those who remain below can only look after him, and can never catch him again.

Kant, then, ventured to show by his teaching that all those dogmas which had been so often professedly proved were incapable of proof. Speculative theology, and the rational psychology connected with it, received from him their deathblow. Since then they have vanished from German philosophy, and one must not allow oneself to be misled by the fact that here and there the word is retained after the thing has been given up, or some wretched professor of philosophy has the fear of his master in view, and lets truth take care of itself. Only he who has observed the pernicious influence of these conceptions upon natural science, and upon philosophy in all, even the best writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, can estimate the extent of this service of Kant's. The change of tone and of metaphysical background which has appeared in German writing upon natural science since Kant [pg 015] is remarkable; before him it was in the same position as it still occupies in England. This merit of Kant's is connected with the fact that the unreflecting pursuit of the laws of the phenomenon, the elevation of these to the position of eternal truths, and thus the raising of the fleeting appearance to the position of the real being of the world, in short, realism undisturbed in its illusion by any reflection, had reigned throughout all preceding philosophy, ancient, mediÆval, and modern. Berkeley, who, like Malebranche before him, recognised its one-sidedness, and indeed falseness, was unable to overthrow it, for his attack was confined to one point. Thus it was reserved for Kant to enable the idealistic point of view to obtain the ascendancy in Europe, at least in philosophy; the point of view which throughout all non-Mohammedan Asia, and indeed essentially, is that of religion. Before Kant, then, we were in time; now time is in us, and so on.

Ethics also were treated by that realistic philosophy according to the laws of the phenomenon, which it regarded as absolute and valid also for the thing in itself. They were therefore based now upon a doctrine of happiness, now upon the will of the Creator, and finally upon the conception of perfection; a conception which, taken by itself, is entirely empty and void of content, for it denotes a mere relation that only receives significance from the things to which it is applied. “To be perfect” means nothing more than “to correspond to some conception which is presupposed and given,” a conception which must therefore be previously framed, and without which the perfection is an unknown quantity, and consequently has no meaning when expressed alone. If, however, it is intended tacitly to presuppose the conception “humanity,” and accordingly to make it the principle of morality to strive after human perfection, this is only saying: “Men ought to be as they ought to be,”—and we are just as wise as before. In fact “perfect” is very nearly a mere synonym of “complete,” for it signifies that in one given [pg 016] case or individual, all the predicates which lie in the conception of its species appear, thus are actually present. Therefore the conception “perfection,” if used absolutely and in the abstract, is a word void of significance, and this is also the case with the talk about the “most perfect being,” and other similar expressions. All this is a mere jingle of words. Nevertheless last century this conception of perfection and imperfection had become current coin; indeed it was the hinge upon which almost all speculation upon ethics, and even theology, turned. It was in every one's mouth, so that at last it became a simple nuisance. We see even the best writers of the time, for example Lessing, entangled in the most deplorable manner in perfections and imperfections, and struggling with them. At the same time, every thinking man must at least dimly have felt that this conception is void of all positive content, because, like an algebraical symbol, it denotes a mere relation The little I have said, which by no means exhausts the subject, may suffice as evidence of my recognition of the great merits of Kant,—a recognition expressed here both for my own satisfaction, and because justice demands that those merits should be recalled to the memory of every one who desires to follow me in the unsparing exposure of his errors to which I now proceed.

It may be inferred, upon purely historical grounds, that Kant's great achievements must have been accompanied by great errors. For although he effected the greatest [pg 017] revolution in philosophy and made an end of Scholasticism, which, understood in the wider sense we have indicated, had lasted for fourteen centuries, in order to begin what was really the third entirely new epoch in philosophy which the world has seen, yet the direct result of his appearance was only negative, not positive. For since he did not set up a completely new system, to which his disciples could only have adhered for a period, all indeed observed that something very great had happened, but yet no one rightly knew what. They certainly saw that all previous philosophy had been fruitless dreaming, from which the new age had now awakened, but what they ought to hold to now they did not know. A great void was felt; a great need had arisen; the universal attention even of the general public was aroused. Induced by this, but not urged by inward inclination and sense of power (which find utterance even at unfavourable times, as in the case of Spinoza), men without any exceptional talent made various weak, absurd, and indeed sometimes insane, attempts, to which, however, the now interested public gave its attention, and with great patience, such as is only found in Germany, long lent its ear.

The same thing must once have happened in Nature, when a great revolution had altered the whole surface of the earth, land and sea had changed places, and the scene was cleared for a new creation. It was then a long time before Nature could produce a new series of lasting forms all in harmony with themselves and with each other. Strange and monstrous organisations appeared which did not harmonise either with themselves or with each other, and therefore could not endure long, but whose still existing remains have brought down to us the tokens of that wavering and tentative procedure of Nature forming itself anew.

Since, now, in philosophy, a crisis precisely similar to this, and an age of fearful abortions, was, as we all know, introduced by Kant, it may be concluded that the services [pg 018] he rendered were not complete, but must have been negative and one-sided, and burdened with great defects. These defects we now desire to search out.

First of all we shall present to ourselves clearly and examine the fundamental thought in which the aim of the whole “Critique of Pure Reason” lies. Kant placed himself at the standpoint of his predecessors, the dogmatic philosophers, and accordingly he started with them from the following assumptions:—(1.) Metaphysics is the science of that which lies beyond the possibility of all experience. (2.) Such a science can never be attained by applying principles which must first themselves be drawn from experience (Prolegomena, § 1); but only what we know before, and thus independently of all experience, can reach further than possible experience. (3.) In our reason certain principles of this kind are actually to be found: they are comprehended under the name of Knowledge of pure reason. So far Kant goes with his predecessors, but here he separates from them. They say: “These principles, or this knowledge of pure reason, are expressions of the absolute possibility of things, Kant's style bears throughout the stamp of a pre-eminent mind, genuine strong individuality, and quite [pg 021] exceptional power of thought. Its characteristic quality may perhaps be aptly described as a brilliant dryness, by virtue of which he was able to grasp firmly and select the conceptions with great certainty, and then to turn them about with the greatest freedom, to the astonishment of the reader. I find the same brilliant dryness in the style of Aristotle, though it is much simpler. Nevertheless Kant's language is often indistinct, indefinite, inadequate, and sometimes obscure. Its obscurity, certainly, is partly excusable on account of the difficulty of the subject and the depth of the thought; but he who is himself clear to the bottom, and knows with perfect distinctness what he thinks and wishes, will never write indistinctly, will never set up wavering and indefinite conceptions, compose most difficult and complicated expressions from foreign languages to denote them, and use these expressions constantly afterwards, as Kant took words and formulas from earlier philosophy, especially Scholasticism, which he combined with each other to suit his purposes; as, for example, “transcendental synthetic unity of apperception,” and in general “unity of synthesis” (But let us return to Kant. We are compelled to admit that he entirely lacks grand, classical simplicity, After he has treated space and time isolated from everything else, and has then dismissed this whole world of perception which fills space and time, and in which we live and are, with the meaningless words “the empirical content of perception is given us,” he immediately arrives with one spring at the logical basis of his whole philosophy, the table of judgments. From this table he deduces an exact dozen of categories, symmetrically arranged under four heads, which afterwards become the fearful procrustean bed into which he violently forces all things in the world and all that goes on in man, shrinking from no violence and disdaining no sophistry if only he is able to repeat everywhere the symmetry of that table. The first that is symmetrically deduced from it is the pure physiological table of the general principles of natural science—the axioms of intuition, anticipations of perception, analogies of experience, and postulates of empirical thought in general. Of these fundamental principles, the first two are simple; but each of the last two sends out symmetrically three shoots. The mere categories were what he calls conceptions; but these principles of natural science are judgments. In accordance with his highest guide to all wisdom, symmetry, the series must now prove itself fruitful in the syllogisms, and this, indeed, is done symmetrically and regularly. For, as by the application of the categories to sensibility, experience with all its We pay the tribute of our admiration to the really exceedingly acute combination which produced this elegant structure, but we shall none the less proceed to a thorough examination of its foundation and its parts. But the following remarks must come first.

It is astonishing how Kant, without further reflection, pursues his way, following his symmetry, ordering everything in accordance with it, without ever taking one of the subjects so handled into consideration on its own account. I will explain myself more fully. After he has considered intuitive knowledge in a mathematical reference only, he neglects altogether the rest of knowledge of perception in which the world lies before us, and confines himself entirely to abstract thinking, although this receives the whole of its significance and value from the world of perception alone, which is infinitely more significant, generally present, and rich in content than the abstract part of our knowledge. Indeed, and this is an important point, he has nowhere clearly distinguished perception from abstract knowledge, and just on this account, as we shall afterwards see, he becomes involved in irresolvable contradictions with himself. After he has disposed of the whole sensible world with the meaningless “it is given,” he makes, as we have said, the logical table of judgments the foundation-stone of his building. But here again he [pg 025] does not reflect for a moment upon that which really lies before him. These forms of judgment are indeed words and combinations of words; yet it ought first to have been asked what these directly denote: it would have been found that they denote conceptions. The next question would then have been as to the nature of conceptions. It would have appeared from the answer what relation these have to the ideas of perception in which the world exists; for perception and reflection would have been distinguished. It would now have become necessary to examine, not merely how pure and merely formal intuition or perception The understanding also is constantly being explained anew. In seven passages of the “Critique of Pure Reason” it is explained in the following terms. On p. 51; V. 75, it is the faculty which of itself produces ideas of perception. On p. 69; V. 94, it is the faculty of judging, [pg 027] i.e., of thinking, i.e., of knowing through conceptions. On p. 137 of the fifth edition, it is the faculty of knowledge generally. On p. 132; V. 171, it is the faculty of rules. On p. 158; V. 197, however, it is said: “It is not only the faculty of rules, but the source of principles (Against such really confused and groundless language on the subject (even though it comes from Kant) I shall have no need to defend the explanation which I have given of these two faculties of knowledge—an explanation which is fixed, clearly defined, definite, simple, and in full agreement with the language of all nations and all ages. I have only quoted this language as a proof of my charge that Kant follows his symmetrical, logical system without sufficiently reflecting upon the subject he is thus handling.

Now, as I have said above, if Kant had seriously examined how far two such different faculties of knowledge, one of which is the specific difference of man, may be known, and what, in accordance with the language of all nations and all philosophers, reason and understanding are, he would never, without further authority than the I have given it above as the chief merit of Kant that he distinguished the phenomenon from the thing in itself, explained the whole visible world as phenomenon, and therefore denied all validity to its laws beyond the phenomenon. It is certainly remarkable that he did not deduce this merely relative existence of the phenomenon from the simple undeniable truth which lay so near him, “No object without a subject,” in order thus at the very root to show that the object, because it always exists merely in relation to a subject, is dependent upon it, conditioned by it, and therefore conditioned as mere phenomenon, which does not exist in itself nor unconditioned. Berkeley, to whose merits Kant did not do justice, had already made this important principle the foundation-stone of his philosophy, and thereby established an immortal reputation. Yet he himself did not draw the proper conclusions from this principle, and so he was both misunderstood and insufficiently attended to. In my first edition I explained Kant's avoidance of this Berkeleian principle as arising from an evident shrinking [pg 029] from decided idealism; while, on the other hand, I found idealism distinctly expressed in many passages of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” and accordingly I charged Kant with contradicting himself. And this charge was well founded, if, as was then my case, one only knew the “Critique of Pure Reason” in the second or any of the five subsequent editions printed from it. But when later I read Kant's great work in the first edition, which is already so rare, I saw, to my great pleasure, all these contradictions disappear, and found that although Kant does not use the formula, “No object without a subject,” he yet explains, with just as much decision as Berkeley and I do, the outer world lying before us in space and time as the mere idea of the subject that knows it. Therefore, for example, he says there without reserve (p. 383): “If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must disappear, for it is nothing but a phenomenon in the sensibility of our subject, and a class of its ideas.” But the whole passage from p. 348-392, in which Kant expounded his pronounced idealism with peculiar beauty and clearness, was suppressed by him in the second edition, and instead of it a number of remarks controverting it were introduced. In this way then the text of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” as it has circulated from the year 1787 to the year 1838, was disfigured and spoilt, and it became a self-contradictory book, the sense of which could not therefore be thoroughly clear and comprehensible to any one. The particulars about this, and also my conjectures as to the reasons and the weaknesses which may have influenced Kant so to disfigure his immortal work, I have given in a letter to Professor Rosenkranz, and he has quoted the principal passage of it in his preface to the second volume of the edition of Kant's collected works edited by him, to which I therefore refer. In consequence of my representations, Professor Rosenkranz was induced in the year 1838 to restore the “Critique of Pure Reason” to its original form, for in the second volume referred to [pg 030] he had it printed according to the first edition of 1781, by which he has rendered an inestimable service to philosophy; indeed, he has perhaps saved from destruction the most important work of German literature; and this should always be remembered to his credit. But let no one imagine that he knows the “Critique of Pure Reason” and has a distinct conception of Kant's teaching if he has only read the second or one of the later editions. That is altogether impossible, for he has only read a mutilated, spoilt, and to a certain extent ungenuine text. It is my duty to say this here decidedly and for every one's warning.

Yet the way in which Kant introduces the thing in itself stands in undeniable contradiction with the distinctly idealistic point of view so clearly expressed in the first edition of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” and without doubt this is the chief reason why, in the second edition, he suppressed the principal idealistic passage we have referred to, and directly declared himself opposed to the Berkeleian idealism, though by doing so he only introduced inconsistencies into his work, without being able to remedy its principal defect. This defect, as is known, is the introduction of the thing in itself in the way chosen by him, the inadmissibleness of which was exposed at length by G. E. Schulze in “Ænesidemus,” and was soon recognised as the untenable point of his system. The matter may be made clear in a very few words. Kant based the assumption of the thing in itself, though concealed under various modes of expression, upon an inference from the law of causality—an inference that the empirical perception, or more accurately the sensation, in our organs of sense, from which it proceeds, must have an external cause. But according to his own account, which is correct, the law of causality is known to us The great defect of the Kantian system in this point, which, as has been said, was soon pointed out, is an illustration of the truth of the beautiful Indian proverb: “No lotus without a stem.” The erroneous deduction of the thing in itself is here the stem; yet only the method of the deduction, not the recognition of a thing in itself belonging to the given phenomenon. But this last was Fichte's misunderstanding of it, which could only happen because he was not concerned with truth, but with making a sensation for the furtherance of his individual ends. Accordingly he was bold and thoughtless enough to deny the thing in itself altogether, and to set up a system in which, not, as with Kant, the mere form of the idea, but also the matter, its whole content, was professedly deduced I now return to the great mistake of Kant, already [pg 032] touched on above, that he has not properly separated perceptible and abstract knowledge, whereby an inextricable confusion has arisen which we have now to consider more closely. If he had sharply separated ideas of perception from conceptions merely thought The “Transcendental Æsthetic” is a work of such extraordinary merit that it alone would have been sufficient to immortalise the name of Kant. Its proofs carry such perfect conviction, that I number its propositions among incontestable truths, and without doubt they are also among those that are richest in results, and are, therefore, to be regarded as the rarest thing in the world, a real and great discovery in metaphysics. The fact, strictly proved by him, that a part of our knowledge is known to us Therefore from the doctrine of the Transcendental Æsthetic I knew of nothing to take away, only of something to add. Kant did not carry out his thought to the end, especially in this respect, that he did not reject Euclid's whole method of demonstration, even after having said on p. 87; V. 120, that all geometrical knowledge has direct evidence from perception. It is most remarkable that one of Kant's opponents, and indeed the acutest of them, G. E. Schulze (Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie, ii. 241), draws the conclusion that from his doctrine an entirely different treatment of geometry from that which is actually in use would arise; and thus he thought to bring an apagogical argument against Kant, but, in fact, without knowing it, he only began the war against the method of Euclid. Let me refer to § 15 of the first book of this work.

After the full exposition of the universal forms of perception given in the Transcendental Æsthetic, one necessarily expects to receive some explanation as to its content, as to the way in which the empirical perception comes into our consciousness, how the knowledge of this whole world, which is for us so real and so important, arises in [pg 034] us. But the whole teaching of Kant contains really nothing more about this than the oft-repeated meaningless expression: “The empirical element in perception is given from without.” Consequently here also from the pure forms of perception Kant arrives with one spring at thinking at the Transcendental Logic. Just at the beginning of the Transcendental Logic (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 50; V. 74), where Kant cannot avoid touching upon the content of the empirical perception, he takes the first false step; he is guilty of the πρωτον ψευδος. “Our knowledge,” he says, “has two sources, receptivity of impressions and spontaneity of conceptions: the first is the capacity for receiving ideas, the second that of knowing an object through these ideas: through the first an object is given us, through the second it is thought.” This is false; for according to it the impression, for which alone we have mere receptivity, which thus comes from without and alone is properly “given,” would be already an idea, and indeed an object. But it is nothing more than a mere sensation in the organ of sense, and only by the application of the understanding (i.e., of the law of causality) and the forms of perception, space and time, does our intellect change this mere sensation into an idea, which now exists as an object in space and time, and cannot be distinguished from the latter (the object) except in so far as we ask after the thing in itself, but apart from this is identical with it. I have explained this point fully in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, § 21. With this, however, the work of the understanding and of the faculty of perception is completed, and no conceptions and no thinking are required in addition; therefore the brute also has these ideas. If conceptions are added, if thinking is added, to which spontaneity may certainly be attributed, then knowledge of perception is entirely abandoned, and a completely different class of ideas comes into consciousness, non-perceptible abstract conceptions. This is the activity of the reason, which yet obtains the whole [pg 035] content of its thinking only from the previous perception, and the comparison of it with other perceptions and conceptions. But thus Kant brings thinking into the perception, and lays the foundation for the inextricable confusion of intuitive and abstract knowledge which I am now engaged in condemning. He allows the perception, taken by itself, to be without understanding, purely sensuous, and thus quite passive, and only through thinking (category of the understanding) does he allow an object to be apprehended: thus he brings thought into the perception. But then, again, the object of thinking is an individual real object; and in this way thinking loses its essential character of universality and abstraction, and instead of general conceptions receives individual things as its object: thus again he brings perception into thinking. From this springs the inextricable confusion referred to, and the consequences of this first false step extend over his whole theory of knowledge. Through the whole of his theory the utter confusion of the idea of perception with the abstract idea tends towards a something between the two which he expounds as the object of knowledge through the understanding and its categories, and calls this knowledge experience. It is hard to believe that Kant really figured to himself something fully determined and really distinct in this object of the understanding; I shall now prove this through the tremendous contradiction which runs through the whole Transcendental Logic, and is the real source of the obscurity in which it is involved.

In the “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 67-69; V. 92-94; p. 89, 90; V. 122, 123; further, V. 135, 139, 153, he repeats and insists: the understanding is no faculty of perception, its knowledge is not intuitive but discursive; the understanding is the faculty of judging (p. 69; V. 94), and a judgment is indirect knowledge, an idea of an idea (p. 68; V. 93); the understanding is the faculty of thinking, and thinking is knowledge through conceptions (p. 69; V. 94); the categories of the understanding are by no means [pg 036] the conditions under which objects are given in perception (p. 89; V. 122), and perception in no way requires the functions of thinking (p. 91; V. 123); our understanding can only think, not perceive (V. pp. 135, 139). Further, in the “Prolegomena,” § 20, he says that perception, sensation, From this it follows that this perceptible world would exist for us even if we had no understanding at all; that it comes into our head in a quite inexplicable manner, which he constantly indicates by his strange expression the perception is given, without ever explaining this indefinite and metaphorical expression further.

Now all that has been quoted is contradicted in the most glaring manner by the whole of the rest of his doctrine of the understanding, of its categories, and of the possibility of experience as he explains it in the Transcendental Logic. Thus (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 79; V. 105), the understanding through its categories brings unity into the manifold of perception, and the pure conceptions of the understanding refer I challenge every one who shares my respect towards Kant to reconcile these contradictions and to show that in his doctrine of the object of experience and the way it is determined by the activity of the understanding and its twelve functions, Kant thought something quite distinct and definite. I am convinced that the contradiction I have pointed out, which extends through the whole Transcendental Logic, is the real reason of the great obscurity of its language. Kant himself, in fact, was dimly conscious of the contradiction, inwardly combated it, but yet either would not or could not bring it to distinct consciousness, and therefore veiled it from himself and others, and avoided it by all kinds of subterfuges. This is perhaps also the reason why he made out of the faculties of knowledge such a strange complicated machine, with so many wheels, as the twelve categories, the transcendental synthesis of imagination, of the inner sense, of the transcendental unity of apperception, also the schematism of the pure conceptions of the understanding, &c., &c. And notwithstanding this great apparatus, not even an attempt is made to explain the perception of the external world, which is after all the principal fact in our knowledge; but this pressing claim is very meanly rejected, always through the same meaningless metaphorical expression: “The empirical perception is given us.” On p. 145 of the fifth edition, we learn further that the perception is given through the object; therefore the object must be something different from the perception.

If, now, we endeavour to investigate Kant's inmost meaning, not clearly expressed by himself, we find that in reality such an object, different from the perception, but which is by no means a conception, is for him the proper object for the understanding; indeed that it must be by means of the strange assumption of such an object, which cannot be presented in perception, that the perception [pg 039] first becomes experience. I believe that an old deeply-rooted prejudice in Kant, dead to all investigation, is the ultimate reason of the assumption of such an absolute object, which is an object in itself, i.e., without a subject. It is certainly not the perceived object, but through the conception it is added to the perception by thought, as something corresponding to it; and now the perception is experience, and has value and truth, which it thus only receives through the relation to a conception (in diametrical opposition to my exposition, according to which the conception only receives value and truth from the perception). It is then the proper function of the categories to add on in thought to the perception this directly non-perceptible object. “The object is given only through perception, and is afterwards thought in accordance with the category” (Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, p. 399). This is made specially clear by a passage on p. 125 of the fifth edition: “Now the question arises whether conceptions Besides in the passages quoted, the assumption of Kant here criticised will be found expressed with admirable clearness in the “Critique of Judgment,” § 36, just at the beginning; also in the “Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science,” in the note to the first explanation of “Phenomenology.” But with a According to what has been said, the object of the categories is for Kant, not indeed the thing in itself, but yet most closely akin to it. It is the object in itself; it is an object that requires no subject; it is a particular thing, and yet not in space and time, because not perceptible; it is an object of thought, and yet not an abstract conception. Accordingly Kant really makes a triple division: (1.) the idea; (2.) the object of the idea; (3.) the thing in itself. The first belongs to the sensibility, which in its case, as in that of sensation, includes the pure forms of perception, space and time. The second belongs to the understanding, which thinks it through its twelve categories. The third lies beyond the possibility of all knowledge. (In support of this, cf. Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, p. 108 and 109.) The distinction of the idea from the object of the idea is however unfounded; this had already been proved by Berkeley, and it appears from my whole exposition in the first book, especially chap. i. of the supplements; nay, even from Kant's own completely idealistic point of view in the first edition. But if we should not wish to count the object of the idea as belonging to the idea and identify it with the idea, it would be necessary to attribute it to the thing in itself: this ultimately depends on the sense which is attached to the word object. This, however, always remains certain, that, when we think clearly, nothing more can be found than idea and thing in itself. The illicit introduction of that hybrid, the object of the idea, is the source of Kant's errors; yet when it is taken away, the doctrine of the categories as conceptions [pg 042] The language in which the doctrine of the categories is expressed affords an evidence of its baselessness. What a difference in this respect between the Transcendental Æsthetic and the Transcendental Analytic! In the [pg 044] former, what clearness, definiteness, certainty, firm conviction which is freely expressed and infallibly communicates itself! All is full of light, no dark lurking-places are left: Kant knows what he wants and knows that he is right. In the latter, on the other hand, all is obscure, confused, indefinite, wavering, uncertain, the language anxious, full of excuses and appeals to what is coming, or indeed of suppression. Moreover, the whole second and third sections of the Deduction of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding are completely changed in the second edition, because they did not satisfy Kant himself, and they have become quite different from the first edition, though not clearer. We actually see Kant in conflict with the truth in order to carry out his hypothesis which he has once fixed upon. In the Transcendental Æsthetic all his propositions are really proved from undeniable facts of consciousness, in the Transcendental Analytic, on the contrary, we find, if we consider it closely, mere assertions that thus it is and must be. Here, then, as everywhere, the language bears the stamp of the thought from which it has proceeded, for style is the physiognomy of the mind. We have still to remark, that whenever Kant wishes to give an example for the purpose of fuller explanation, he almost always takes for this end the category of causality, and then what he has said turns out correct; for the law of causality is indeed the real form of the understanding, but it is also its only form, and the remaining eleven categories are merely blind windows. The deduction of the categories is simpler and less involved in the first edition than in the second. He labours to explain how, according to the perception given by sensibility, the understanding produces experience by means of thinking the categories. In doing so, the words recognition, reproduction, association, apprehension, transcendental unity of apperception, are repeated to weariness, and yet no distinctness is attained. It is well worth noticing, however, that in this explanation [pg 045] he does not once touch upon what must nevertheless first occur to every one—the relation of the sensation to its external cause. If he did not intend this relation to hold good, he ought to have expressly denied it; but neither does he do this. Thus in this way he evades the point, and all the Kantians have in like manner evaded it. The secret motive of this is, that he reserves the causal nexus, under the name “ground of the phenomenon,” for his false deduction of the thing in itself; and also that perception would become intellectual through the relation to the cause, which he dare not admit. Besides this, he seems to have been afraid that if the causal nexus were allowed to hold good between sensation and object, the latter would at once become the thing in itself, and introduce the empiricism of Locke. But this difficulty is removed by reflection, which shows us that the law of causality is of subjective origin, as well as the sensation itself; and besides this, our own body also, inasmuch as it appears in space, already belongs to ideas. But Kant was hindered from confessing this by his fear of the Berkeleian idealism.

“The combination of the manifold of perception” is repeatedly given as the essential operation of the understanding, by means of its twelve categories. Yet this is never adequately explained, nor is it shown what this manifold of perception is before it is combined by the understanding. But time and space, the latter in all its three dimensions, are After repeated study of the “Critique of Pure Reason” at different periods of my life, a conviction has forced itself upon me with regard to the origin of the Transcendental Logic, which I now impart as very helpful to an understanding of it. Kant's only discovery, which is based upon objective comprehension and the highest human thought, is the apperÇu that time and space are known by us After Kant had thus introduced such great errors into the first simple outlines of a theory of the faculty of perception, he adopted a variety of very complicated assumptions. To these belongs first of all the synthetic unity of apperception: a very strange thing, very strangely explained. “The I think must be able to accompany all my ideas.” Must—be able: this is a problematic-apodictic enunciation; in plain English, a proposition which takes with one hand what it gives with the other. And what is the meaning of this carefully balanced proposition? That all knowledge of ideas is thinking? That is not the case: and it would be dreadful; there would then be nothing but abstract conceptions, or at any rate a pure perception free from reflection and will, such as that of the beautiful, the deepest comprehension of the true nature of things, i.e., of their Platonic Ideas. And besides, the brutes would then either think also, or else they would not even have ideas. Or is the proposition perhaps intended to mean: no object without a subject? That would be very badly expressed by it, and would come too late. If we collect Kant's utterances on the subject, we shall find that what he understands by the synthetic unity of apperception is, as it were, the extensionless centre of the sphere of all our ideas, whose radii converge to it. It is what I call the subject of knowing, the correlative of all ideas, and it is also that which I have fully described and explained in the 22d chapter of the Supplements, as the focus in which the rays of the activity [pg 052] of the brain converge. Therefore, to avoid repetition, I now refer to that chapter.

That I reject the whole doctrine of the categories, and reckon it among the groundless assumptions with which Kant burdened the theory of knowledge, results from the criticism given above; and also from the proof of the contradictions in the Transcendental Logic, which had their ground in the confusion of perception and abstract knowledge; also further from the proof of the want of a distinct and definite conception of the nature of the understanding and of the reason, instead of which we found in Kant's writings only incoherent, inconsistent, insufficient, and incorrect utterances with regard to these two faculties of the mind. Finally, it results from the explanations which I myself have given of these faculties of the mind in the first book and its Supplements, and more fully in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, § 21, 26, and 34,—explanations which are very definite and distinct, which clearly follow from the consideration of the nature of our knowledge, and which completely agree with the conceptions of those two faculties of knowledge that appear in the language and writings of all ages and all nations, but were not brought to distinctness. Their defence against the very different exposition of Kant has, for the most part, been given already along with the exposure of the errors of that exposition. Since, however, the table of judgments, which Kant makes the foundation of his theory of thinking, and indeed of his whole philosophy, has, in itself, as a whole, its correctness, it is still incumbent upon me to show how these universal forms of all judgment arise in our faculty of knowledge, and to reconcile them with my exposition of it. In this discussion I shall always attach to the concepts understanding and reason the sense given them in my explanation, which I therefore assume the reader is familiar with.

[pg 053]

An essential difference between Kant's method and that which I follow lies in this, that he starts from indirect, reflected knowledge, while I start from direct or intuitive knowledge. He may be compared to a man who measures the height of a tower by its shadow, while I am like him who applies the measuring-rule directly to the tower itself. Therefore, for him philosophy is a science of conceptions, but for me it is a science in conceptions, drawn from knowledge of perception, the one source of all evidence, and comprehended and made permanent in general conceptions. He passes over this whole world of perception which surrounds us, so multifarious and rich in significance, and confines himself to the forms of abstract thinking; and, although he never expressly says so, this procedure is founded on the assumption that reflection is the ectype of all perception, that, therefore, all that is essential in perception must be expressed in reflection, and expressed in very contracted forms and outlines, which are thus easily surveyed. According to this, what is essential and conformable to law in abstract knowledge would, as it were, place in our hands all the threads by which the varied puppet-show of the world of perception is set in motion before our eyes. If Kant had only distinctly expressed this first principle of his method, and then followed it consistently, he would at least have been obliged to separate clearly the intuitive from the abstract, and we would not have had to contend with inextricable contradictions and confusions. But from the way in which he solves his problem we see that that fundamental principle of his method was only very indistinctly present to his mind, and thus we have still to arrive at it by conjecture even after a thorough study of his philosophy.

Now as concerns the specified method and fundamental maxim itself, there is much to be said for it, and it is a brilliant thought. The nature of all science indeed consists in this, that we comprehend the endless manifold of [pg 054] perceptible phenomena under comparatively few abstract conceptions, and out of these construct a system by means of which we have all those phenomena completely in the power of our knowledge, can explain the past and determine the future. The sciences, however, divide the wide sphere of phenomena among them according to the special and manifold classes of the latter. Now it was a bold and happy thought to isolate what is absolutely essential to the conceptions as such and apart from their content, in order to discover from these forms of all thought found in this way what is essential to all intuitive knowledge also, and consequently to the world as phenomenon in general; and because this would be found The whole of reflective knowledge, or the reason, has only one chief form, and that is the abstract conception. It is proper to the reason itself, and has no direct necessary connection with the world of perception, which therefore exists for the brutes entirely without conceptions, and indeed, even if it were quite another world from what it is, that form of reflection would suit it just as well. But the combination of conceptions for the purpose of judging has certain definite and normal forms, which have been found by induction, and constitute the table of judgments. These forms are for the most part deducible from the nature of reflective knowledge itself, thus directly from the reason, because they spring from the four laws of thought (called by me metalogical truths) and the 1. The so-called Quantity of judgments springs from the nature of concepts as such. It thus has its ground in the reason alone, and has absolutely no direct connection with the understanding and with knowledge of perception. It is indeed, as is explained at length in the first book, essential to concepts, as such, that they should have an extent, a sphere, and the wider, less determined concept includes the narrower and more determined. The latter can therefore be separated from the former, and this may happen in two ways,—either the narrower concept may be indicated as an indefinite part of the wider concept in general, or it may be defined and completely separated by means of the addition of a special name. The judgment which carries out this operation is in the first case called a particular, and in the second case an universal judgment. For example, one and the same part of the sphere of the concept tree may be isolated through a particular and through an universal judgment, thus—“Some trees bear gall-nuts,” or “All oaks bear gall-nuts.” One sees that the difference of the two operations is very slight; indeed, that the possibility of it depends upon the richness of the language. Nevertheless, Kant has explained this difference as disclosing two fundamentally different actions, functions, categories of the pure understanding which determines experience Finally, a concept may also be used in order to arrive by means of it at a definite particular idea of perception, from which, as well as from many others, this concept itself is drawn; this happens in the singular judgment. Such a judgment merely indicates the boundary-line [pg 057] between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception, and passes directly to the latter, “This tree here bears gall-nuts.” Kant has made of this also a special category.

After all that has been said there is no need of further polemic here.

2. In the same way the Quality of the judgment lies entirely within the province of reason, and is not an adumbration of any law of that understanding which makes perception possible, i.e., it does not point to it. The nature of abstract concepts, which is just the nature of the reason itself objectively comprehended, carries with it the possibility of uniting and separating their spheres, as was already explained in the first book, and upon this possibility, as their presupposition, rest the universal laws of thought of identity and contradiction, to which I have given the name of metalogical truths, because they spring purely from the reason, and cannot be further explained. They determine that what is united must remain united, and what is separated must remain separate, thus that what is established cannot at the same time be also abolished, and thus they presuppose the possibility of the combination and separation of spheres, i.e., of judgment. This, however, lies, according to its form, simply and solely in the reason, and this form has not, like the content of the judgments, been brought over from the perceptible knowledge of the understanding, and therefore there is no correlative or analogue of it to be looked for there. After the perception has been brought about through the understanding and for the understanding, it exists complete, subject to no doubt nor error, and therefore knows neither assertion nor denial; for it expresses itself, and has not, like the abstract knowledge of the reason, its value and content in its mere relation to something outside of it, according to the principle of the ground of knowing. It is, therefore, pure reality; all negation is foreign to its nature, can only be added on through reflection, and just [pg 058] on this account remains always in the province of abstract thought.

To the affirmative and negative Kant adds the infinite judgment, making use of a crotchet of the old scholastics, an ingeniously invented stop-gap, which does not even require to be explained, a blind window, such as many others he made for the sake of his architectonic symmetry.

3. Under the very wide conception of Relation Kant has brought three entirely different properties of judgments, which we must, therefore, examine singly, in order to recognise their origin.

(a.) The hypothetical judgment in general is the abstract expression of that most universal form of all our knowledge, the principle of sufficient reason. In my essay on this principle, I already showed in 1813 that it has four entirely different meanings, and in each of these originally originates in a different faculty of knowledge, and also concerns a different class of ideas. It clearly follows from this, that the source of the hypothetical judgment in general, of that universal form of thought, cannot be, as Kant wishes to make it, merely the understanding and its category of causality; but that the law of causality which, according to my exposition, is the one form of knowledge of the pure understanding, is only one of the forms of that principle which embraces all pure or (b.) The form of the categorical judgment is nothing but the form of judgment in general, in its strictest sense. For, strictly speaking, judging merely means thinking, the combination of, or the impossibility of combining, the spheres of the concepts. Therefore the hypothetical and the disjunctive combination are properly no special forms of the judgment; for they are only applied to already completed judgments, in which the combination of the concepts remains unchanged the categorical. But they again connect these judgments, for the hypothetical form expresses their dependence upon each other, and the disjunctive their incompatibility. Mere concepts, however, have only one class of relations to each other, those which are expressed in the categorical judgment. The fuller determination, or the sub-species of this relation, are the intersection and the complete separateness of the concept-spheres, i.e., thus affirmation and negation; out of which Kant has made special categories, under quite a different title, that of quality. Intersection and separateness have again sub-species, according as the spheres lie within each other entirely, or only in part, a determination which constitutes the quantity of the judgments; out of which Kant has again made a quite special class of categories. Thus he separates what is very closely related, and even identical, the easily surveyed modifications of the one possible relation of mere concepts to each other, and, on the other hand, unites what is very different under this title of relation.

Categorical judgments have as their metalogical principle the laws of thought of identity and contradiction. [pg 060] But the ground of the connection of the concept-spheres which gives truth to the judgment, which is nothing but this connection, may be of very different kinds; and, according to this, the truth of the judgment is either logical, or empirical, or metaphysical, or metalogical, as is explained in the introductory essay, § 30-33, and does not require to be repeated here. But it is apparent from this how very various the direct cognitions may be, all of which exhibit themselves in the abstract, through the combination of the spheres of two concepts, as subject and predicate, and that we can by no means set up the sole function of the understanding as corresponding to them and producing them. For example, the judgments, “Water boils, the sine measures the angle, the will resolves, business distracts, distinction is difficult,” express through the same logical form the most different kinds of relations; but from this we obtain the right, however irregular the beginning may be, of placing ourselves at the standpoint of abstract knowledge to analyse direct intuitive knowledge. For the rest, the categorical judgment springs from knowledge of the understanding proper, in my sense, only when causation is expressed by it; this is, however, the case in all judgments which refer to a physical quality. For if I say, “This body is heavy, hard, fluid, green, sour, alkaline, organic, &c., &c.,” this always refers to its effect, and thus is knowledge which is only possible through the pure understanding. Now, after this, like much which is quite different from it (for example, the subordination of very abstract concepts), has been expressed in the abstract through subject and predicate, these mere relations of concepts have been transferred back to knowledge of perception, and it has been supposed that the subject and predicate of the judgment must have a peculiar and special correlative in perception, substance and accident. But I shall show clearly further on that the conception substance has no other true content than that of the conception matter. Accidents, however, are quite synonymous with [pg 061] kinds of effects, so that the supposed knowledge of substance and accident is never anything more than the knowledge of cause and effect by the understanding. But the special manner in which the idea of matter arises is explained partly in § 4 of the first book, and still more clearly in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason at the end of § 21, p. 77 (3d ed., p. 82), and in some respects we shall see it still more closely when we investigate the principle of the permanence of substance.

(c.) Disjunctive judgments spring from the law of thought of excluded third, which is a metalogical truth; they are, therefore, entirely the property of the reason, and have not their origin in the understanding. The deduction of the category of community or reciprocity from them is, however, a glaring example of the violence which Kant sometimes allowed to be done to truth, merely in order to satisfy his love of architectonic symmetry. The illegitimacy of that deduction has already often been justly condemned and proved upon various grounds, especially by G. E. Schulze in his “Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie,” and by Berg in his “Epikritik der Philosophie.” What real analogy is there, indeed, between the problematical determination of a concept by disjunctive predicates and the thought of reciprocity? The two are indeed absolutely opposed, for in the disjunctive judgment the actual affirmation of one of the two alternative propositions is also necessarily the negation of the other; if, on the other hand, we think two things in the relation of reciprocity, the affirmation of one is also necessarily the affirmation of the other, and vice versa. Therefore, unquestionably, the real logical analogue of reciprocity is the vicious circle, for in it, as nominally in the case of reciprocity, what is proved is also the proof, and conversely. And just as logic rejects the vicious circle, so the conception of reciprocity ought to be banished from metaphysics. For I now intend, quite seriously, to prove that there is no reciprocity in the strict [pg 062] sense, and this conception, which people are so fond of using, just on account of the indefiniteness of the thought, is seen, if more closely considered, to be empty, false, and invalid. First of all, the reader must call to mind what causality really is, and to assist my exposition, see upon this subject § 20 of the introductory essay, also my prize-essay on the freedom of the will, chap. iii. p. 27 seq., and lastly the fourth chapter of the second book of this work. Causality is the law according to which the conditions or states of matter which appear determine their position in time. Causality has to do merely with conditions or states, indeed, properly, only with changes, and neither with matter as such, nor with permanence without change. Matter, as such, does not come under the law of causality, for it neither comes into being nor passes away; thus neither does the whole thing, as we commonly express ourselves, come under this law, but only the conditions or states of matter. Further, the law of causality has nothing to do with permanence, for where nothing changes there is no producing of effects and no causality, but a continuing quiet condition or state. But if, now, such a state is changed, then the new state is either again permanent or it is not, but immediately introduces a third state, and the necessity with which this happens is just the law of causality, which is a form of the principle of sufficient reason, and therefore cannot be further explained, because the principle of sufficient reason is the principle of all explanation and of all necessity. From this it is clear that cause and effect stand in intimate connection with, and necessary relation to, the course of time. Only because the state A. precedes in time the state B., and their succession is necessary and not accidental, i.e., no mere sequence but a consequence—only because of this is the state A. cause and the state B. effect. The conception reciprocity, however, contains this, that both are cause and both are effect of each other; but this really amounts to saying that each of the two is the [pg 063] earlier and also the later; thus it is an absurdity. For that both states are simultaneous, and indeed necessarily simultaneous, cannot be admitted, because, as necessarily belonging to each other and existing at the same time, they constitute only one state. For the permanence of this state there is certainly required the continued existence of all its determinations, but we are then no longer concerned with change and causality, but with duration and rest, and nothing further is said than that if one determination of the whole state be changed, the new state which then appears cannot continue, but becomes the cause of the change of all the other determinations of the first state, so that a new third state appears; which all happens merely in accordance with the simple law of causality, and does not establish a new law, that of reciprocity.

I also definitely assert that the conception reciprocity cannot be supported by a single example. Everything that one seeks to pass off as such is either a state of rest, to which the conception of causality, which has only significance with reference to changes, finds no application at all, or else it is an alternating succession of states of the same name which condition each other, for the explanation of which simple causality is quite sufficient. An example of the first class is afforded by a pair of scales brought to rest by equal weights. Here there is no effect produced, for there is no change; it is a state of rest; gravity acts, equally divided, as in every body which is supported at its centre of gravity, but it cannot show its force by any effect. That the taking away of one weight produces a second state, which at once becomes the cause of the third, the sinking of the other scale, happens according to the simple law of cause and effect, and requires no special category of the understanding, and not even a special name. An example of the second class is the continuous burning of a fire. The combination of oxygen with the combustible body is the [pg 064] cause of heat, and heat, again, is the cause of the renewed occurrence of the chemical combination. But this is nothing more than a chain of causes and effects, the links of which have alternately the same name. The burning, A., produces free heat, B., this produces new burning, C. (i.e., a new effect which has the same name as the cause A., but is not individually identical with it), this produces new heat, D. (which is not really identical with the effect B., but only according to the concept, i.e., it has the same name), and so on indefinitely. A good example of what in ordinary life is called reciprocity is afforded by a theory about deserts given by Humboldt (Ansichten der Natur, 2d ed., vol. ii. p. 79). In the sandy deserts it does not rain, but it rains upon the wooded mountains surrounding them. The cause is not the attraction of the clouds by the mountains; but it is the column of heated air rising from the sandy plain which prevents the particles of vapour from condensing, and drives the clouds high into the heavens. On the mountains the perpendicular rising stream of air is weaker, the clouds descend, and the rainfall ensues in the cooler air. Thus, want of rain and the absence of plants in the desert stand in the relation of reciprocity; it does not rain because the heated sand-plain sends out more heat; the desert does not become a steppe or prairie because it does not rain. But clearly we have here again, as in the example given above, only a succession of causes and effects of the same names, and throughout nothing essentially different from simple causality. This is also the case with the swinging of the pendulum, and indeed also with the self-conservation of the organised body, in which case likewise every state introduces a new one, which is of the same kind as that by which it was itself brought about, but individually is new. Only here the matter is complicated, because the chain no longer consists of links of two kinds, but of many kinds, so that a link of the same name only recurs after several others have intervened. But we [pg 065] always see before us only an application of the single and simple law of causality which gives the rule to the sequence of states, but never anything which must be comprehended by means of a new and special function of the understanding.

Or is it perhaps advanced in support of the conception of reciprocity that action and reaction are equal? But the reason of this is what I urge so strongly and have fully explained in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, that the cause and the effect are not two bodies, but two successive states of bodies, consequently each of the two states implicates all bodies concerned; thus the effect, i.e., the newly appearing state, for example, in the case of an impulse, extends to both bodies in the same proportion; therefore the body impelled produces just as great a change in the body impelling as it itself sustains (each in proportion to its mass and velocity). If one pleases to call this reciprocity, then absolutely every effect is a reciprocal effect, and no new conception is introduced on this account, still less does it require a new function of the understanding, but we only have a superfluous synonym for causality. But Kant himself, in a moment of thoughtlessness, exactly expressed this view in the “Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science” at the beginning of the proof of the fourth principle of mechanics: “All external effect in the world is reciprocal effect.” How then should different functions lie Aristotle also denies reciprocity in the strict sense; for he remarks that two things may certainly be reciprocal causes of each other, but only if this is understood in a different sense of each of them; for example, that one acts upon the other as the motive, but the latter acts upon the former as the cause of its movement. We find in two passages the same words: Physic., lib. ii. c. 3, and Metaph., lib. v. c. 2. Εστι δε τινα και αλληλων αιτια; οἱον το πονειν αιτιον της ευεξιας, και αὑτη του πονειν; αλλ᾽ ου τον αυτον τροπον, αλλα το μεν ὡς τελος, το δε ὡς αρχη κινησεως. (4. The categories of Modality have this advantage over all others, that what is expressed through each of them really corresponds to the form of judgment from which it is derived; which with the other categories is scarcely ever the case, because for the most part they are deduced from the forms of judgment with the most capricious violence.

Thus that it is the conceptions of the possible, the actual, and the necessary which occasion the problematic, assertatory, and apodictic forms of judgment, is perfectly true; but that those conceptions are special, original forms of knowledge of the understanding which cannot be further deduced is not true. On the contrary, they spring from the single original form of all knowledge, which is, therefore, known to us I hold that to be necessary and to be the consequent of a given reason are absolutely interchangeable notions, and completely identical. We can never know, nor even think, anything as necessary, except so far as we regard it as the consequent of a given reason; and the conception of necessity contains absolutely nothing more than this dependence, this being established through something else, and this inevitable following from it. Thus it arises and exists simply and solely through the application of the principle of sufficient reason. Therefore, there is, according to the different forms of this principle, a physical necessity (the effect from the cause), a logical (through the ground of knowing, in analytical judgments, syllogisms, &c.), a mathematical (according to the ground of being in time and space), and finally a practical necessity, by which we intend to signify not determination through a pretended categorical imperative, but the necessary occurrence of an action according to the motives presented, in the case of a given empirical character. But everything necessary is only so relatively, that is, under the presupposition of the reason from which it follows; therefore absolute necessity is a contradiction. With regard to the rest, I refer to § 49 of the essay on the principle of sufficient reason.

The contradictory opposite, i.e., the denial of necessity, is contingency. The content of this conception is, therefore, negative—nothing more than this: absence of the connection expressed by the principle of sufficient reason. Consequently the contingent is also always merely relative. It is contingent in relation to something which is [pg 068] not its reason. Every object, of whatever kind it may be—for example, every event in the actual world—is always at once necessary and contingent, necessary in relation to the one condition which is its cause: contingent in relation to everything else. For its contact in time and space with everything else is a mere coincidence without necessary connection: hence also the words chance, συμπτωμα, In nature, which consists of ideas of perception, everything that happens is necessary; for it proceeds from its cause. If, however, we consider this individual with reference to everything else which is not its cause, we know it as contingent; but this is already an abstract reflection. Now, further, let us abstract entirely from a natural object its causal relation to everything else, thus its necessity and its contingency; then this kind of knowledge comprehends the conception of the actual, in which one only considers the effect, without looking for the cause, in relation to which one would otherwise have to call it necessary, and in relation to everything else contingent. All this rests ultimately upon the fact that the modality of the judgment does not indicate so much the objective nature of things as the relation of our knowledge to them. Since, however, in nature everything proceeds from a cause, everything actual is also necessary, yet only so far as it is at this time, in this place; for only so far does [pg 069] determination by the law of causality extend. Let us leave, however, concrete nature and pass over to abstract thinking; then we can present to ourselves in reflection all the natural laws which are known to us partly From this exposition, which requires no proof because it rests directly upon the knowledge of the principle of sufficient reason and upon the development of the conceptions of the necessary, the actual, and the possible, it is sufficiently evident how entirely groundless is Kant's assumption of three special functions of the understanding for these three conceptions, and that here again he has allowed himself to be disturbed by no reflection in the carrying out of his architectonic symmetry.

To this, however, we have to add the other great mistake, that, certainly according to the procedure of earlier philosophy, he has confounded the conceptions of necessity and contingency with each other. That earlier philosophy has applied abstraction to the following mistaken use. It was clear that that of which the reason is given inevitably follows, i.e., cannot not be, and thus necessarily is. But that philosophy held to this last determination alone, and said that is necessary which cannot be otherwise, or the opposite of which is impossible. It left, however, the [pg 070] ground and root of such necessity out of account, overlooked the relativity of all necessity which follows from it, and thereby made the quite unthinkable fiction of an absolute necessity, i.e., of something the existence of which would be as inevitable as the consequent of a reason, but which yet was not the consequent of a reason, and therefore depended upon nothing; an addition which is an absurd I take this opportunity of adding a few further remarks on these conceptions of modality. Since all necessity rests upon the principle of sufficient reason, and is on this account relative, all apodictic judgments are originally, and according to their ultimate significance, hypothetical. They become categorical only through the addition of an assertatory minor, thus in the conclusion. If this minor is still undecided, and this indecision is expressed, this gives the problematical judgment.

What in general (as a rule) is apodictic (a law of nature), is in reference to a particular case only problematical, because the condition must actually appear which brings the case under the rule. And conversely, what in the particular as such is necessary (apodictic) (every particular change necessary through the cause), is again in general, and predicated universally, only problematical; because the causes which appear only concern the particular case, and the apodictic, always hypothetical judgment, always expresses merely the general law, not the particular case directly. All this has its ground in the fact that possibility exists only in the province of reflection and for the reason; the actual, in the province of perception and for [pg 072] the understanding; the necessary, for both. Indeed, the distinction between necessary, actual, and possible really exists only in the abstract and according to the conception; in the real world, on the other hand, all three fall into one. For all that happens, happens necessarily, because it happens from causes; but these themselves have again causes, so that the whole of the events of the world, great and small, are a strict concatenation of necessary occurrences. Accordingly everything actual is also necessary, and in the real world there is no difference between actuality and necessity, and in the same way no difference between actuality and possibility; for what has not happened, i.e., has not become actual, was also not possible, because the causes without which it could never appear have not themselves appeared, nor could appear, in the great concatenation of causes; thus it was an impossibility. Every event is therefore either necessary or impossible. All this holds good only of the empirically real world, i.e., the complex of individual things, thus of the whole particular as such. If, on the other hand, we consider things generally, comprehending them Maj. All houses (consequently also my house) can be destroyed by fire.

Min. My house is on fire.

Concl. My house is being destroyed by fire.

For every general proposition, thus every major, always determines things with reference to actuality only under a presupposition, therefore hypothetically; for example, the capability of being burnt down has as a presupposition the catching fire. This presupposition is produced in the minor. The major always loads the cannon, but only if the minor brings the match does the shot, i.e., the conclusion, follow. This holds good throughout of the relation of possibility to actuality. Since now the conclusion, which is the assertion of actuality, always follows necessarily, it is evident from this that all that is actual is also necessary, which can also be seen from the fact that necessity only means being the consequent of a given reason: this is in the case of the actual a cause: thus everything actual is necessary. Accordingly, we see here the conceptions of the possible, the actual, and the necessary unite, and not merely the last presuppose the first, but also the converse. What keeps them apart is the limitation of our intellect through the form of time; for time is the mediator between possibility and actuality. The necessity of the particular event may be fully seen from the knowledge of all its causes; but the concurrence of the whole of these different and independent causes seems to [pg 074] us contingent; indeed their independence of each other is just the conception of contingency. Since, however, each of them was the necessary effect of its causes, the chain of which has no beginning, it is evident that contingency is merely a subjective phenomenon, arising from the limitation of the horizon of our understanding, and just as subjective as the optical horizon at which the heavens touch the earth.

Since necessity is the same thing as following from given grounds, it must appear in a special way in the case of every form of the principle of sufficient reason, and also have its opposite in the possibility and impossibility which always arises only through the application of the abstract reflection of the reason to the object. Therefore the four kinds of necessity mentioned above stand opposed to as many kinds of impossibility, physical, logical, mathematical and practical. It may further be remarked that if one remains entirely within the province of abstract concepts, possibility is always connected with the more general, and necessity with the more limited concept; for example, “An animal may be a bird, a fish, an amphibious creature, &c.” “A nightingale must be a bird, a bird must be an animal, an animal must be an organism, an organism must be a body.” This is because logical necessity, the expression of which is the syllogism, proceeds from the general to the particular, and never conversely. In the concrete world of nature (ideas of the first class), on the contrary, everything is really necessary through the law of causality; only added reflection can conceive it as also contingent, comparing it with that which is not its cause, and also as merely and purely actual, by disregarding all causal connection. Only in this class of ideas does the conception of the actual properly occur, as is also shown by the derivation of the word from the conception of causality. In the third class of ideas, that of pure mathematical perception or intuition, if we confine ourselves strictly to it, there is only necessity. Possibility occurs here also only [pg 075] through relation to the concepts of reflection: for example, “A triangle may be right-angled, obtuse-angled, or equiangular; its three angles must be equal to two right-angles.” Thus here we only arrive at the possible through the transition from the perceptible to the abstract.

After this exposition, which presupposes the recollection of what was said both in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason and in the first book of the present work, there will, it is hoped, be no further doubt as to the true and very heterogeneous source of those forms which the table of judgments lays before us, nor as to the inadmissibility and utter groundlessness of the assumption of twelve special functions of the understanding for the explanation of them. The latter point is also supported by a number of special circumstances very easily noted. Thus, for example, it requires great love of symmetry and much trust in a clue derived from it, to lead one to assume that an affirmative, a categorical, and an assertatory judgment are three such different things that they justify the assumption of an entirely special function of the understanding for each of them.

Kant himself betrays his consciousness of the untenable nature of his doctrine of the categories by the fact that in the third chapter of the Analytic of Principles (phÆnomena et noumena) several long passages of the first edition (p. 241, 242, 244-246, 248-253) are omitted in the second—passages which displayed the weakness of that doctrine too openly. So, for example, he says there (p. 241) that he has not defined the individual categories, because he could not define them even if he had wished to do so, inasmuch as they were susceptible of no definition. In saying this he forgot that at p. 82 of the same first edition he had said: “I purposely dispense with the definition of the categories although I may be in possession of it.” This then was, This table of the categories is now made the guiding clue according to which every metaphysical, and indeed every scientific inquiry is to be conducted (Prolegomena, § 39). And, in fact, it is not only the foundation of the whole Kantian philosophy and the type according to which its symmetry is everywhere carried out, as I have already shown above, but it has also really become the procrustean bed into which Kant forces every possible inquiry, by means of a violence which I shall now consider somewhat more closely. But with such an opportunity what must not the The principle of the Permanence of Substance is deduced from the category of subsistence and inherence. This, however, we know only from the form of the categorical judgment, i.e., from the connection of two concepts as subject and predicate. With what violence then is that great metaphysical principle made dependent upon this simple, purely logical form! Yet this is only done In the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, § 23, I have fully explained the incorrectness of the following proof of the There are still a few points in the further course of the transcendental analytic which I should have to refute were it not that I am afraid of trying the patience of the reader; I therefore leave them to his own reflection. But ever anew in the “Critique of Pure Reason” we meet that principal and fundamental error of Kant's, which I have copiously denounced above, the complete failure to distinguish abstract, discursive knowledge from intuitive. It is this that throws a constant obscurity over Kant's whole [pg 081] theory of the faculty of knowledge, and never allows the reader to know what he is really speaking about at any time, so that instead of understanding, he always merely conjectures, for he alternately tries to understand what is said as referring to thought and to perception, and remains always in suspense. In the chapter “On the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena,” Kant carries that incredible want of reflection as to the nature of the idea of perception and the abstract idea, as I shall explain more fully immediately, so far as to make the monstrous assertion that without thought, that is, without abstract conceptions, there is no knowledge of an object; and that perception, because it is not thought, is also not knowledge, and, in general, is nothing but a mere affection of sensibility, mere sensation! Nay, more, that perception without conception is absolutely void; but conception without perception is yet always something (p. 253; V. 309). Now this is exactly the opposite of the truth; for concepts obtain all significance, all content, only from their relation to ideas of perception, from which they have been abstracted, derived, that is, constructed through the omission of all that is unessential: therefore if the foundation of perception is taken away from them, they are empty and void. Perceptions, on the contrary, have in themselves immediate and very great significance (in them, indeed, the thing in itself objectifies itself); they represent themselves, express themselves, have no mere borrowed content like concepts. For the principle of sufficient reason governs them only as the law of causality, and determines as such only their position in space and time; it does not, however, condition their content and their significance, as is the case with concepts, in which it appears as the principle of the ground of knowing. For the rest, it looks as if Kant really wished here to set about distinguishing the idea of perception and the abstract idea. He objects to Leibnitz and Locke that the former reduced everything to abstract ideas, and the latter everything [pg 082] to ideas of perception. But yet he arrives at no distinction; and although Locke and Leibnitz really committed these errors, Kant himself is burdened with a third error which includes them both—the error of having so mixed up knowledge of perception and abstract knowledge that a monstrous hybrid of the two resulted, a chimera of which no distinct idea is possible, and which therefore necessarily only confused and stupefied students, and set them at variance.

Certainly thought and perception are separated more in the chapter referred to “On the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena” than anywhere else, but the nature of this distinction is here a fundamentally false one. On p. 253; V. 309, it is said: “If I take away all thought (through the categories) from empirical knowledge, there remains absolutely no knowledge of an object, for through mere perception nothing at all is thought, and that this affection of sensibility is in me establishes really no relation of such ideas to any object.” This sentence contains, in some degree, all the errors of Kant in a nutshell; for it brings out clearly that he has falsely conceived the relation between sensation, perception, and thought, and accordingly identifies the perception, whose form he yet supposes to be space, and indeed space in all its three dimensions, with the mere subjective sensation in the organs of sense, but only allows the knowledge of an object to be given through thought, which is different from perception. I, on the contrary, say: Objects are first of all objects of perception, not of thought, and all knowledge of objects is originally and in itself perception. Perception, however, is by no means mere sensation, but the understanding is already active in it. The thought, which is added only in the case of men, not in the case of the brutes, is mere abstraction from perception, gives no fundamentally new knowledge, does not itself establish objects which were not before, but merely changes the form of the knowledge already won through perception, [pg 083] makes it abstract knowledge in concepts, whereby its concrete or perceptible character is lost, but, on the other hand, combination of it becomes possible, which immeasurably extends the range of its applicability. The material of our thought is, on the other hand, nothing else than our perceptions themselves, and not something which the perceptions did not contain, and which was added by the thought; therefore the material of everything that appears in our thought must be capable of verification in our perception, for otherwise it would be an empty thought. Although this material is variously manipulated and transformed by thought, it must yet be capable of being reduced to perception, and the thought traced back to this—just as a piece of gold can be reduced from all its solutions, oxides, sublimates, and combinations, and presented pure and undiminished. This could not happen if thought itself had added something, and, indeed, the principal thing, to the object.

The whole of the chapter on the Amphiboly, which follows this, is merely a criticism of the Leibnitzian philosophy, and as such is on the whole correct, though the form or pattern on which it is constructed is chosen merely for the sake of architectonic symmetry, which here also is the guiding clue. Thus, to carry out the analogy with the Aristotelian Organon, a transcendental Topic is set up, which consists in this, that every conception is to be considered from four points of view, in order to make out to which faculty of knowledge it belongs. But these four points of view are quite arbitrarily selected, and ten others might be added to them with just as much right; but their fourfold number corresponds to the titles of the categories, and therefore the chief doctrine of Leibnitz is divided among them as best it may be. By this critique, also, to some extent, certain errors are stamped as natural to the reason, whereas they were merely false abstractions of Leibnitz's, who, rather than learn from his great philosophical contemporaries, Spinoza and Locke, preferred to [pg 084] serve up his own strange inventions. In the chapter on the Amphiboly of Reflection it is finally said that there may possibly be a kind of perception entirely different from ours, to which, however, our categories are applicable; therefore the objects of that supposed perception would be Yet it was just this distinction between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception, entirely overlooked by Kant, which the ancients denoted by φαινομενα and νοουμενα,7 and whose opposition and incommensurability occupied them so much in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later the Scholastics in the controversy between Nominalism and Realism, the seed of which, so late in developing, was already contained in the opposite mental tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who, in an inexcusable manner, entirely neglected the thing to denote which the words φαινομενα and νοουμενα had already been taken, took possession of the words, as if they were still unappropriated, in order to denote by them his thing in itself and his phenomenon.

Since I have been obliged to reject Kant's doctrine of the categories, just as he rejected that of Aristotle, I wish here to indicate as a suggestion a third way of reaching what is aimed at. What both Kant and Aristotle sought for under the name of the categories were the most general conceptions under which all things, however different, must be subsumed, and through which therefore everything that exists would ultimately be thought. Just on this account Kant conceived them as the forms of all thought.

Grammar is related to logic as clothes to the body. Should not, therefore, these primary conceptions, the ground-bass of the reason, which is the foundation of all special thought, without whose application, therefore, no thought can take place, ultimately lie in those conceptions which [pg 086] just on account of their exceeding generality (transcendentalism) have their expression not in single words, but in whole classes of words, because one of them is thought along with every word whatever it may be, whose designation would therefore have to be looked for, not in the lexicon but in the grammar? In fact, should they not be those distinctions of conceptions on account of which the word which expresses them is either a substantive or an adjective, a verb or an adverb, a pronoun, a preposition, or some other particle—in short, the parts of speech? For undoubtedly these denote the forms which all thought primarily assumes, and in which it directly moves; accordingly they are the essential forms of speech, the fundamental constituent elements of every language, so that we cannot imagine any language which would not consist of at least substantives, adjectives, and verbs. These fundamental forms would then have subordinated to them those forms of thought which are expressed through their inflections, that is, through declension and conjugation, and it is unessential to the chief concern whether in denoting them we call in the assistance of the article and the pronoun. We will examine the thing, however, somewhat more closely, and ask the question anew: What are the forms of thought?

(1.) Thought consists throughout of judging; judgments are the threads of its whole web, for without making use of a verb our thought does not move, and as often as we use a verb we judge.

(2.) Every judgment consists in the recognition of the relation between subject and predicate, which it separates or unites with various restrictions. It unites them from the recognition of the actual identity of the two, which can only happen in the case of synonyms; then in the recognition that the one is always thought along with the other, though the converse does not hold—in the universal affirmative proposition; up to the recognition that the one is sometimes thought along with the other, in the [pg 087] particular affirmative proposition. The negative propositions take the opposite course. Accordingly in every judgment the subject, the predicate, and the copula, the latter affirmative or negative, must be to be found; even although each of these is not denoted by a word of its own, as is however generally the case. The predicate and the copula are often denoted by one word, as “Caius ages;” sometimes one word denotes all three, as (3.) These real, unalterable, original forms of thought are certainly those of Kant's logical table of judgments; only that in this table are to be found blind windows for the sake of symmetry and the table of the categories; these must all be omitted, and also a false arrangement. Thus:—

(a.) Quality: affirmation and negation, i.e., combination and separation of concepts: two forms. It depends on the copula.

(b.) Quantity: the subject-concept is taken either in [pg 088] whole or in part: totality or multiplicity. To the first belong also individual subjects: Socrates means “all Socrateses.” Thus two forms. It depends on the subject.

(c.) Modality: has really three forms. It determines the quality as necessary, actual, or contingent. It consequently depends also on the copula.

These three forms of thought spring from the laws of thought of contradiction and identity. But from the principle of sufficient reason and the law of excluded middle springs—

(d.) Relation. It only appears if we judge concerning completed judgments, and can only consist in this, that it either asserts the dependence of one judgment upon another (also in the plurality of both), and therefore combines them in the hypothetical proposition; or else asserts that judgments exclude each other, and therefore separates them in the disjunctive proposition. It depends on the copula, which here separates or combines the completed judgments.

The parts of speech and grammatical forms are ways of expressing the three constituent parts of the judgment, the subject, the predicate, and the copula, and also of the possible relations of these; thus of the forms of thought just enumerated, and the fuller determinations and modifications of these. Substantive, adjective, and verb are therefore essential fundamental constituent elements of language in general; therefore they must be found in all languages. Yet it is possible to conceive a language in which adjective and verb would always be fused together, as is sometimes the case in all languages. Provisionally it may be said, for the expression of the subject are intended the substantive, the article, and the pronoun; for the expression of the predicate, the adjective, the adverb, and the preposition; for the expression of the copula, the verb, which, however, with the exception of the verb to be, also contains the predicate. It is the task of the philosophy of grammar to teach the precise mechanism of [pg 089] the expression of the forms of thought, as it is the task of logic to teach the operations with the forms of thought themselves.

Note.—As a warning against a false path and to illustrate the above, I mention S. Stern's “VorlÄufige Grundlage zur Sprachphilosophie,” 1835, which is an utterly abortive attempt to construct the categories out of the grammatical forms. He has entirely confused thought with perception, and therefore, instead of the categories of thought, he has tried to deduce the supposed categories of perception from the grammatical forms, and consequently has placed the grammatical forms in direct relation to perception. He is involved in the great error that language is immediately related to perception, instead of being directly related only to thought as such, thus to the abstract concepts, and only by means of these to perception, to which they, however, have a relation which introduces an entire change of the form. What exists in perception, thus also the relations which proceed from time and space, certainly becomes an object of thought; thus there must also be forms of speech to express it, yet always merely in the abstract, as concepts. Concepts are always the primary material of thought, and the forms of logic are always related to these, never directly to perception. Perception always determines only the material, never the formal truth of the proposition, for the formal truth is determined according to the logical rules alone.

I return to the Kantian philosophy, and come now to the Transcendental Dialectic. Kant opens it with the explanation of reason, the faculty which is to play the principal part in it, for hitherto only sensibility and understanding were on the scene. When considering his different explanations of reason, I have already spoken above of the explanation he gives here that “it is the [pg 090] faculty of principles.” It is now taught here that all the However, Kant finally comes forward with a pretended principle of the reason answering to his demand, yet only with this one, from which others afterwards follow as corollaries. It is the principle which Chr. Wolf set up and explained in his “Cosmologia,” sect. i. c. 2, § 93, and in his “Ontologia,” § 178. As now above, under the title of the Amphiboly, mere Leibnitzian philosophemes were taken for natural and necessary aberrations of the reason, and were criticised as such, so here precisely the same thing happens with the philosophemes of Wolf. Kant still presents this principle of the reason in an obscure light, through indistinctness, indefiniteness, and breaking of it up (p. 307; V. 361, and 322; V. 379). Clearly expressed, however, it is as follows: “If the conditioned is given, the totality of its conditions must also be given, [pg 091] and therefore also the unconditioned, through which alone that totality becomes complete.” We become most vividly aware of the apparent truth of this proposition if we imagine the conditions and the conditioned as the links of a suspended chain, the upper end of which, however, is not visible, so that it might extend That the return to an unconditioned cause, to a first beginning, by no means lies in the nature of reason, is, moreover, practically proved by the fact that the primitive religions of our race, which even yet have the greatest number of followers upon earth, Brahmanism and [pg 095] Buddhaism, neither know nor admit such assumptions, but carry the series of phenomena conditioning each other into infinity. Upon this point, I refer to the note appended to the criticism of the first antinomy, which occurs further on; and the reader may also see Upham's “Doctrine of Buddhaism” (p. 9), and in general all genuine accounts of the religions of Asia. Judaism and reason ought not to be identified.

Kant, who by no means desires to maintain his pretended principle of reason as objectively valid, but merely as subjectively necessary, deduces it even as such only by means of a shallow sophism, p. 307; V. 364. He says that because we seek to subsume every truth known to us under a more general truth, as far as this process can be carried, this is nothing else than the pursuit of the unconditioned, which we already presuppose. But, in truth, in this endeavour we do nothing more than apply reason, and intentionally make use of it to simplify our knowledge by enabling us to survey it—reason, which is that faculty of abstract, general knowledge that distinguishes the reflective, thinking man, endowed with speech, from the brute, which is the slave of the present. For the use of reason just consists in this, that we know the particular through the universal, the case through the rule, the rule through the more general rule; thus that we seek the most general points of view. Through such survey or general view our knowledge is so facilitated and perfected that from it arises the great difference between the life of the brutes and that of men, and again between the life of educated and that of uneducated men. Now, certainly the series of grounds of knowledge, which exist only in the sphere of the abstract, thus of reason, always finds an end in what is indemonstrable, i.e., in an idea which is not further conditioned according to this form of the principle of sufficient reason, thus in the Now Kant himself denies objective validity to this pretended principle of reason; he gives it, however, as a necessary subjective assumption, and thus introduces an irremediable split into our knowledge, which he soon allows to appear more clearly. With this purpose he unfolds that principle of reason further, p. 322; V. 379, in accordance with the method of architectonic symmetry of which he is so fond. From the three categories of relation spring three kinds of syllogisms, each of which gives the clue for the discovery of a special unconditioned, of which again there are three: the soul, the world (as an object in itself and absolute totality), and God. Now here we must at once note a great contradiction, of which Kant, however, takes no notice, because it would be very dangerous to the symmetry. Two of these unconditioneds [pg 097] are themselves conditioned by the third, the soul and the world by God, who is the cause of their existence. Thus the two former have by no means the predicate of unconditionedness in common with the latter, though this is really the point here, but only that of inferred being according to the principles of experience, beyond the sphere of the possibility of experience.

Setting this aside, we recognise in the three unconditioneds, to which, according to Kant, reason, following its essential laws, must come, the three principal subjects round which the whole of philosophy under the influence of Christianity, from the Scholastics down to Christian Wolf, has turned. Accessible and familiar as these conceptions have become through all these philosophers, and now also through the philosophers of pure reason, this by no means shows that, without revelation, they would necessarily have proceeded from the development of all reason as a production peculiar to its very nature. In order to prove this it would be necessary to call in the aid of historical criticism, and to examine whether the ancient and non-European nations, especially the peoples of Hindostan and many of the oldest Greek philosophers, really attained to those conceptions, or whether it is only we who, by quite falsely translating the Brahma of the Hindus and the Tien of the Chinese as “God,” good-naturedly attribute such conceptions to them, just as the Greeks recognised their gods everywhere; whether it is not rather the case that theism proper is only to be found in the religion of the Jews, and in the two religions which have proceeded from it, whose followers just on this account comprise the adherents of all other religions on earth under the name of heathen, which, by the way, is a most absurd and crude expression, and ought to be banished at least from the writings of the learned, because it identifies and jumbles together Brahmanists, Buddhists, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Gauls, Iroquois, Patagonians, Caribbeans, Otaheiteans, Australians, and [pg 098] many others. Such an expression is all very well for priests, but in the learned world it must at once be shown the door: it can go to England and take up its abode at Oxford. It is a thoroughly established fact that Buddhism, the religion which numbers more followers than any other on earth, contains absolutely no theism, indeed rejects it. As regards Plato, it is my opinion that he owes to the Jews the theism with which he is periodically seized. On this account Numenius (according to Clem. Alex., Strom., i. c. 22, Euseb. prÆp. evang., xiii. 12, and Suidas under Numenius) called him the But the name “Idea” is very unfortunately chosen for these pretended necessary productions of the pure theoretical reason, and violently appropriated from Plato, who used it to denote the eternal forms which, multiplied through space and time, become partially visible in the innumerable individual fleeting things. Plato's “Ideas” are accordingly throughout perceptible, as indeed the word which he chose so definitely signifies, for it could only be adequately translated by means of perceptible or visible things; and Kant has appropriated it to denote that which lies so far from all possibility of perception that even abstract thought can only half attain to it. The word “Idea,” which Plato first introduced, has, moreover, since then, through two-and-twenty centuries, always retained the significance in which he used it; for not only all ancient philosophers, but also all the Scholastics, and indeed the Church Fathers and the theologians of the Middle Ages, used it only in that Platonic sense, the [pg 100] sense of the Latin word The refutation of rational psychology is much fuller and more thorough in the first edition of the “Critique of Pure Reason” than in the second and following editions, and therefore upon this point we must make use of the first edition exclusively. This refutation has as a whole very great merit and much truth. Yet I am clearly of the opinion that it was merely from his love of symmetry that Kant deduced as necessary the conception of the soul from the paralogism of substantiality by applying the demand for the unconditioned to the conception substance, which is the first category of relation, and accordingly maintained that the conception of a soul arose in this way in every speculative reason. If this conception really had its origin in the presupposition of a final subject of all predicates of a thing, one would have assumed a soul not in men alone, but also just as necessarily in every lifeless thing, for such a thing also requires a final subject of all its predicates. Speaking generally, however, Kant makes use of a quite inadmissible expression when he talks of something which can exist only as subject and not as predicate (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason, p. 323; V. 412; Prolegomena, § 4 and [pg 101] 47); though a precedent for this is to be found in Aristotle's “Metaphysics,” iv. ch. 8. Nothing whatever exists as subject and predicate, for these expressions belong exclusively to logic, and denote the relations of abstract conceptions to each other. Now their correlative or representative in the world of perception must be substance and accident. But then we need not look further for that which exists always as substance and never as accident, but have it directly in matter. It is the substance corresponding to all properties of things which are their accidents. It is, in fact, if one wishes to retain the expression of Kant which has just been condemned, the final subject of all predicates of that empirically given thing, that which remains after the abstraction of all its properties of every kind. And this holds good of man as of a brute, a plant, or a stone, and is so evident, that in order not to see it a determined desire not to see is required. That it is really the prototype of the conception substance, I will show soon. But subject and predicate are related to substance and accident rather as the principle of sufficient reason in logic to the law of causality in nature, and the substitution or identification of the former is just as inadmissible as that of the latter. Yet in the “Prolegomena,” § 46, Kant carries this substitution and identification to its fullest extent in order to make the conception of the soul arise from that of the final subject of all predicates and from the form of the categorical syllogism. In order to discover the sophistical nature of this paragraph, one only needs to reflect that subject and predicate are purely logical determinations, which concern abstract conceptions solely and alone, and that according to their relation in the judgment. Substance and accident, on the other hand, belong to the world of perception and its apprehension in the understanding, and are even there only as identical with matter and form or quality. Of this more shortly.

The antithesis which has given occasion for the assumption [pg 102] of two fundamentally different substances, body and soul, is in truth that of objective and subjective. If a man apprehends himself objectively in external perception, he finds a being extended in space and in general merely corporeal; but if, on the other hand, he apprehends himself in mere self-consciousness, thus purely subjectively, he finds himself a merely willing and perceiving being, free from all forms of perception, thus also without a single one of the properties which belong to bodies. Now he forms the conception of the soul, like all the transcendental conceptions called by Kant Ideas, by applying the principle of sufficient reason, the form of all objects, to that which is not an object, and in this case indeed to the subject of knowing and willing. He treats, in fact, knowing, thinking, and willing as effects of which he seeks the cause, and as he cannot accept the body as their cause, he assumes a cause of them entirely different from the body. In this manner the first and the last of the dogmatists proves the existence of the soul: Plato in the “PhÆdrus” and also Wolf: from thinking and willing as the effects which lead to that cause. Only after in this way, by hypostatising a cause corresponding to the effect, the conception of an immaterial, simple, indestructible being had arisen, the school developed and demonstrated this from the conception of substance. But this conception itself they had previously constructed specially for this purpose by the following artifice, which is worthy of notice.

With the first class of ideas, i.e., the real world of perception, the idea of matter is also given; because the law governing this class of ideas, the law of causality, determines the change of the states or conditions, and these conditions themselves presuppose something permanent, whose changes they are. When speaking above of the principle of the permanence of substance, I showed, by reference to earlier passages, that this idea of matter arises because in the understanding, for which alone it [pg 103] exists, time and space are intimately united, and the share of space in this product exhibits itself as the permanence of matter, while the share of time appears as the change of states. Purely in itself, matter can only be thought The categories were a procrustean bed for every possible thing, but the three kinds of syllogisms are so only for the three so-called Ideas. The Idea of the soul was compelled to find its origin in the form of the categorical syllogism. It is now the turn of the dogmatic ideas concerning the universe, so far as it is thought as an object in itself, between two limits—that of the smallest (atom), and that of the largest (limits of the universe in time and space). These must now proceed from the form of the hypothetical [pg 105] syllogism. Nor for this in itself is any special violence necessary. For the hypothetical judgment has its form from the principle of sufficient reason, and not the cosmological alone but all those so-called Ideas really have their origin in the inconsiderate and unrestricted application of that principle, and the laying aside of it at pleasure. For, in accordance with that principle, the mere dependence of an object upon another is ever sought for, till finally the exhaustion of the imagination puts an end to the journey; and thus it is lost sight of that every object, and indeed the whole chain of objects and the principle of sufficient reason itself, stand in a far closer and greater dependence, the dependence upon the knowing subject, for whose objects alone, i.e., ideas, that principle is valid, for their mere position in space and time is determined by it. Thus, since the form of knowledge from which here merely the cosmological Ideas are derived, the principle of sufficient reason, is the source of all subtle hypostases, in this case no sophisms need be resorted to; but so much the more is sophistry required in order to classify those Ideas according to the four titles of the categories.

(1.) The cosmological Ideas with regard to time and space, thus of the limits of the world in both, are boldly regarded as determined through the category of quantity, with which they clearly have nothing in common, except the accidental denotation in logic of the extent of the concept of the subject in the judgment by the word quantity, a pictorial expression instead of which some other might just as well have been chosen. But for Kant's love of symmetry this is enough. He takes advantage of the fortunate accident of this nomenclature, and links to it the transcendent dogmas of the world's extension.

(2.) Yet more boldly does Kant link to quality, i.e., the affirmation or negation in a judgment, the transcendent Ideas concerning matter; a procedure which has not even an accidental similarity of words as a basis. For it is just [pg 106] to the quantity, and not to the quality of matter that its mechanical (not chemical) divisibility is related. But, what is more, this whole idea of divisibility by no means belongs to those inferences according to the principle of sufficient reason, from which, however, as the content of the hypothetical form, all cosmological Ideas ought to flow. For the assertion upon which Kant there relies, that the relation of the parts to the whole is that of the condition to the conditioned, thus a relation according to the principle of sufficient reason, is certainly an ingenious but yet a groundless sophism. That relation is rather based upon the principle of contradiction; for the whole is not through the part, nor the parts through the whole, but both are necessarily together because they are one, and their separation is only an arbitrary act. It depends upon this, according to the principle of contradiction, that if the parts are thought away, the whole is also thought away, and conversely; and by no means upon the fact that the parts as the reason conditioned the whole as the consequent, and that therefore, in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, we were necessarily led to seek the ultimate parts, in order, as its reason, to understand from them the whole. Such great difficulties are here overcome by the love of symmetry.

(3.) The Idea of the first cause of the world would now quite properly come under the title of relation; but Kant must reserve this for the fourth title, that of modality, for which otherwise nothing would remain, and under which he forces this idea to come by saying that the contingent (i.e., according to his explanation, which is diametrically opposed to the truth, every consequent of its reason) becomes the necessary through the first cause. Therefore, for the sake of symmetry, the conception of freedom appears here as the third Idea. By this conception, however, as is distinctly stated in the observations on the thesis of the third conflict, what is really meant is only that Idea of the cause of the world which alone is admissible [pg 107] here. The third and fourth conflicts are at bottom tautological.

About all this, however, 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, The theses and antitheses which here appear in such conflict remind one of the δικαιος and αδικος λογος which Socrates, in the “Clouds” of Aristophanes, brings forward as contending. Yet this resemblance extends only to the form and not to the content, though this would gladly be asserted by those who ascribe to these most speculative of all questions of theoretical philosophy an influence upon morality, and therefore seriously regard the thesis as the [pg 108] δικαιος, and the antithesis as the αδικος λογος. I shall not, however, accommodate myself here with reference to such small, narrow, and perverse minds; and, giving honour not to them, but to the truth, I shall show that the proofs which Kant adduced of the individual theses are sophisms, while those of the antitheses are quite fairly and correctly drawn from objective grounds. I assume that in this examination the reader has always before him the Kantian antinomy itself.

If the proof of the thesis in the first conflict is to be held as valid, then it proves too much, for it would be just as applicable to time itself as to change in time, and would therefore prove that time itself must have had a beginning, which is absurd. Besides, the sophism consists in this, that instead of the beginninglessness of the series of states, which was at first the question, suddenly the endlessness (infinity) of the series is substituted; and now it is proved that this is logically contradicted by completeness, and yet every present is the end of the past, which no one doubted. The end of a beginningless series can, however, always be thought, without prejudice to the fact that it has no beginning; just as, conversely, the beginning of an endless series can also be thought. But against the real, true argument of the antithesis, that the changes of the world necessarily presuppose an infinite series of changes backwards, absolutely nothing is advanced. We can think the possibility that the causal chain will some day end in an absolute standstill, but we can by no means think the possibility of an absolute beginning.8

[pg 109]

With reference to the spatial limits of the world, it is proved that, if it is to be regarded as a given whole, it must necessarily have limits. The reasoning is correct, only it was just the first link of it that was to be proved, and that remains unproved. Totality presupposes limits, and limits presuppose totality; but here both together are arbitrarily presupposed. For this second point, however, the antithesis affords no such satisfactory proof as for the first, because the law of causality provides us with necessary determinations only with reference to time, not to space, and affords us In the second conflict the thesis is at once guilty of a very palpable 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 [pg 112] 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 co-existence of which the estate 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. It only comes to be added on account of the laziness of the speculating individual. That this assumption lies in the acceptance of a cause as a sufficient reason is thus unfairly arrived at and false, as I have shown at length above when considering the Kantian principle of pure reason which coincides with this thesis. In illustration of the assertion of this false thesis, Kant is bold enough in his observations upon it to give as an example of an unconditioned beginning his rising from his chair; as if it were not just as impossible for him to rise without a motive as for a ball to roll without a cause. I certainly do not need to prove the baselessness of the appeal which, induced by a sense of [pg 113] weakness, he makes to the philosophers of antiquity, by quoting from Ocellus Lucanus, the Eleatics, &c., not to speak of the Hindus. Against the proof of this antithesis, as in the case of the previous ones, there is nothing to advance.

The fourth conflict is, as I have already remarked, really tautological with the third; and the proof of the thesis is also essentially the same as that of the preceding one. His assertion that every conditioned presupposes a complete series of conditions, and therefore a series which ends with an unconditioned, is a A certain appearance of probability cannot be denied to the antinomy; yet it is remarkable that no part of the Kantian philosophy has met so little contradiction, indeed has found so much acceptance, as this exceedingly paradoxical doctrine. Almost all philosophical parties and text-books have regarded it as valid, and have also repeatedly reconstructed it; while nearly all Kant's other doctrines have been contested, and indeed there have never been wanting some perverse minds which rejected even the transcendental Æsthetic. The undivided assent which the antinomy, on the other hand, has met with may ultimately arise from the fact that certain persons regard with inward satisfaction the point at which the understanding is so thoroughly brought to a standstill, having hit upon something which at once is and is not, so that they actually have before them here the sixth trick of Philadelphia in Lichtenberg's broadsheet.

If we examine the real meaning of Kant's Critical Solution of the cosmological problem which now follows, we find that it is not what he gives it out to be, the solution of the problem by the disclosure that both sides, starting from false assumptions, are wrong in the first and second [pg 114] conflicts, and that in the third and fourth both are right. It is really the confirmation of the antitheses by the explanation of their assertions.

First Kant asserts, in this solution, obviously wrongly, that both sides started from the assumption, as their first principle, that with the conditioned the completed (thus rounded off) series of its conditions is given. Only the thesis laid down this proposition, Kant's principle of pure reason, as the ground of its assertions; the antithesis, on the other hand, expressly denied it throughout, and asserted the contrary. Further, Kant charges both sides with this assumption, that the world exists in itself, i.e., independently of being known and of the forms of this knowledge, but this assumption also is only made by the thesis; indeed, it is so far from forming the ground of the assertions of the antithesis that it is absolutely inconsistent with them. For that it should all be given is absolutely contradictory of the conception of an infinite series. It is therefore essential to it that it should always exist only with reference to the process of going through it, and not independently of this. On the other hand, in the assumption of definite limits also lies that of a whole which exists absolutely and independently of the process of completely measuring it. Thus it is only the thesis that makes the false assumption of a self-existent universe, i.e., a universe given prior to all knowledge, and to which knowledge came as to something external to itself. The antithesis from the outset combats this assumption absolutely; for the infinity of the series which it asserts merely under the guidance of the principle of sufficient reason can only exist if the regressus is fully carried out, but not independently of it. As the object in general presupposes the subject, so also the object which is determined as an endless chain of conditions necessarily presupposes in the subject the kind of knowledge corresponding to this, that is, the constant following of the links of that chain. But this is just what Kant gives as the solution [pg 115] of the problem, and so often repeats: “The infinity of the world is only through the regressus, not before it.” This his solution of the conflict is thus really only the decision in favour of the antithesis in the assertion of which this truth already lies, while it is altogether inconsistent with the assertions of the thesis. If the antithesis had asserted that the world consisted of infinite series of reasons and consequents, and yet existed independently of the idea and its regressive series, thus in itself, and therefore constituted a given whole, it would have contradicted not only the thesis but also itself. For an infinite can never be given as a whole, nor an endless series exist, except as an endless progress; nor can what is boundless constitute a whole. Thus this assumption, of which Kant asserts that it led both sides into error, belongs only to the thesis.

It is already a doctrine of Aristotle's that an infinity can never be Indeed if, reversing the procedure, we take as the [pg 116] starting-point what Kant gives as the solution of the conflict, the assertion of the antithesis follows exactly from it. Thus: if the world is not an unconditioned whole and does not exist absolutely but only in the idea, and if its series of reasons and consequents do not exist before the regressus of the ideas of them but only through this regressus, then the world cannot contain determined and finite series, because their determination and limitation would necessarily be independent of the idea, which would then only come afterwards; but all its series must be infinite, i.e., inexhaustible by any idea.

On p. 506; V. 534, Kant tries to prove from the falseness of both sides the transcendental ideality of the phenomenon, and begins, “If the world is a whole existing by itself, it is either finite or infinite.” But this is false; a whole existing of itself cannot possibly be infinite. That ideality may rather be concluded from the infinity of the series in the world in the following manner:—If the series of reasons and consequents in the world are absolutely without end, the world cannot be a given whole independent of the idea; for such a world always presupposes definite limits, just as on the contrary infinite series presuppose an infinite regressus. Therefore, the presupposed infinity of the series must be determined through the form of reason and consequent, and this again through the form of knowledge of the subject; thus the world as it is known must exist only in the idea of the subject.

Now whether Kant himself was aware or not that his critical solution of the problem is really a decision in favour of the antithesis, I am unable to decide. For it depends upon whether what Schelling has somewhere very happily called Kant's system of accommodation extended so far; or whether Kant's mind was here already involved in an unconscious accommodation to the influence of his time and surroundings.

[pg 117]

The solution of the third antinomy, the subject of which was the Idea of freedom, deserves a special consideration, because it is for us very well worth notice that it is just here in connection with the Idea of freedom that Kant is obliged to speak more fully of the thing in itself, which was hitherto only seen in the background. This is very explicable to us since we have recognised the thing in itself as the will. Speaking generally, this is the point at which the Kantian philosophy leads to mine, or at which mine springs out of his as its parent stem. One will be convinced of this if one reads with attention pp. 536 and 537; V. 564 and 565, of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” and, further, compares these passages with the introduction to the “Critique of Judgment,” pp. xviii. and xix. of the third edition, or p. 13 of Rosenkranz's edition, where indeed it is said: “The conception of freedom can in its object (that is then the will) present to the mind a thing in itself, but not in perception; the conception of nature, on the other hand, can present its object to the mind in perception, but not as a thing in itself.” But specially let any one read concerning the solution of the antinomies the fifty-third paragraph of the Prolegomena, and then honestly answer the question whether all that is said there does not sound like a riddle to which my doctrine is the answer. Kant never completed his thought; I have merely carried out his work. Accordingly, what Kant says only of the human phenomenon I have extended to all phenomena in general, as differing from the human phenomenon only in degree, that their true being is something absolutely free, i.e., a will. It appears from my work how fruitful this insight is in connection with Kant's doctrine of the ideality of space, time, and causality.

Kant has nowhere made the thing in itself the subject of a special exposition or distinct deduction; but, whenever he wants it, he introduces it at once by means of the conclusion that the phenomenon, thus the visible world, [pg 118] must have a reason, an intelligible cause, which is not a phenomenon, and therefore belongs to no possible experience. He does this after having assiduously insisted that the categories, and thus causality also, had a use which was absolutely confined to possible experience; that they were merely forms of the understanding, which served to spell out the phenomena of the world of sense, beyond which, on the other hand, they had no significance, &c., &c. Therefore, he denies in the most uncompromising manner their application to things beyond experience, and rightly explains and at once rejects all earlier dogmatism as based upon the neglect of this law. The incredible inconsistency which Kant here fell into was soon noticed, and used by his first opponents to make attacks on his philosophy to which it could offer no resistance. For certainly we apply the law of causality entirely With the proof of the thing in itself it has happened to Kant precisely as with that of the The thing in itself I have neither introduced surreptitiously nor inferred according to laws which exclude it, because they really belong to its phenomenal appearance; nor, in general, have I arrived at it by roundabout ways. On the contrary, I have shown it directly, there where it lies immediately, in the will, which reveals itself to every one directly as the in-itself of his own phenomenal being.

And it is also this immediate knowledge of his own will out of which in human consciousness the conception of freedom springs; for certainly the will, as world-creating, as thing in itself, is free from the principle of sufficient reason, and therewith from all necessity, thus is completely independent, free, and indeed almighty. Yet, in truth, this only holds good of the will in itself, not of its manifestations, the individuals, who, just through the [pg 120] will itself, are unalterably determined as its manifestations in time. But in the ordinary consciousness, unenlightened by philosophy, the will is at once confused with its manifestation, and what belongs only to the former is attributed to the latter, whence arises the illusion of the unconditioned freedom of the individual. Therefore Spinoza says rightly that if the projected stone had consciousness, it would believe that it flew of its own free will. For certainly the in-itself of the stone also is the will, which alone is free; but, as in all its manifestations, here also, where it appears as a stone, it is already fully determined. But of all this enough has already been said in the text of this work.

Kant fails to understand and overlooks this immediate origin of the conception of freedom in every human consciousness, and therefore he now places (p. 533; V. 561) the source of that conception in a very subtle speculation, through which the unconditioned, to which the reason must always tend, leads us to hypostatise the conception of freedom, and it is only upon this transcendent Idea of freedom that the practical conception of it is supposed to be founded. In the “Critique of Practical Reason,” § 6, and p. 158 of the fourth and 235 of Rosenkranz's edition, he yet deduces this last conception differently by saying that the categorical imperative presupposes it. The speculative Idea is accordingly only the primary source of the conception of freedom for the sake of this presupposition, but here it obtains both significance and application. Neither, however, is the case. For the delusion of a perfect freedom of the individual in his particular actions is most lively in the conviction of the least cultivated man who has never reflected, and it is thus founded on no speculation, although often assumed by speculation from without. Thus only philosophers, and indeed only the most profound of them, are free from it, and also the most thoughtful and enlightened of the writers of the Church.

It follows, then, from all that has been said, that the [pg 121] true source of the conception of freedom is in no way essentially an inference, either from the speculative Idea of an unconditioned cause, nor from the fact that it is presupposed by the categorical imperative. But it springs directly from the consciousness in which each one recognises himself at once as the will, i.e., as that which, as the thing in itself, has not the principle of sufficient reason for its form, and which itself depends upon nothing, but on which everything else rather depends. Every one, however, does not recognise himself at once with the critical and reflective insight of philosophy as a determined manifestation of this will which has already entered time, as we might say, an act of will distinguished from that will to live itself; and, therefore, instead of recognising his whole existence as an act of his freedom, he rather seeks for freedom in his individual actions. Upon this point I refer the reader to my prize-essay on the freedom of the will.

Now if Kant, as he here pretends, and also apparently did in earlier cases, had merely inferred the thing in itself, and that with the great inconsistency of an inference absolutely forbidden by himself, what a remarkable accident would it then be that here, where for the first time he approaches the thing in itself more closely and explains it, he should recognise in it at once the will, the free will showing itself in the world only in temporal manifestations! I therefore really assume, though it cannot be proved, that whenever Kant spoke of the thing in itself, in the obscure depths of his mind he already always indistinctly thought of the will. This receives support from a passage in the preface to the second edition of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” pp. xxvii. and xxviii., in Rosenkranz's edition, p. 677 of the Supplement.

For the rest, it is just this predetermined solution of the sham third conflict that affords Kant the opportunity of expressing very beautifully the deepest thoughts of his whole philosophy. This is the case in the whole of the [pg 122] “Sixth Section of the Antinomy of Pure Reason;” but, above all, in the exposition of the opposition between the empirical and the intelligible character, p. 534-550; V. 562-578, which I number among the most admirable things that have ever been said by man. (As a supplemental explanation of this passage, compare a parallel passage in the Critique of Practical Reason, p. 169-179 of the fourth edition, or p. 224-231 of Rosenkranz's edition.) It is yet all the more to be regretted that this is here not in its right place, partly because it is not found in the way which the exposition states, and therefore could be otherwise deduced than it is, partly because it does not fulfil the end for which it is there—the solution of the sham antinomy. The intelligible character, the thing in itself, is inferred from the phenomenon by the inconsistent use of the category of causality beyond the sphere of all phenomena, which has already been sufficiently condemned. In this case the will of man (which Kant entitles reason, most improperly, and with an unpardonable breach of all use of language) is set up as the thing in itself, with an appeal to an unconditioned ought, the categorical imperative, which is postulated without more ado.

Now, instead of all this, the plain open procedure would have been to start directly from the will, and prove it to be the in-itself of our own phenomenal being, recognised without any mediation; and then to give that exposition of the empirical and the intelligible character to explain how all actions, although necessitated by motives, yet, both by their author and by the disinterested judge, are necessarily and absolutely ascribed to the former himself and alone, as depending solely upon him, to whom therefore guilt and merit are attributed in respect of them. This alone was the straight path to the knowledge of that which is not phenomenon, and therefore will not be found by the help of the laws of the phenomenon, but is that which reveals itself through the phenomenon, becomes knowable, objectifies [pg 123] itself—the will to live. It would then have had to be exhibited merely by analogy as the inner nature of every phenomenon. Then, however, it certainly could not have been said that in lifeless or even animal nature no faculty can be thought except as sensuously conditioned (p. 546; V. 574), which in Kant's language is simply saying that the explanation, according to the law of causality, exhausts the inner nature of these phenomena, and thus in their case, very inconsistently, the thing in itself disappears. Through the false position and the roundabout deduction according with it which the exposition of the thing in itself has received from Kant, the whole conception of it has also become falsified. For the will or the thing in itself, found through the investigation of an unconditioned cause, appears here related to the phenomenon as cause to effect. But this relation exists only within the phenomenal world, therefore presupposes it, and cannot connect the phenomenal world itself with what lies outside it, and is Further, the intended end, the solution of the third antinomy by the decision that both sides, each in a different sense, are right, is not reached at all. For neither the thesis nor the antithesis have anything to do with the thing in itself, but entirely with the phenomenon, the objective world, the world as idea. This it is, and absolutely nothing else, of which the thesis tries to show, by means of the sophistry we have laid bare, that it contains unconditioned causes, and it is also this of which the antithesis rightly denies that it contains such causes. Therefore the whole exposition of the transcendental freedom of the will, so far as it is a thing in itself, which is given here in justification of the thesis, excellent as it is in itself, is yet here entirely a μεταβασις εις αλλο γενος. For the transcendental freedom of the will which is expounded is by no means the unconditioned causality of a cause, which the thesis asserts, because it is of the essence of a cause that it must be a phenomenon, and not something [pg 124] which lies beyond all phenomena and is If what is spoken of is cause and effect, the relation of the will to the manifestation (or of the intelligible character to the empirical) must never be introduced, as happens here: for it is entirely different from causal relation. However, here also, in this solution of the antinomy, it is said with truth that the empirical character of man, like that of every other cause in nature, is unalterably determined, and therefore that his actions necessarily take place in accordance with the external influences; therefore also, in spite of all transcendental freedom (i.e., independence of the will in itself of the laws of the connection of its manifestation), no man has the power of himself to begin a series of actions, which, however, was asserted by the thesis. Thus also freedom has no causality; for only the will is free, and it lies outside nature or the phenomenon, which is just its objectification, but does not stand in a causal relation to it, for this relation is only found within the sphere of the phenomenon, thus presupposes it, and cannot embrace the phenomenon itself and connect it with what is expressly not a phenomenon. The world itself can only be explained through the will (for it is the will itself, so far as it manifests itself), and not through causality. But in the world causality is the sole principle of explanation, and everything happens simply according to the laws of nature. Thus the right lies entirely on the side of the antithesis, which sticks to the question in hand, and uses that principle of explanation which is valid with regard to it; therefore it needs no apology. The thesis, on the other hand, is supposed to be got out of the matter by an apology, which first passes over to something quite different from the question at issue, and then assumes a principle of explanation which is inapplicable to it.

The fourth conflict is, as has already been said, in its real meaning tautological with the third. In its solution [pg 125] Kant develops still more the untenable nature of the thesis; while for its truth, on the other hand, and its pretended consistency with the antithesis, he advances no reason, as conversely he is able to bring no reason against the antithesis. The assumption of the thesis he introduces quite apologetically, and yet calls it himself (p. 562; V. 590) an arbitrary presupposition, the object of which might well in itself be impossible, and shows merely an utterly impotent endeavour to find a corner for it somewhere where it will be safe from the prevailing might of the antithesis, only to avoid disclosing the emptiness of the whole of his once-loved assertion of the necessary antinomy in human reason.

Now follows the chapter on the transcendental ideal, which carries us back at once to the rigid Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. One imagines one is listening to Anselm of Canterbury himself. The Moreover, I do not doubt that Kant was compelled to write this extraordinary chapter, so unworthy of him, simply by his fondness for architectonic symmetry. The three principal objects of the Scholastic philosophy (which, as we have said, if understood in the wider sense, may be regarded as continuing down to Kant), the soul, the world, and God, are supposed to be deduced from the three possible major propositions of syllogisms, though it is plain that they have arisen, and can arise, simply and solely through the unconditioned application of the principle of sufficient reason. Now, after the soul had been forced into the categorical judgment, and the hypothetical was [pg 126] set apart for the world, there remained for the third Idea nothing but the disjunctive major. Fortunately there existed a previous work in this direction, the Even if we assume that every reason must, or at least can, attain to the conception of God, even without revelation, [pg 127] this clearly takes place only under the guidance of causality. This is so evident that it requires no proof. Therefore Chr. Wolf says (Cosmologia Generalis, proef., p. 1): On the detailed refutation of speculative theology which now follows I have only briefly to remark that it, and in general the whole criticism of the three so-called Ideas of reason, thus the whole Dialectic of Pure Reason, is indeed to a certain extent the goal and end of the whole work: yet this polemical part has not really an absolutely universal, permanent, and purely philosophical interest, such as is possessed by the preceding doctrinal part, i.e., the Æsthetic and analytic; but rather a temporary and local interest, because it stands in a special relation to the leading points of the philosophy which prevailed in Europe up till the time of Kant, the complete overthrow of which was yet, to his immortal credit, achieved by him through this polemic. He has eliminated theism from philosophy; for in it, as a science and not a system of faith, only that can find a place which is either empirically given or established by valid proofs. Naturally we only mean here the real seriously understood philosophy which is concerned with the truth, and nothing else; and by no means the jest of philosophy taught in the universities, in which, after Kant as before him, speculative theology plays the principal part, and where, also, after as before him, the soul appears without ceremony as a familiar person. For it is the philosophy endowed with salaries and fees, and, indeed, also with titles of Hofrath, which, looking proudly down from its height, remains for forty years entirely unaware of the existence of little people like me, and would be thoroughly [pg 129] glad to be rid of the old Kant with his Critiques, that they might drink the health of Leibnitz with all their hearts. It is further to be remarked here, that as Kant was confessedly led to his doctrine of the Now, as regards the performance of the task, no critique of reason was necessary for the refutation of the ontological proof of the existence of God; for without presupposing the Æsthetic and analytic, it is quite easy to make clear that that ontological proof is nothing but a subtle playing with conceptions which is quite powerless to produce conviction. There is a chapter in the “Organon” of Aristotle which suffices as fully for the refutation of the ontological proof as if it had been written intentionally with that purpose. It is the seventh chapter of the second book of [pg 130] the “Analyt. Post.” Among other things, it is expressly said there: “το δε ειναι ουκ ουσια ουδενι,” i.e., The refutation of the cosmological proof is an application to a given case of the doctrine of the Critique as expounded up to that point, and there is nothing to be said against it. The physico-theological proof is a mere amplification of the cosmological, which it presupposes, and it finds its full refutation only in the “Critique of Judgment.” I refer the reader in this connection to the rubric, “Comparative Anatomy,” in my work on the Will in Nature.

In the criticism of this proof Kant has only to do, as we have already said, with speculative theology, and limits himself to the School. If, on the contrary, he had had life and popular theology also in view, he would have been obliged to add a fourth proof to the three he has considered—that proof which is really the effective one with the great mass of men, and which in Kant's technical language might best be called the keraunological. It is the proof which is founded upon the needy, impotent, and dependent condition of man as opposed to natural forces, which are infinitely superior, inscrutable, and for the most part threatening evil; to which is added man's natural inclination to personify everything, and finally the hope of effecting something by prayers and flattery, and even by gifts. In every human undertaking there is something which is not in our power and does not come within our calculations; the wish to win this for oneself is the origin of the gods. “Till Kant came there was a real dilemma between materialism and theism, i.e., between the assumption that a blind chance, or that an intelligence working from without in accordance with purposes and conceptions, had brought about the world, In the chapter on the ultimate aim of the natural dialectic of reason it is asserted that the three transcendent Ideas are of value as regulative principles for the advancement of the knowledge of nature. But Kant can barely [pg 133] have been serious in making this assertion. At least its opposite, that these assumptions are restrictive and fatal to all investigation of nature, is to every natural philosopher beyond doubt. To test this by an example, let any one consider whether the assumption of the soul as an immaterial, simple, thinking substance would have been necessarily advantageous or in the highest degree impeding to the truths which Cabanis has so beautifully expounded, or to the discoveries of Flourens, Marshall Hall, and Ch. Bell. Indeed Kant himself says (Prolegomena, § 44), “The Ideas of the reason are opposed and hindering to the maxims of the rational knowledge of nature.”

It is certainly not the least merit of Frederick the Great, that under his Government Kant could develop himself, and dared to publish the “Critique of Pure Reason.” Hardly under any other Government would a salaried professor have ventured such a thing. Kant was obliged to promise the immediate successor of the great king that he would write no more.

I might consider that I could dispense with the criticism of the ethical part of the Kantian philosophy here because I have given a detailed and thorough criticism of it twenty-two years later than the present work in the “Beiden Grundproblemen der Ethik.” However, what is here retained from the first edition, and for the sake of completeness must not be omitted, may serve as a suitable introduction to that later and much more thorough criticism, to which in the main I therefore refer the reader.

On account of Kant's love of architectonic symmetry, the theoretical reason had also to have a pendant. The As wickedness is quite consistent with reason, and indeed only becomes really terrible in this conjunction, so, conversely, nobleness is sometimes joined with want of reason. To this may be attributed the action of Coriolanus, who, after he had applied all his strength for years to the accomplishment of his revenge upon the Romans, when at length the time came, allowed himself to be softened by the prayers of the Senate and the tears of his mother and wife, gave up the revenge he had so long and so painfully prepared, and indeed, by thus bringing on himself the just anger of the Volscians, died for those very Romans whose thanklessness he knew and desired so intensely to punish. Finally, for the sake of completeness, it may be mentioned that reason may very well exist along with want of understanding. This is the case when a foolish maxim is chosen, but is followed out consistently. An example of this is afforded by the case of the Princess Isabella, daughter of Philip II., who vowed that she would not put on a clean chemise so long as Ostend remained unconquered, and kept her word through three years. In general all vows are of this class, whose origin is a want of insight as regards the law of causality, i.e., want of understanding; nevertheless it is rational to fulfil them if one is of such narrow understanding as to make them.

In agreement with what we have said, we see the writers who appeared just before Kant place the conscience, as the seat of the moral impulses, in opposition to the reason. Thus Rousseau, in the fourth book of “Emile,” says: “I have explained reason to be the faculty of framing concepts. It is this quite special class of general non-perceptible ideas, which are symbolised and fixed only by words, that distinguishes man from the brutes and gives him the pre-eminence upon earth. While the brute is the slave of the present, and knows only immediate sensible motives, and therefore when they present themselves to it is necessarily attracted or repelled by them, as iron is by the magnet, in man, on the contrary, deliberation has been introduced through the gift of reason.

[pg 138]

This enables him easily to survey as a whole his life and the course of the world, looking before and after; it makes him independent of the present, enables him to go to work deliberately, systematically, and with foresight, to do evil as well as to do good. But what he does he does with complete self-consciousness; he knows exactly how his will decides, what in each case he chooses, and what other choice was in the nature of the case possible; and from this self-conscious willing he comes to know himself and mirrors himself in his actions. In all these relations to the conduct of men reason is to be called practical; it is only theoretical so far as the objects with which it is concerned have no relation to the action of the thinker, but have purely a theoretical interest, which very few men are capable of feeling. What in this sense is called practical reason is very nearly what is signified by the Latin word Finally, reason manifests itself very specially as practical in those exceedingly rational characters who on this account are called in ordinary life practical philosophers, and who are distinguished by an unusual equanimity in disagreeable as in pleasing circumstances, an equable disposition, and a determined perseverance in resolves once made. In fact, it is the predominance of reason in them, i.e., the more abstract than intuitive knowledge, and therefore the survey of life by means of conceptions, in general and as a whole, which has enabled them once for all to recognise the deception of the momentary impression, the fleeting nature of all things, the shortness of life, the emptiness of pleasures, the fickleness of fortune, and the great and little tricks of chance. Therefore nothing comes to them unexpectedly, and what they know in the abstract does not surprise nor disturb them when it meets them in the actual and in the particular case, though it does so in the case of those less reasonable characters upon whom the present, the perceptible, the actual, exerts such an influence that the cold, colourless conceptions are thrown quite into the background of consciousness, and forgetting principles and maxims, they are abandoned to emotions and passions of every kind. I have already explained at the end of the first book that in my opinion the ethics of Stoicism were simply a guide to a truly reasonable life, in this sense. Such a life is also repeatedly praised by Horace in very many passages. This is the significance of his In all the cases given, and indeed in all conceivable cases, the distinction between rational and irrational action runs back to the question whether the motives are abstract conceptions or ideas of perception. Therefore the explanation which I have given of reason agrees exactly with the use of language at all times and among all peoples—a circumstance which will not be regarded as merely accidental or arbitrary, but will be seen to arise from the distinction of which every man is conscious, of the different faculties of the mind, in accordance with which consciousness he speaks, though certainly he does not raise it to the distinctness of an abstract definition. Our ancestors did not make the words without attaching to them a definite meaning, in order, perhaps, that they might lie ready for philosophers who might possibly come centuries after and determine what ought to be thought in connection with them; but they denoted by them quite definite conceptions. Thus the words are no [pg 141] longer unclaimed, and to attribute to them an entirely different sense from that which they have hitherto had means to misuse them, means to introduce a licence in accordance with which every one might use any word in any sense he chose, and thus endless confusion would necessarily arise. Locke has already shown at length that most disagreements in philosophy arise from a false use of words. For the sake of illustration just glance for a moment at the shameful misuse which philosophers destitute of thoughts make at the present day of the words substance, consciousness, truth, and many others. Moreover, the utterances and explanations concerning reason of all philosophers of all ages, with the exception of the most modern, agree no less with my explanation of it than the conceptions which prevail among all nations of that prerogative of man. Observe what Plato, in the fourth book of the Republic, and in innumerable scattered passages, calls the λογιμον, or λογιστικον της ψυχης, what Cicero says (De Nat. Deor., iii. 26-31), what Leibnitz and Locke say upon this in the passages already quoted in the first book. There would be no end to the quotations here if one sought to show how all philosophers before Kant have spoken of reason in general in my sense, although they did not know how to explain its nature with complete definiteness and distinctness by reducing it to one point. What was understood by reason shortly before Kant's appearance is shown in general by two essays of Sulzer in the first volume of his miscellaneous philosophical writings, the one entitled “Analysis of the Conception of Reason,” the other, “On the Reciprocal Influence of Reason and Language.” If, on the other hand, we read how reason is spoken about in the most recent times, through the influence of the Kantian error, which after him increased like an avalanche, we are obliged to assume that the whole of the wise men of antiquity, and also all philosophers before Kant, had absolutely no reason at all; for the immediate perceptions, intuitions, apprehensions, presentiments of the [pg 142] reason now discovered were as utterly unknown to them as the sixth sense of the bat is to us. And as far as I am concerned, I must confess that I also, in my weakness, cannot comprehend or imagine that reason which directly perceives or apprehends, or has an intellectual intuition of the super-sensible, the absolute, together with long yarns that accompany it, in any other way than as the sixth sense of the bat. This, however, must be said in favour of the invention or discovery of such a reason, which at once directly perceives whatever you choose, that it is an incomparable expedient for withdrawing oneself from the affair in the easiest manner in the world, along with one's favourite ideas, in spite of all Kants, with their Critiques of Reason. The invention and the reception it has met with do honour to the age.

Thus, although what is essential in reason (το λογιμον, ἡ φρονησις, We might have expected that in his critiques of theoretical and practical reason Kant would have started with an exposition of the nature of reason in general, and, after [pg 143] he had thus defined the genus, would have gone on to the explanation of the two species, showing how one and the same reason manifests itself in two such different ways, and yet, by retaining its principal characteristic, proves itself to be the same. But we find nothing of all this. I have already shown how inadequate, vacillating, and inconsistent are the explanations of the faculty he is criticising, which he gives here and there by the way in the “Critique of Pure Reason.” The practical reason appears in the “Critique of Pure Reason” without any introduction, and afterwards stands in the “Critique” specially devoted to itself as something already established. No further account of it is given, and the use of language of all times and peoples, which is treated with contempt, and the definitions of the conception given by the greatest of earlier philosophers, dare not lift up their voices. In general, we may conclude from particular passages that Kant's opinion amounts to this: the knowledge of principles Moreover, the birthplace of this child of practical reason, the absolute ought or the categorical imperative, is not in the “Critique of Practical Reason,” but in that of “Pure Reason,” p. 802; V. 830. The birth is violent, and is only accomplished by means of the forceps of a therefore, which stands boldly and audaciously, indeed one might say shamelessly, between two propositions which are utterly foreign to each other and have no connection, in order to combine them as reason and consequent. Thus, that not merely perceptible but also abstract motives determine us, is the proposition from which Kant starts, expressing it in the following manner: “Not merely what excites, i.e., what affects the senses directly, determines human will, but we have a power of overcoming the impressions made upon our sensuous appetitive faculty through ideas of that which is itself in a more remote manner useful or hurtful. These deliberations as to what is worthy of desire, with reference to our whole condition, i.e., as to what is good and useful, rest upon reason.” (Perfectly right; would that he only always spoke so rationally of reason!) “Reason therefore gives! also laws, which are imperatives, i.e., objective laws of freedom, and say what ought to take place, though perhaps it never does take place”! Thus, without further authentication, the categorical imperative comes into the world, in order to rule there with its unconditioned ought—a sceptre of wooden iron. For in the conception “ought” there lies always and essentially the reference to threatened punishment, or [pg 145] promised reward, as a necessary condition, and cannot be separated from it without abolishing the conception itself and taking all meaning from it. Therefore an unconditioned ought is a The content of the absolute ought, the fundamental principle of the practical reason, is the famous: “So act that the maxim of your will might always be also valid as the principle of a universal legislation.” This principle presents to him who desires a rule for his own will the task of seeking such a rule for the wills of all. Then the question arises how such a rule is to be found. Clearly, in order to discover the rule of my conduct, I ought not to have regard to myself alone, but to the sum of all individuals. Then, instead of my own well-being, the well-being of all without distinction becomes my aim. Yet the aim still always remains well-being. I find, then, that all can be equally well off only if each limits his own egoism by that of others. From this it certainly follows that I must injure no one, because, since this principle is [pg 147] assumed to be universal, I also will not be injured. This, however, is the sole ground on account of which I, who do not yet possess a moral principle, but am only seeking one, can wish this to be a universal law. But clearly in this way the desire of well-being, i.e., egoism, remains the source of this ethical principle. As the basis of politics it would be excellent, as the basis of ethics it is worthless. For he who seeks to establish a rule for the wills of all, as is demanded by that moral principle, necessarily stands in need of a rule himself; otherwise everything would be alike to him. But this rule can only be his own egoism, since it is only this that is affected by the conduct of others; and therefore it is only by means of this egoism, and with reference to it, that each one can have a will concerning the conduct of others, and that it is not a matter of indifference to him. Kant himself very naively intimates this (p. 123 of the “Critique of Practical Reason;” Rosenkranz's edition, p. 192), where he thus prosecutes the search for maxims for the will: “If every one regarded the need of others with complete indifference, and thou also didst belong to such an order of things, wouldst thou consent thereto?” We cannot, therefore, share Kant's satisfaction that his principle of ethics is not a material one, i.e., one which sets up an object as a motive, but merely formal, whereby it corresponds symmetrically to the formal laws with which the “Critique of Pure Reason” has made us familiar. Certainly it is, instead of a law, merely a formula for finding such a law. But, in the first place, we had this formula already more briefly and clearly in the “Another mistake which, because it offends the feelings of every one, has often been condemned, and was satirised by Schiller in an epigram, is the pedantic rule that for an act to be really good and meritorious it must be done simply and solely out of respect for the known law and the conception of duty, and in accordance with a maxim known to the reason That Kant by no means penetrated to the real significance of the ethical content of actions is shown finally by his doctrine of the highest good as the necessary combination of virtue and happiness, a combination indeed in which virtue would be that which merits happiness. He is here involved in the logical fallacy that the conception of merit, which is here the measure or test, already presupposes a theory of ethics as its own measure, and thus could not be deducible from it. It appeared in our fourth book that all genuine virtue, after it has attained to its highest grade, at last leads to a complete renunciation in which all willing finds an end. Happiness, on the other hand, is a satisfied wish; thus the two are essentially incapable of being combined. He who has been enlightened by my exposition requires no further explanation of the complete perverseness of this Kantian view of the highest good. And, independent of my positive exposition, I have no further negative exposition to give.

Kant's love of architectonic symmetry meets us also in the “Critique of Practical Reason,” for he has given it the shape of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” and has again introduced the same titles and forms with manifest intention, which becomes specially apparent in the table of the categories of freedom.

The “Philosophy of Law” is one of Kant's latest works, and is so poor that, although I entirely disagree with it, I think a polemic against it is superfluous, since of its own weakness it must die a natural death, just as if it were not the work of this great man, but the production of an ordinary mortal. Therefore, as regards the “Philosophy of Law,” I give up the negative mode of procedure and refer to the positive, that is, to the short outline of it given in the fourth book. Just one or two general remarks on [pg 151] Kant's “Philosophy of Law” may be made here. The errors which I have condemned in considering the “Critique of Pure Reason,” as clinging to Kant throughout, appear in the “Philosophy of Law” in such excess that one often believes he is reading a satirical parody of the Kantian style, or at least that he is listening to a Kantian. Two principal errors, however, are these. He desires (and many have since then desired) to separate the Philosophy of Law sharply from ethics, and yet not to make the former dependent upon positive legislation, i.e., upon arbitrary sanction, but to let the conception of law exist for itself pure and On the “Critique of Judgment” also, after what has been said, I must be very short. We cannot but be surprised that Kant, to whom art certainly was very foreign, and who to all appearance had little susceptibility for the beautiful, indeed probably never had the opportunity of seeing an important work of art, and who seems, finally, to have had no knowledge of Goethe, the only man of his century and nation who was fit to be placed by his side as his giant equal,—it is, I say, surprising how, notwithstanding all this, Kant was able to render a great and permanent service to the philosophical consideration of art and the beautiful. His merit lies in this, that much as men had reflected upon the beautiful and upon art, they had yet really always considered it only from the empirical point of view, and had investigated upon a basis [pg 153] of facts what quality distinguished the object of any kind which was called beautiful from other objects of the same kind. On this path they first arrived at quite special principles, and then at more general ones. They sought to separate true artistic beauty from false, and to discover marks of this genuineness, which could then serve again as rules. What gives pleasure as beautiful and what does not, what therefore is to be imitated, what is to be striven against, what is to be avoided, what rules, at least negative rules, are to be established, in short, what are the means of exciting Æsthetic satisfaction, i.e., what are the conditions of this residing in the object—this was almost exclusively the theme of all treatises upon art. This path was followed by Aristotle, and in the most recent times we find it chosen by Home, Burke, Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, and many others. It is true that the universality of the Æsthetical principles discovered finally led back to the subject, and it was observed that if the effect upon the subject were adequately known we would then also be able to determine In the “Critique of Æsthetical Judgment” the observation first of all forces itself upon us that Kant retains the method which is peculiar to his whole philosophy, and which I have considered at length above—I mean the method of starting from abstract knowledge in order to establish knowledge of perception, so that the former serves him, so to speak, as a With regard to the form of his whole book, it is to be observed that it originated in the idea of finding in the teleological conception the key to the problem of the beautiful. This inspiration is deduced, which is always a matter of no difficulty, as we have learnt from Kant's successors. Thus there now arises the strange combination of the knowledge of the beautiful with that of the teleology of natural bodies in one faculty of knowledge called judgment, and the treatment of these two heterogeneous subjects in one book. With these three powers of knowledge, reason, judgment, and understanding, a variety of symmetrical-architectonic amusements are afterwards undertaken, the general inclination to which shows itself in many ways in this book; for example, in the forcible adaptation of the whole of it to the pattern of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” and very specially in the antinomy of the Æsthetical judgment, which is dragged in by the hair. One might also extract a charge of great inconsistency from the fact that after it has been incessantly repeated in the “Critique of Pure Reason” that the understanding is the faculty of judgment, and after the forms of its judgment have been made the foundation-stone of all philosophy, a quite special faculty of judgment now appears, which is completely different from the former. For the rest, what I call the faculty of judgment, the capacity for translating knowledge of perception into abstract knowledge, and again of applying the latter correctly to the former, is explained in the positive part of my work.

By far the best part of the “Critique of Æsthetical Judgment” [pg 156] is the theory of the sublime. It is incomparably more successful than that of the beautiful, and does not only give, as that does, the general method of investigation, but also a part of the right way to it—so much so that even though it does not give the real solution of the problem, it yet touches very closely upon it.

In the “Critique of the Teleological Judgment,” on account of the simplicity of the matter, we can recognise perhaps more than anywhere else Kant's rare talent of turning a thought this way and that way, and expressing it in a multitude of different ways, until out of it there grows a book. The whole book is intended to say this alone: although organised bodies necessarily appear to us as if they were constructed in accordance with a conceived design of an end which preceded them, yet we are not justified in assuming that this is objectively the case. For our intellect, to which things are given from without and indirectly, which thus never knows their inner nature through which they arise and exist, but merely their outward side, cannot otherwise comprehend a certain quality peculiar to organised productions of nature than by analogy, for it compares it with the intentionally accomplished works of man, the nature of which is determined by a design and the conception of this design. This analogy is sufficient to enable us to comprehend the agreement of all the parts with the whole, and thus indeed to give us the clue to their investigation; but it must by no means on this account be made the actual ground of explanation of the origin and existence of such bodies. For the necessity of so conceiving them is of subjective origin. Somewhat in this way I would epitomise Kant's doctrine on this question. In its most important aspect he had expounded it already in the “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 692-702; V., 720-730. But in the knowledge of this truth also we find David Hume to be Kant's worthy forerunner. He also had keenly controverted that assumption in the second part of his “Dialogues concerning Natural [pg 157] Religion.” The difference between Hume's criticism of that assumption and Kant's is principally this, that Hume criticised it as an assumption based upon experience, while Kant, on the other hand, criticised it as an The reader whom this criticism of the Kantian philosophy interests should not neglect to read the supplement to it which is given in the second essay of the first volume of my “Parerga and Paralipomena,” under the title “Noch einige ErlÄuterungen zur Kantischen Philosophie” (Some Further Explanations of the Kantian Philosophy). For it must be borne in mind that my writings, few as they are, were not composed all at once, but successively, in the course of a long life, and with long intervals between them. Accordingly, it must not be expected that all I have said upon one subject should stand together in one place.

—Goethe.

[pg 163]

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