on the whole rather unexpectedly than otherwise, to lend
a kind of confirmation to the grand theory.
But if the three last centuries are a new intellectual era
in the history of the human mind, because philosophy has
reverted and not least through the efforts of these thinkers
to its original and proper function of carrying disinterested
inquiry, high and low, near and far, to the uttermost limit of
human conceiving, they are a new era not less in that, in
the way of positive science, inquiry has started from the
solid ground of experience, and, however free its flight, has
always come back again to rest upon the solid ground.
The natural sciences have grown up, and are indefinitely
growing, as a legitimate and fruitful system of search into
the different aspects or departments of nature proceeding
upon experience and having no higher object than to explain
and control experience. Thereby is altered the position of
philosophy. Though philosophy may have continued to be
the rational guide and director of human conduct, and may
claim to retain hold upon fields where positive inquiry has
not been able to gain a footing, it has to reckon with rivals
upon what was once nn undisputed part of its domain. The
rivals have established themselves on their chosen ground by
310 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.
accomplishing what philosophy tried but failed to accomplish
there, and, so far as that ground is concerned, the changed
position of philosophy is that it retains the function only of
understanding and prescribing the general limits of what the
sciences may there attempt. This was what the English
thinkers saw and kept always in view in their philosophy,
each in his own way. It was what Descartes and the other
speculative philosophers did not see or would not allow. As
we judge now, the English thinkers better understood the
task which their age required of them. Kant likewise under-
stood it, and thus is for ever to be distinguished from the
school or schools of speculative metaphysicians. He is one"
of those philosophical inquirers who make no pretence of
stemming the resistless tide of scientific research whose
thought is rather bent towards guiding it into effective
channels.
Regarded as a mental philosopher, however, there is
a side of Kant on which he holds with the Rationalists (as
they may be called), and *akes ground against the English
thinkers ; whence his own claim, and also his repute, to have
united the different streams of thought that were before him
in a doctrine embodying all the truth of either. The English
thinkers sought to explain all knowledge as developed out of
particular experiences, and it was from this point of view that
they could so easily make allowance for natural science by
the side of their philosophy ; this being but an application to
the general question of human knowledge of the same habit
of thought or method of inquiry exercised in the upcoming
sciences. Kant on the other hand denied that knowledge,
as actually had, could ever be developed from such experi-
ences as the English inquirers adduced, and made it a great
part of all his philosophic task to explain from the native
xxvu.] Elements of General Philosophy. 311
constitution of the mind how experience, truly so to be
called, could come to pass. Nor can it be doubted that
in the execution of that task he displayed a depth of insight
and width of intellectual grasp never before shown; so that,
man for man, he must be pronounced a far greater thinker
than any of his English predecessors. It only docs not
therefore follow that he was on the right track, and they were
on the wrong. There have been thinkers hardly inferior to
himself, upon some lines perhaps superior, who were on
a wrong track, when he was on the right. A cause is after
all something greater than any of its upholders greater, that
is, than their particular conceptions of it. It is so in the
sciences, which take to themselves the best results that all
workers bring, and often are advanced by inferior men when
greater ones have strayed. One thing at least is certain, that
Kant, in as far as he sided with the Rationalists, claimed
a finality for his philosophical position which did exclude the
notion of farther inquiry as touching that. And in view of
the course of human thought in modern days, before or since
Kant, that is a claim that must be regarded with some
suspicion.
For it is possible to look upon the course of modern
thought as one long struggle waged between the rival
principles of inquiry, for which there are no more expressive
names than Reason and Experience a struggle in which the
cause of Experience evidently makes way, though Reason
does not retire except to renew the encounter from fresh
positions, and Experience does not advance except by multi-
plying its forces and ever reorganising them in face of the
adversary. As regards the investigation of nature we have
already remarked that science, instead of reasoning out from
within how things could or should be, as of old, now
312 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.
seeks to interpret the universe simply as found its parts
in the light of one another. But it should be added that
positive investigation, in advancing to occupy ever new fields,
has not thus broadened its scope without also acquiring
depth. There has been forced upon it the necessity of
satisfying, as far as may be, that instinct of coherent vision
which prompted the earlier speculative efforts ; and the word
Experience to a scientific mind has come to have a signifi-
cance which it needs an education to understand. Similar
is the result, or tendency, visible in the progress of the
attempt to account for the fact or facts of human knowledge.
That is the central question which philosophy at all times
has had to consider, and it is the quest'on which modern
philosophy, as differing from the sciences, claims specially
for its own. It is so expressly in Locke and in Kant ; it is
so implicitly in the other thinkers who disregard or disavow
the restriction. In Descartes' theory of knowledge specu-
lative Reason has the form of pure intellectualism ; to him
sense-experience is sheer and incurable delusion, while truth
and certainty appertain only to knowledge that is supposed
born with or innate to the mind. It is a naVve conception,
and facing it, in like manner, Experience stands at first in
the form of the crude sensationalism of Hobbes crude and
hardly making pretence to afford a full explanation. Comes
Locke, however, with his systematic inquiry into the origin
and limits of knowledge, and the philosophical standard of
Experience is definitively raised: it is proclaimed that all
knowledge originally comes by the way of experience in the
individual, and that by a reference to the sources of psycho-
logical experience the import of aught claiming to be
knowledge must be judged. On the oiher side, Leibniz
abandons the Cartesian position, and it is with a very much
xxvii.] Elements of General Philosophy. 313
deeper conception of knowledge as the development of poten-
tialities lying in mind, or, again, as the interpretation of
experience according to native mental predispositions, that
he sallies forth by way of Reason to explain the All.
Confidently his disciples, Wolff the chief, build up a huge
dogmatic system out of his large ideas; the while Berkeley
and Hume push farther along the line of positive inquiry
opened by Locke, i.nd find a derivation in psychological
experience for much reckoned hitherto simple in conscious-
ness. At the same time there is in both, as compared with
Locke, a deepened sense of the limitation put upon know-
ledge by experience, whatever different expression it has in
each; Berkeley rejoicing to be able thus to annihilate the
bugbear of unintelligent matter with all its soul-debasing
influences, while Hume finds his pleasure in calmly pricking
the bubbles blown by the vanity of human reason.
What neither seriously attempts beyond Locke is to find
a full and systematic explanation of human knowledge and
science as existing in fact. This is the task reserved for
Kant. As little disposed as they to make light of experience,
and more than they concerned to justify the standing of modern
science, he is with them the sworn foe of metaphysical
speculation. No innate ideas, ousting experience, as for
Descartes no predeterminations to think, making experience
superfluous, as for Leibniz can for him explain the facts of
real objective knowledge. But neither can he accept the
position of the English Experientialists, working without
system where they are in the right vein, and without discern-
ment of the true issues to be met. Hence his new manner
of inquiry, named Critical, into the foundations of human
knowledge, resulting in the detection of a variety of rational
elements or conditions to be necessarily assumed as prior
314 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.
to experience, and with the complement of experience
by no means without experience making real knowledge
possible.
It looks like the reconciliation of all differences which it is
meant for. But is there an end of conflict Reason satisfied
with such a justification or excuse for its old pretensions,
Experience contented with this frank and decisive recognition
of its claim to be considered ? By no means. After Kant,
in Germany speculation returns to the onset with a vehemence
never known before, and in the end sinks exhausted rather
than is overcome. In England the cause of Experience finds
new upholders, who bend their energies in good earnest to*
the development of a theory of scientific evidence, also to the
pursuit of psychological research as the only positive founda-
tion for a philosophy a philosophy not to be thought of as
other than progressive while psychology in relation with the
sciences generally makes progress. And in such a sense, the
principle of Experience, more or less profoundly conceived,
does in fact at the present time dominate the field of
philosophic thought, not here only but also in the land
of Kant.
Will it continue dominant? And what then of Kant?
Experientialism, amongst ourselves, has made its last great
advance with so little reference to the import of Kant's
doctrine as a whole, that its real conflict, where it is at
variance with that, may be said to be still to come. Perhaps
it is not altogether a matter of regret that the English philo-
sophical inquirers of this century I exclude those of the
younger generation now rising up have not gone to school,
as they might have done, under Kant. Working upon the
line of the old tradition of English thought, they have done
their best with their own principle of inquiry, and the result
xxvii.] Elements of General Philosophy. 315
is there to be judged. Nor is it a result, in one or other of
the present or newly-departed leaders on the field of thought,
to be lightly spoken of. In logical theory and psychological
science it is not to be denied that English inquirers of the
last two generations have made signal progress : the fame of
their work is spread abroad. Addressing themselves, without
special regard to Kant, to the questions concerning human
knowledge which the philosopher has to consider, they have
sought an experiential solution of difficulties which made him
desert their position, after he had been in it. Their solution
has found a large measure of acceptance, falling in as it does
with the general scientific tendency of the time, and Kant's
solution of such questions, as, for instance, the necessary
character of mathematical truth, physical causation and the
like, has been set aside, when not neglected. But nothing
strikes the attentive reader of Kant more than his anticipation,
already then, of the kind of solution which Experientialism
would give, and has in fact given. One sees that he did not
forsake the experiential position without a very hard struggle
to remain there, and that he did forsake it only because of
the impossibility, as he ultimately deemed, of explaining from
it the actual facts of human knowledge. Now that he did
right to abandon it, I do not say ; the progress of inquiry
since then has done much to justify the faith of those who
have clung to the position. But we may be sure they were
no common difficulties that urged him to enter upon the
thorny path of his critical inquiry: and the full force of these
difficulties has still to be apprehended within the English
school. Nay, I venture to think that until the dominant
Experientialism, even as transformed in the system of
Mr. Spencer, has come face to face with Kant's doctrine,
not at this point or at that, but at all points, and has stood
316 Elements of General Philosophy.
the encounter, it has not secured its future. Kant's Critical
Philosophy, if it did nothing else, raised deeper, yet at the
same time more determinate, questions than any philosophy
before, and though his own way of answer be not final, the
questions abide. It concerns English thought at the present
day to mark them well, and that is the reason of Kant's
special importance now.
LECTURE XXVIII.
ON KANT'S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY (continued}.
II. General View of the Kritik and the Prolegomena.
THE Kritik of Pure Reason, in the shape that it finally
received from Kant, dates from the year 1787. It first saw
the light in 1781, after those eleven years of close and
sustained thinking that supervened in his life upon the long
period during which he slowly grasped the issues of other
men's thoughts, and came at last to conceive the idea of an
inquiry to be driven down deep beneath them all. The
second edition of the Krtlik, appearing in 1787, was con-
siderably changed from the first changed in the expression,
Kant himself declares, at important points to make his
thoughts clearer ; changed in the conception, others declare,
to make it less abhorrent to the prejudices of the vulgar.
It is easier to repel the insinuation than to allow the improve-
ment. However well-meant, the change in expression clouds
the sense not seldom instead of clearing. What is called the
change in conception, while it can in no case have sprung
from the baseness of compromise in one of the most fearless
of thinkers, is no more than an effort, only partially successful,
towards a greater consistency than was possible, or at least
was attained, in the first execution of so stupendous a work.
At all events the position in which Kant rested from 1787
318 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.
was already taken in 1783. Two years after the appearance
of the Kritik, when it was beginning to draw public notice,
but hardly yet had been grasped in its full scope by any
readers, while it was grievously misapprehended by some,
Kant wrote a short and simpler treatise to bring out the main
principles and results of his investigation, without the elaborate
system of its suppoits. The Prolegomena to any Future
Meiaphysic, very serviceable as an introduction to the severity
of the method of the Kritik, is conceived in the same key as
the second edition of the latter.
The Kritik contains the systematic exposition of Kant's
thought, so widely conceived, so laboriously worked out.
When his mind, in full maturity, originated the great purpose,
part of it seemed to be achieved as with a spring, but it was
by no means so with the whole, and the years as they passed
saw him groping about for a path and baffled long before he
found one. The traces of the internal struggle, wherever it
was severe, are only too apparent in the exposition, though
this was far from designed. Kant did not write out his work
till he had succeeded in thinking it out the mere writing out
took, it is said, but five months after so many years of mental
effort and the greater difficulty in the exposition at some
places represented in his own view only the greater complexity
of subject there. For it was a system of philosophical thought
fully and equally developed in all its parts, and no mere
essay towards a philosophical view, that Kant put forward
in the Krilik of Pure Reason. Nor was it less a systematic
whole, because it did not attempt over again the task of past
metaphysical systems because it even stopped short of the
soberer positive doctrine which it held out in prospect as the
true substitute for these. ' The inventory of all our posses-
sions through pure Reason, systematically disposed' such
XXVIIL] Elements of General Philosophy. 319
is Kant's own description of his work. A mere inventory,
and not the rational possessions themselves ; yet withal one
systematic and complete.
Reason : it dealt with knowing the mind's faculty of
knowledge ; not with Being, as dogmatic metaphysic had
done.
Pure Reason : it dealt with knowledge as dependent only
on the mind, or with faculty before and apart from all
experience ; not with the variety of the sources or channels
of experience, as Locke's inquiry had done. Kritik of Pure
Reason : it was an exhaustively reasoned search for the
conditions of such knowledge, which, well or ill grounded,
could not, Kant held, be denied in fact ; not an exercise of
dialectical ingenuity, irregularly pursued and bent to mere
negation, as Hume's scrutiny had been.
Finding, then, in the result, the general cognitive faculty
to be twofold a faculty of Sense and a faculty of Thought
and that each had fixed and native conditions of exercise,
Kant made a corresponding division of his S)Siematic work,
and set forth, with full detail of grounds and consequences,
the doctrine of Sense and doctrine of Thought thus critically
evolved. This doctrine he called Transcendental because
treating of the conditions of knowledge prior to experience.
The subsidiary work, the Prolegomena, is cast in quite
a different mould. It is not so much that it is short and
summary where the Kritik is elaborate to painfulness, and
that in particular it does not exhibit the most characteristic
side of Kant his determination to slur over no difficulties in
his path but rather that it has, by the side of the Kritik,
the distinctive character of disclosing the route by which he
began to work down to tha resolution of the problem of
knowledge in general which the systematic work gives in full.
320 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.
As Kant himself technically expresses the difference, the
Prolegomena proceeds analytically while the Kritik is syn-
thetic ; and though the resolution in the one case is far from
being as exhaustively pursued as is the composition in the
other, the insight, nevertheless, given into the working of his
mind cannot be too highly valued. The Prolegomena shows
us the very questions that broke Kant's rest till he found
answers for them, and, if it does not give the complete
answers as they may be extracted from the Krilik, it gives in
each case what he is most disposed to lay stress upon.
We have .seen what was the school of dogmatic meta-
physic in which Kant had his philosophical nurture. Wolffs'
system of metaphysic began with a general doctrine of pure
Being, or Ontology, and then broke up into three parts
dealing with the special kinds of being, namely, World or
Cosmos, Soul, God. By pure reasoning Wolff sought to
determine the character of all these, and there could be
nothing but Reason to determine them by. He had indeed
his empirical physics and emp : "'cal psychology, but these
were subordinate to the rational doctrine of World and Soul,
more especially as far as concerned their ultimate essence or
inner substance, of which there was no experience. Of the
World as a harmonious whole of real beings appearing, as far
as they appeared to our sense at all, in the guise of external
nature, or, again, of the Soul as that permanent substance or
force, the spring of all our conscious life, there could be no
experience; still less could there be any experience of the
Infinite Being, the Being of Beings. Yet into all these
supernatural entities and pure Being itself Wolff claimed to
have rational insight ; nay the more, the farther they were
removed above experience.
A fine prospect surely, that philosophic reason should be
xxvili.] Elements of General Philosophy. 321
able to determine all that was best worth knowing determine
it fully, and (what was of as much account) determine it all
from within. Nor could there be any doubt that it was by
an unconquerable impulse that the human mind was ever
being driven forth beyond its experience to find a realm of
the purely intelligible, when system after system of metaphysic
had been appearing since the dawn of reflexion. But was
it not a strange and suspicious circumstance that system after
system as regularly disappeared, even though it were only to
appear over again in some new shape ; nothing here being
fixed, while other sciences were making steady progress?
The prospect, however fine, somehow remained prospect
always. And now here was Hume, with cool steady hand
drawing a veil that shut out all such prospect for ever ; nay,
as the result of his dialectic, leaving it doubtful whether even
on the field of experience any one thing could be brought
into fixed and certain connexion with anything else. It was
time indeed that metaphysic should be called on to establish
its pretensions to establish them, or failing that, to abandon
them. Such was the form in which it first became a question
with Kant to inquire into the nature and capabilities of Pure
Reason. Metaphysic as dealing with the supernatural, was
a creation of Pure Reason : Was such a science possible ?
The Prolegomena is mainly an answer to the question in that
form. It is answered by implication and with much more
circumstance in the Kritik in this other form : Is knowledge
O
possible through pure Reason, apart from all or any experience,
and transcending experience ?
Whether Hume was right or not as regards knowledge of
the supernatural, Kant came in time to be convinced, as he
had from the first suspected, that the general question of
knowledge was tried upon far too limited an issue by his
Y
322 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.
acute predecessor. In particular was it not a fact that
sciences existed, pure in respect of having their origin not
in experience and being freely extended without reference
to actual experience, yet real in having an indubitable
application to the realm of experience? What of Mathe-
matics, the very type of exact knowledge, carried so far by
the continuous labour of many generations? And what
of that body of laws or principles (in which the law of
causation was but one), which men had ready to employ
for the interpretation of their natural experience, and which
taken altogether formed a general Science of Nature ? Related
to Metaphysic in respect of their method, so that any settle-
ment of its fate must needs reflect upon them, they had
all the character of universal recognition and progressive
development so notoriously wanting to it. Why then not
judge of its pretensions or claims in the light of their
achievements ? Let it be discovered how they could be
what in fact they were, and so it might be clearly seen
whether it could be what in fact it yet was not. A critical
search for their conditions would at the same time show'
what conditions should be required of it. Therefore the
Prolegomena, for the sake of the main question, seeks first
to answer two others : How is pure Mathematics possible ?
How is fur e Science of Nature possible ? Both are answered
by implication and more exhaustively in the Kritik in another
form : How is knowledge possible through pure Reason, which
shall hold for experience received by Sense and fashioned by
Thought ?
If this makes clear the relation of the two works, it will
be possible without misunderstanding to pass from the one
to the other, where need is. There remains, however, one
mode of statement which not only may be adopted from the
xx VIIL] Elements of General Philosophy. 323
point of view of either, but has the advantage of bringing
the whole inquiry into the compass of a single question.
How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? Till the
critical question is made to assume this general form, it does
not admit of a general solution. The solution in full is to
be looked for only in the Kritik, or rather the Kritik is the
solution. But first the statement of the question itself needs
some explanation *.
III. Mathematical Necessity and Muscular Sense.
Reverting to the first special question in its most general
form : How is the pure science of Mathematics possible ? or