Chapter 6 No.6

Montesquieu[1] (1689-1755) made Locke's doctrine of constitutional monarchy and the division of powers (pp. 179-180), with which he joins the historical point of view of Bodin and the naturalistic positions of the time, the common property of the cultivated world. Laws must be adapted to the character and spirit of the nation; the spirit of the people, again, is the result of nature, of the past, of manners, of religion, and of political institutions.

Nature has bestowed many gifts on the Southern peoples, but few on those of the North; hence the latter need freedom, while the former readily dispense with it. Warm climates produce greater sensibility and passionateness, cold ones, muscular vigor and industry; in the temperate zones nations are less constant in their habits, their vices, and their virtues. The laws of religion concern man as man, those of the state concern him as a citizen; the former have for their object the moral good of the individual, the latter, the welfare of society; the first aim at immutable, the second at mutable good. Laws and manners are closely interrelated. Right is older than the state, and the law of justice holds even in the state of nature; but in order to assure peace positive right is required in three forms, international, political, and civil.

[Footnote 1: Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 1721; Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and of their Decadence, 1734; Spirit of Laws, 1748.]

Each of the four political forms has a passion for its underlying principle: despotism has fear; monarchy, honor (personal and class prejudice); aristocracy, the moderation of the nobility; democracy, political virtue, which subordinates personal to general welfare, and especially the inclination to equality and frugality. While republics are destroyed by extravagance, lust, and self-seeking, a monarchy can dispense with civil virtue, patriotism, and moral disinterestedness, since in it false honor, luxury, and wantonness subserve the public good. Great states tend toward despotism; smaller ones toward aristocracy, or a democratic republicanism; for those of medium size monarchy, which is intermediate between the two former, is the best form of constitution. Although Montesquieu, in his Lettres Persanes, shows himself enthusiastic for the federal republics of Switzerland and the Netherlands, his opinions are different after his return from England, and in his Esprit des Lois he praises the English form of government as the ideal of civil liberty.

Political freedom consists in liberty to do (not what we wish, but) what we ought, or in doing that which the laws allow. Such lawful freedom is possible only where the constitution of the state and criminal legislation inspire the citizen with a sense of security. In order to prevent misuse of the supreme power, the different authorities in the state must be divided so that they shall hold one another in check. In particular Montesquieu demands for the judicial power absolute independence of the executive power (which Locke had termed the federative) as well as of the legislative power. The last belongs to parliament, which includes in its two houses an aristocratic and a democratic element.

Voltaire[1] (1694-1778)-he himself had made this anagram from his name, Arouet l(e) j(eune)-seemed by his many-sided receptivity almost made to be the interpreter of English ideas; in the words of Windelband, he "combines Newton's mechanical philosophy of nature, Locke's no?tical empiricism, and Shaftesbury's moral philosophy under the deistic point of view." The same qualities which made him the first journalist, enabled him to free philosophy from its scholastic garb, and, by concentrating it on the problems which press most upon the lay mind (God, freedom, immortality), to make it a living force among the people. His superficiality, as Erdmann acutely remarks, was his strength. True religion, so reason teaches us, consists in loving God and in being just and forbearing to our fellow-men as to our brothers; morality is so natural and necessary that it is no wonder that all philosophers since Zoroaster have inculcated the same principles. The less of dogma the better the religion; atheism is not so bad as superstition, which teaches men to commit crimes with an easy conscience. He considered it the chief mission of his life to destroy these two miserable errors. He endeavored to controvert atheism by rational arguments, while with passionate hatred and contemptuous wit he attacked positive Christianity and his persecutors, the priesthood. The existence of God is for him not merely a moral postulate, but a result of scientific reasoning. One of his famous sayings was: "If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him; but all nature cries out to us that he exists." He defends immortality in spite of theoretical difficulties, because of its practical necessity; his attitude toward the freedom of the will, which he had energetically defended in the beginning, grows constantly more skeptical with increasing age. His position in regard to the question of evil experiences a similar change-the Lisbon earthquake made him an opponent of optimism, though he had previously favored it.

[Footnote 1: David Friedrich Strauss, Voltaire, sechs Vortr?ge, 1870.]

%2. Theoretical and Practical Sensationalism.%

We turn next from the popular introduction and dissemination of Locke's doctrines, which left their contents unchanged, to their principiant development by the French sensationalists. Condillac (1715-80) always thinks of his work as a completion of Locke's, whose Essay he held not to have gone down to the final root of the cognitive process. Locke did not go far enough, Condillac thinks, in his rejection of innate elements; he failed to trace out the origin of perception, reflection, cognition, and volition, as also the relation between the external senses, the internal sense, and the combining intellect, which he discussed as separate sources, the two former of particular, and the last of complex, ideas; in short, he omitted to inquire into the origin of the first function of the soul. Berkeley was right in feeling that a simplification was needed here; but by erroneously reducing outer perception to inner perception, he reached the absurd conclusion of denying the external world. The true course is just the opposite of this-the one already taken by the Bishop of Cork, Peter Browne (died 1735; The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of the Human Understanding, 1728): understanding and reflection must be reduced to sensation. All psychical functions are transformed sensations. The soul has only one original faculty, that of sensation; all the others, theoretical and practical alike, are acquired, i.e., they have gradually developed from the former. Condillac is related to Locke as Fichte to Kant; in the former case the transition is mediated by Browne, in the latter by Reinhold. Each crowns the work of his predecessor with a unifying conclusion; each demands and offers a genetic psychology which finds the origin of all the spiritual functions-from sensation and feelings of pleasure and pain up to rational cognition and moral will-in a single fundamental power of the soul. But there is a great difference, materially as well as formally, between these kindred undertakings, a difference corresponding to that between Locke's empiricism and Kant's idealism. The idea of ends, which controls the course of thought in Fichte as in Leibnitz, is entirely lacking in Condillac; that which is first in time, sensation, is for the Science of Knowledge and the Monadology only the beginning, not the essence, of psychical activity, while Condillac makes no distinction between beginning and ground, but expressly identifies principe and commencement. With Fichte and Leibnitz sensation is immature thought, with Condillac thought is refined sensation. The former teach a teleological, the latter a mechanical mono-dynamism. The Science of Knowledge, moreover, makes a very serious task of the deduction of the particular psychical functions from the original power, while Condillac takes it extraordinarily easy. Good illustrations of his way of effacing distinctions instead of explaining them are given by such monotonously recurring phrases as memory is "nothing but" modified sensation; comparison and simultaneous attention to two ideas "are the same thing"; sensation "gradually becomes" comparison and judgment; reflection is "in its origin" attention itself; speech, thought, and the formation of general notions are "at bottom the same"; the passions are "only" various kinds of desire; understanding and will spring "from one root," etc.

The demand for a single fundamental psychical power comes from Descartes, and Condillac does not hesitate to retain the word penser itself as a general designation for all mental functions. Similarly he holds fast to the dualism between extension and sensation as reciprocally incompatible properties, opposes the soul as the "simple" subject of thought to "divisible" matter, and sees in the affections of the bodily organs merely the "occasions" on which the soul of itself alone exercises its sensitive activity. Even freedom-the supremacy of thought over the passions-is maintained, in striking contrast to the whole tendency of his doctrine and to the openly announced principle, that pleasure controls the attention and governs all our actions. He has just as little intention of doubting the existence of God. All is dependent on God. He is our lawgiver; it is in virtue of his wisdom that from small beginnings-perception and need-the most splendid results, science and morality, are developed under the hands of man. Whoever undertakes to complain that He has concealed from us the nature of things and granted us to know relations alone, forgets that we need no more than this. We do not exist in order to know; to live is to enjoy.

The theme of the Treatise on the Sensations, 1754, is: Memory, comparison, judgment, abstraction, and reflection (in a word, cognition) are nothing but different forms of attention; similarly the emotions, the appetites, and the will, nothing but modifications of desire; while both alike take their origin in sensation. Sensation is the sole source and the sole content of the life of the mind as a whole. To prove these positions Condillac makes use of the fiction of a statue, in which one sense awakes after another, first the lowest of the senses, smell, and last the most valuable, the sense of touch, which compels us (by its perception of density or resistance) to project our sensations, and thus wakes in us the idea of an external world. In themselves sensations are merely subjective states, modes of our own being; without the sense of touch we would ascribe odor, sound, and color to ourselves. Condillac distinguishes between sensation and ideas in a twofold sense, as mere ideas (the memory or imagination of something not present), and as ideas of objective things (the image, representative of a body); this latter sense is meant when he says, touch sensations only are also ideas.

For the details of the deduction, which often makes very happy use of a rich store of psychological material, the reader must be referred to the more extended expositions. Here we can only cite as examples the chief among the genetic definitions. Perceptions (impressions) and consciousness are the same thing under different names. A lively sensation, in which the mind is entirely occupied, becomes attention, without the necessity of assuming an additional special faculty in the mind. Attention, by its retentive effect on the sensation, becomes memory. Double attention-to a new sensation, and to the lingering trace of the previous one-is comparison; the recognition of a relation (resemblance or difference) between two ideas is judgment; the separation of an idea from another naturally connected with it, by the aid of voluntary linguistic symbols, is abstraction; a series of judgments is reflection; and the sum total of inner phenomena, that wherein ideas succeed one another, the ego or person. All truths concern relations among ideas. The tactual idea of solidity accustoms us to project the sensations of the other senses also, to transfer them thither where they are not; hence arise the ideas of our body, of external objects, and of space. If we perceive several such projected qualities together, we refer them to a substratum-substance, which we know to exist, although not what it is. By force we mean the unknown, but indubitably existent, cause of motion.

There are no indifferent mental states; every sensation is accompanied by pleasure or pain. Joy and pain give the determining law for the operation of our faculties. The soul dwells longer on agreeable sensations; without interest, ideas would pass away like shadows. The remembrance of past impressions more agreeable than the present ones is need; from this springs desire (désir) then the emotions of love, hate, hope, fear, and astonishment; finally, the will as an unconditional desire accompanied by the thought of its possible fulfillment. All inclinations, good and bad alike, spring from self-love. The predicates "good" and "beautiful" denote the pleasure-giving qualities of things, the former, that which is agreeable to smell and taste (and the passions), the latter, that which pleases sight, hearing, feeling (and the intellect). Morality is the conformity of our actions to laws, which men have established by convention with mutual obligations. In this way the good, which at first was the servant of the passions, becomes their lord.

Man's superiority to the brute depends on the greater perfection of his sense of touch; on the greater variety of his wants and his associations of ideas; on the idea of death, which leads him to seek not merely the avoidance of pain but also self-preservation; and the possession of language. Without denomination no abstractions, no thought, no handing down of knowledge. Although all that is mental has its origin, in the last analysis, in simple sensations, its development requires emancipation from the sensuous, and language is the means for freeing ourselves from the pressure of sensations by the generalization and combination of ideas.

A more moderate representative of sensationalism was Charles Bonnet, who later exercised a considerable influence in Germany, especially until Tetens (1720-93; Essay in Psychology, or Considerations on the Operations of the Soul, 1755; Analytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul, 1760; Philosophical Palingenesis, or Ideas on the Past and the Future of Living Beings, 1769, including a defense of Christianity; Collected Works, 1779). Sensations, to which he, too, reduces all mental life, are, in his view, reactions of the immaterial soul to sense stimuli, which operate merely as occasional causes. On the other hand, he emphasizes more strongly than Condillac the dependence of psychical phenomena on physiological conditions, and endeavors to show definite brain vibrations as the basis not only of habit, memory, and the association of ideas, but also of the higher mental operations. In harmony with these views he adheres to determinism, and finds the motive of all endeavor: in self-love, and its ultimate aim in happiness. To the latter the hope of immortality is indispensable. The link between Bonnet's theory of the thoroughgoing dependence of the soul on the body and his orthodox convictions, is formed by his idea of an imperishable ethereal body, which enables the soul in the life to come to remember its life on earth and, after the dissolution of the present material body, to acquire a new one. Animals as well as men share in the continuance of existence and the transition to a higher stage.

The material earnestness of these thinkers is in sharp contrast to the superficial and frivolous manner in which Helvetius (1715-71) carries out sensationalism in the sphere of ethics. His chief work, On Mind, came out in 1758; and a year after his death, the work On Man, his Intellectual Faculties and his Education. The search for pleasure or self-love is, as Helvetius thinks he has discovered for the first time,[1] the only motive of action; the laws of interest reign in the moral world as the laws of motion in the physical world; justice and love for our neighbors are based on utility; we seek friends in order to be amused, aided, and, in misfortune, compassionated by them; the philanthropist and the monster both seek only their own pleasure.

[Footnote 1: In reality not only English moralists, but also some among his countrymen, had anticipated him in the position that all actions proceed from selfishness, and that virtue is merely a refined egoism. Thus La Rochefoucauld in his Maxims (Réflexions, ou Sentences et Maximes Morales, 1665), La Bruyère (Les Charactères et les Moeurs de ce Siécle, 1687), and La Mettrie (of. pp, 251-253).]

Helvetius draws the proof for these positions from Condillac. Recollection and judgment are sensation. The soul is originally nothing more than the capacity for sensation; it receives the stimulus to its development from self-love, i.e., from powerful passions such as the love of fame, on the one hand, and, on the other, from hatred of ennui, which induces man to overcome the indolence natural to him and to submit himself to the irksome effort of attention-without passion he would remain stupid. The sum of ideas collected in him is called intellect. All distinctions among men are acquired, and concern the intellect only, not the soul: that which is innate-sensibility and self-love-is the same in all; differences arise only through external circumstances, through education. Man is the pupil of all that environs him, of his situation and his chance experience. The most important instrument in education is the law; the function of the lawgiver is to connect public and personal welfare by means of rewards and punishments, and thus to elevate morality. A man is called virtuous when his stronger passions harmonize with the general interest. Unfortunately the virtues of prejudice, which do not contribute to the public good, are more honored among most nations than the political virtues, to which alone real merit belongs. And self-interest is always the one motive to just and generous action; we serve only our own interests in furthering the welfare of the community. As the promulgator of these doctrines was himself a kind and generous man, Rousseau could make to him the apt reply: You endeavor in vain to degrade yourself below your own level; your spirit gives evidence against your principles; your benevolent heart discredits your doctrines.

The morality of enlightened self-love or "intelligent self-interest" appears in a milder form in Maupertuis (Works, 1752), and Frederick the Great,[1] to the latter of whom D'Alembert objected by letter that interest could never generate the sense of duty and reverence for the law.

[Footnote 1: Essay on Self-love as a Principle of Morals, 1770, printed in the proceedings of the Academy of Sciences. Cf. on Frederick, Ed. Zeller, 1886.]

%3. Skepticism and Materialism.%

The ideas thus far developed move in a direction whose further pursuit inevitably issues in materialism. Diderot, the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades (1751-72), which gathered all the currents of the Illumination into one great stream and carried them to the open sea of popular culture, reflects in his intellectual development the dialectical movement from deism through skepticism to atheism and materialism, and was a co-laborer in the work which brought the whole movement to a conclusion, Holbach's System of Nature. Two decades, however, before the latter work, the outcome of a long development of thought, appeared, the physician La Mettrie[1] (1709-51) had promulgated materialism, though rather in an anthropological form than as a world-system, and with cynical satisfaction in the violation of traditional beliefs-in his Natural History of the Soul, 1745, in a disguised form, and, undisguised, in his Man a Machine, 1748-and at the same time (Anti-Seneca, or Discourse on Happiness, 1748) had sketched out for Helvetius the outlines of the sensationalistic morality of interest. While ill with a violent fever he observed the influence of the heightened circulation of the blood on his mental tone, and inferred that thought is the result of the bodily organization. The soul can only be known from the body. The senses, the best philosophers, teach us that matter is never without form and motion; and whether all matter is sentient or not, certainly all that is sentient is material, and every part of the organism contains a vital principle (the heart of a frog beats for an hour after its removal from the body; the parts of cut-up polyps grow into perfect animals). All ideas come from without, from the senses; without sense-impressions no ideas, without education, few ideas, the mind of a man grown up in isolation remains entirely undeveloped; and since the soul is entirely dependent on the bodily organs, along with which it originates, grows, and declines, it is subject to mortality. Not only animals, as Descartes has shown, but men, who differ from the brutes only in degree, are mere machines; by the soul we mean that part of the body which thinks, and the brain has fine muscles for thinking as the leg its coarse ones for walking.

[Footnote 1: La Mettrie was born at St. Malo, and educated in Paris, and in Leyden under Boerhave; he died in Berlin, whither Frederick the Great had called him after he had been driven out of his native land and from Holland. On La Mettrie cf. Lange, History of Materialism, vol. ii. pp. 49-91; and DuBois-Reymond's Address, 1875.]

If man is nothing but body, there is no other pleasure than that of the body. There is a difference, however, between sensuous pleasure, which is intense and brief, and intellectual pleasure, which is calm and lasting. The educated man will prefer the latter, and find in it a higher and more noble happiness; but nature has been just enough to grant the common multitude, in the coarser pleasures, a more easily attainable happiness. Enjoy the moment, till the farce of life is ended! Virtue exists only in society, which restrains from evil by its laws, and incites to good by rousing the love of honor. The good man, who subordinates his own welfare to that of society, acts under the same necessity as the evil-doer; hence repentance and pangs of conscience, which increase the amount of pain in the world, but are incapable of effecting amendment, are useless and reprehensible: the criminal is an ill man, and must not be more harshly punished than the safety of society requires. Materialism humanizes and exercises a tranquilizing influence on the mind, as the religious view of the world, with its incitement to hatred, disturbs it; materialism frees us from the sense of guilt and responsibility, and from the fear of future suffering. A state composed of atheists, is not only possible, as Bayle argued, but it would be the happiest of all states.

Among the editors of the Encyclopedia, the mathematician D'Alembert (Elements of Philosophy, 1758) remained loyal to skeptical views. Neither matter nor spirit is in its essence knowable; the world is probably quite different from our sensuous conception of it. As Diderot (1713-84), and the Encyclopedia with him, advanced from skepticism to materialism, D'Alembert retired from the editorial board (1757), after Rousseau, also, had separated himself from the Encyclopedists. Diderot[1] was the leading spirit in the second half of the eighteenth century, as Voltaire in the first half. His lively and many-sided receptivity, active industry, clever and combative eloquence, and enthusiastic disposition qualified him for this r?le beyond all his contemporaries, who testify that they owe even more to his stimulating conversation than to his writings. He commenced by bringing Shaftesbury's Inquiry into Virtue and Merit to the notice of his countrymen; and then turned his sword, on the one hand, against the atheists, to refute whom, he thought, a single glance into the microscope was sufficient, and, on the other, against the traditional belief in a God of anger and revenge, who takes pleasure in bathing in the tears of mankind. Then followed a period of skepticism, which is well illustrated by the prayer in the Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, 1754: O God! I do not know whether thou art, but I will guide my thoughts and actions as though thou didst see me think and act, etc. Under the influence of Holbach's circle he finally reached (in the Conversation between D'Alembert and Diderot, and D'Alembert's Dream, written in 1769, but not published until 1830, in vol. iv. of the Mémoires, Correspondance, et Ouvrages Inédits de Diderot) the position of naturalistic monism-there exists but one great individual, the All. Though he had formerly distinguished thinking substance from material substance, and had based the immortality of the soul on the unity of sensation and the unity of the ego, he now makes sensation a universal and essential property of matter (la pierre sent), declares the talk about the simplicity of the soul metaphysico-theological nonsense, calls the brain a self-playing instrument, ridicules self-esteem, shame, and repentance as the absurd folly of a being that imputes to itself merit or demerit for necessary actions, and recognizes no other immortality than that of posthumous fame. But even amid these extreme conclusions, his enthusiasm for virtue remains too intense to allow him to assent to the audacious theories of La Mettrie and Helvetius.

[Footnote 1: Works in twenty-two vols., Paris, Brière, 1821; latest edition, 1875 seq. Cf. on Diderot the fine work by Karl Rosenkranz, Diderots Leben und Werke, 1866.]

French natural science also tended toward materialism. Buffon (Natural History, 1749 seq) endeavors to facilitate the mechanical explanation of the phenomena of life by the assumption of living molecules, from which visible organisms are built up. Robinet (On Nature, 1761 seq.), availing himself of Spinozistic and Leibnitzian conceptions, goes still further, in that he endows every particle of matter with sensation, looks on the whole world as a succession of living beings with increasing mentality, and subjects the interaction of the material and psychical sides of the individual, as well as the relation of pleasure and pain in the universe, to a law of harmonious compensation.

The System of Nature, 1770, which bore on its title page the name of Mirabaud, who had died 1760, proceeded from the company of freethinkers accustomed to meet in the hospitable house of Baron von Holbach (died 1789), a native of the Palatinate. Its real author was Holbach himself, although his friends Diderot, Naigeon, Lagrange, the mathematician, and the clever Grimm (died 1807) seem to have co-operated in the preparation of certain sections. The cumbrous seriousness and the dry tone of this systematic combination of the radical ideas which the century had produced, were no doubt the chief causes of its unsympathetic reception by the public. Similarly unsuccessful was the popular account of materialism with which Holbach followed it, in 1772, and Helvetius's excerpts from the System of Nature, 1774.

Holbach applies himself to the despiritualization of nature and the destruction of religious prejudices with sincere faith in the sacred mission of unbelief-the happiness of humanity depends on atheism. "O Nature, sovereign of all beings, and ye her daughters, Virtue, Reason, and Truth, be forever our only divinities." What has made virtue so difficult and so rare? Religion, which divides men instead of uniting them. What has so long delayed the illumination of the reason, and the discovery of truth? Religion with its mischievous errors, God, spirit, freedom, immortality. Immortality exists only in the memory of later generations; man is the creature of a day; nothing is permanent but the great whole of nature and the eternal law of universal change. Can a clock broken into a thousand pieces continue to mark the hours? The senseless doctrine of freedom was invented only to solve the senseless problem of the justification of God in view of the existence of evil. Man is at every moment of his life a passive instrument in the hands of necessity; the universe is an immeasurable and uninterrupted chain of actions and reactions, an eternal round of interchanging motions, ruled by laws, a change in which would at once alter the nature of all things. The most fatal error is the idea of human and divine spirits, which has been advanced by philosophers and adopted with applause by fools. The opinion that man is divided into two substances is based on the fact that, of the changes in our body, we directly perceive only the external molar movements, while, on the other hand, the inner motions of the invisible molecules are known only by their effects. These latter have been ascribed to the mind, which, moreover, we have adorned with properties whose emptiness is manifested by the fact that they are all mere negations of that which we know. Experience reveals to us only the extended, the corporeal, the divisible-but the mind is to be the opposite of all three, yet at the same time to possess the power (how, no man can tell) of acting on that which is material and of being acted upon by it. In thus dividing himself into body and soul, man has in reality only distinguished between his brain and himself. Man is a purely physical being. All so-called spiritual phenomena are functions of the brain, special cases of the operation of the universal forces of nature. Thought and volition are sensation, sensation is motion. The moving forces in the moral world are the same as those in the physical world; in the latter they are called attraction and repulsion, in the former, love and hate; that which the moralist terms self-love is the same instinct of self-preservation which is familiar in physics as the force of inertia.

As man has doubled himself, so also he has doubled nature. Evil gave the first impulse to the formation of the idea of God, pain and ignorance have been the parents of superstition; our sufferings were ascribed to unknown powers, of which we were in fear, but which, at the same time, we hoped to propitiate by prayer and sacrifice. The wise turned with their worship and reverence toward a more worthy object, to the great All; and, in fact, if we seek to give the word God a tenable meaning, it signifies active nature. The error lay in the dualistic view, in the distinction between nature and itself, i.e. its activity, and in the belief that the explanation of motion required a separate immaterial Mover. This assumption is, in the first place, false, for since the All is the complex of all that exists there can be nothing outside it; motion follows from the existence of the universe as necessarily as its other properties; the world does not receive it from without, but imparts it to itself by its own power. In the second place the assumption is useless; it explains nothing, but confuses the problems of natural science to the point of insolubility. In the third place it is self-contradictory, for after theology has removed the Deity as far away from man as possible, by means of the negative metaphysical predicates, it finds itself necessitated to bring the two together again through the moral attributes-which are neither compatible with one another nor with the meta-physical-and crowns the absurdity by the assurance that we can please God by believing that which is incomprehensible. Finally, the assumption is dangerous; it draws men away from the present, disturbs their peace and enjoyment, stirs up hatred, and thus makes happiness and morality impossible. If, then, utility is the criterion of truth, theism-even in the mild form of deism-is proven erroneous by its disastrous consequences. All error is bane.

Matter and motion are alike eternal. Nature is an active, self-moving, living whole, an endless chain of causes and effects. All is in unceasing motion, all is cause (nothing is dead, nothing rests), all is effect (there is no spontaneous motion, none directed to an end). Order and disorder are not in nature, but only in our understanding; they are abstract ideas to denote that which is conformable to our nature and that which is contrary to it. The end of the All is itself alone, is life, activity; the universal goal of particular beings, like that of the universe, is the conservation of being.

Anthropology is for Holbach essentially reduced to two problems, the deduction of thought from motion, and of morality from the physical tendency to self-preservation. The forces of the soul are no other than those of the body. All mental faculties develop from sensation; sensations are motions in the brain which reveal to us motions without the brain. All the passions may be reduced to love and hate, desire and aversion, and depend upon temperament, on the individual mixture of the fluid parts. Virtue is the equilibrium of the fluids. All human actions proceed from interest. Good and bad men are distinguished only by their organizations, and by the ideas they form concerning happiness. With the same necessity as that of the act itself, follow the love or contempt of fellow-men, the pleasure of self-esteem and the pain of repentance (regret for evil consequences, hence no evidence of freedom). Neither responsibility nor punishment is done away with by this necessity-have we not the right to protect ourselves against the stream which damages our fields, by building dikes and altering its course? The end of endeavor is permanent happiness, and this can be attained through virtue alone. The passions which are useful to society compel the affection and approval of our fellows. In order to interest others in our welfare we must interest ourselves in theirs-nothing is more indispensable to man than man. The clever man acts morally, interest binds us to the good; love for others means love for the means to our own happiness. Virtue is the art of making ourselves happy through the happiness of others. Nature itself chastises immorality, since she makes the intemperate unhappy. Religion has hindered the recognition of these rules, has misunderstood the diseases of the soul, and applied false and ineffective remedies; the renunciation which she requires is opposed to human nature. The true moralist recognizes in medicine the key to the human heart; he will cure the mind through the body, control the passions and hold them in check by other passions instead of by sermons, and will teach men that the surest road to personal ends is to labor for the public good. Illumination is the way to virtue and to happiness.

Volney (Chasseboeuf, died 1820; Catechism of the French Citizen, 1793, later under the title Natural Law or Physical Principles of Morals deduced front the Organization of Man and of the Universe; further, The Ruins; Complete Works, 1821) belongs among the moralists of self-love, although, besides the egoistic interests, he takes account of the natural sympathetic impulses also. This is still more the case with Condorcet (Sketch of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1794), who was influenced alike by Condillac and by Turgot, and who defends a tendency toward universal perfection both in the individual and in the race. Besides the selfish affections, which are directed as much to the injury as to the support of others, there lies in the organization of man a force which steadily tends toward the good, in the form of underived feelings of sympathy and benevolence, from which moral self-judgment is developed by the aid of reflection. The aim of true ethics and social art is not to make the "great" virtues universal, but to make them needless; the nearer the nations approximate to mental and moral perfection, the less they stand in need of these-happy the people in which good deeds are so customary that scarcely an opportunity is left for heroism. The chief instrument for the moral cultivation of the people is the development of the reason, the conscience, and the benevolent affections. Habituation to deeds of kindness is a source of pure and inexhaustible happiness. Sympathy with the good of others must be so cultivated that the sacrifice of personal enjoyment will be a sweeter joy than the pleasure itself. Let the child early learn to enjoy the delight of loving and of being loved. We must, finally, strive toward the gradual diminution of the inequalities of capacity, of property, and between ruler and ruled, for to abolish them is impossible.

Of the remaining philosophers of the revolutionary period mention may be made of the physician Cabanis (Relations of the Physical and the Moral in Man, 1799), and Destutt de Tracy (Elements of Ideology, 1801 seq.). The former is a materialist in psychology (the nerves are the man, ideas are secretions of the brain), considers consciousness a property of organic matter (the soul is not a being, but a faculty), and makes moral sympathy develop out of the animal instincts of preservation and nourishment. De Tracy, also, derives all psychical activity from organization and sensation. His doctrine of the will, though but briefly sketched, is interesting. The desires have a passive and an active side (corresponding to the twofold action of the nerves, on themselves and on the muscles); on the one hand, they are feelings of pleasure or pain, and on the other, they lead us to action-will is need, and, at the same time, the source of the means for satisfying this need. Both these feelings and the external movements are probably based upon unconscious organic motions. The will is rightly identified with the personality, it is the ego itself, the totality of the physico-psychical life of man attaining to self-consciousness. The inner or organic life consists in the self-preserving functions of the individual, the outer or animal life, in the functions of relation (of sense, of motion, of speech, of reproduction); individual interests are rooted in the former, sympathy in the latter. The primal good is freedom, or the power to do what we will; the highest thing in life is love. In order to be happy we must avoid punishment, blame, and pangs of conscience.

%4. Rousseau's Conflict with the Illumination.%

The Genevese, Jean Jacques Rousseau[1] (1712-78), stands in a similar relation of opposition to the French Illumination as the Scottish School to the English, and Herder and Jacobi to the German. He points us away from the cold sophistical inferences of the understanding to the immediate conviction of feeling; from the imaginations of science to the unerring voice of the heart and the conscience; from the artificial conditions of culture to healthy nature. The vaunted Illumination is not the lever of progress, but the source of all degeneration; morality does not rest on the shrewd calculation of self-interest, but on original social and sympathetic instincts (love for the good is just as natural to the human heart as self-love; enthusiasm for virtue has nothing to do with our interest; what would it mean to give up one's life for the sake of advantage?); the truths of religion are not objects of thought, but of pious feeling.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Brockerhoff, Leipsic, 1863-74; L. Moreau, Paris, 1870.]

Rousseau commenced his career as an author with the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, 1750 (the discussion of a prize question, crowned by the Academy of Dijon), which he describes as entirely pernicious, and the Discourse on the Origin and the Bases of the Inequality among Men, 1753. By nature man is innocent and good, becoming evil only in society. Reflection, civilization, and egoism are unnatural. In the happy state of nature pity and innocent self-love (amour de soi) ruled, and the latter was first corrupted by the reason into the artificial feeling of selfishness (amour propre) in the course of social development-thinking man is a degenerate animal. Property has divided men into rich and poor; the magistracy, into strong and weak; arbitrary power, into masters and slaves. Wealth generated luxury with its artificial delights of science and the theater, which make us more unhappy and evil than we otherwise are; science, the child of vice, becomes in turn the mother of new vices. All nature, all that is characteristic, all that is good, has disappeared with advancing culture; the only relief from the universal degeneracy is to be hoped for from a return to nature on the part of the individual and society alike-from education and a state conformed to nature. The novel Emile is devoted to the pedagogical, and the Social Contract, or the Principles of Political Law, to the political problem. Both appeared in 1762, followed two years later by the Letters from the Mountain, a defense against the attacks of the clergy. In these later writings Rousseau's naturalistic hatred of reason appears essentially softened.

Social order is a sacred right, which forms the basis of all others. It does not proceed, however, from nature-no man has natural power over his fellows, and might confers no right-consequently it rests on a contract. Not, however, on a contract between ruler and people. The act by which the people chooses a king is preceded by the act in virtue of which it is a people. In the social contract each devotes himself with his powers and his goods to the community, in order to gain the protection of the latter. With this act the spiritual body politic comes into being, and attains its unity, its ego, its will. The sum of the members is called the people; each member, as a participant in the sovereignty, citizen, and, as bound to obedience to the law, subject. The individual loses his natural freedom, receiving in exchange the liberty of a citizen, which is limited by the general will, and, in addition, property rights in all that he possesses, equality before the law, and moral freedom, which first really makes him master of himself. The impulse of mere desire is slavery, obedience to self-imposed law, freedom. The sovereign is the people, law the general popular will directed to the common good, the supreme goods, "freedom and equality," the chief objects of legislation. The lawgiving power is the moral will of the body politic, the government (magistracy, prince) its executive physical power; the former is its heart, the latter its brain. Rousseau calls the government the middle term between the head of the state and the individual, or between the citizen as lawgiver and as subject-the sovereign (the people) commands, the government executes, the subject obeys. The act by which the people submits itself to its head is not a contract, but merely a mandate; whenever it chooses it can limit, alter, or entirely recall the delegated power. In order to security against illegal encroachments on the part of the government, Rousseau recommends regular assemblies of the people, in which, under suspension of governmental authority, the confirmation, abrogation, or alteration of the constitution shall be determined upon. Even the establishment of the articles of social belief falls to the sovereign people. The essential difference between Rousseau's theory of the state and that of Locke and Montesquieu consists in his rejection of the division of powers and of representation by delegates, hence in its unlimited democratic character. A generation after it was given to the world, the French Revolution made the attempt to translate it into practice. "The masses carried out what Rousseau himself had thought, it is true, but never willed" (Windelband).

Rousseau's theory of education is closely allied to Locke's (cf. above), whose leading idea-the development of individuality-was entirely in harmony with the subjectivism of the philosopher of feeling. Posterity has not found it a difficult task to free the sound kernel therein from the husks of exaggeration and idiosyncrasy which surrounded it. Among the latter belong the preference of bodily over intellectual development, and the unlimited faith in the goodness of human nature. Exercise the body, the organs, the senses of the pupil, and keep his soul unemployed as long as possible; for the first, take care only that his mind be kept free from error and his heart from vice. In order to secure complete freedom from disturbance in this development, it is advisable to isolate the child from society, nay, even from the family, and to bring him up in retirement under the guidance of a private tutor.

As the Swiss republican spoke in Rousseau's politics, so his religious theories[1] betray the Genevan Calvinist. "The Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith" (in Emile) proclaims deism as a religion of feeling. The rational proofs brought forward for the existence of God-from the motion of matter in itself at rest, and from the finality of the world-are only designed, as he declares by letter, to confute the materialists, and derive their impregnability entirely from the inner evidence of feeling, which amid the vacillation of the reason pro and con gives the final decision.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Ch. Borgeaud, Rousseaus Religionsphilosophie, Geneva and

Leipsic, 1883.]

If we limit our inquiry to that which is alone of importance for us, and rely on the evidence of feeling, it cannot be doubted that I myself exist and feel; that there exists an external world which affects me; that thought, comparison or judgment concerning relations is different from sensation or the perception of objects-for the latter is a passive, but the former an active process; that I myself produce the activity of attention or consideration; that, consequently, I am not merely a sensitive or passive, but also an active or intelligent being. The freedom of my thought and action guarantees to me the immateriality of my soul, and is that which distinguishes me from the brute. The life of the soul after the decay of the body is assured to me by the fact that in this world the wicked triumphs, while the good are oppressed. The favored position which man occupies in the scale of beings-he is able to look over the universe and to reverence its author, to recognize order and beauty, to love the good and to do it; and shall he, then, compare himself to the brute?-fills me with emotion and gratitude to the benevolent Creator, who existed before all things, and who will exist when they all shall have vanished away, to whom all truths are one single idea, all places a point, all times a moment. The how of freedom, of eternity, of creation, of the action of my will upon matter, etc., is, indeed, incomprehensible to me, but that these are so, my feeling makes me certain. The worthiest employment of my reason is to annihilate itself before God. "The more I strive to contemplate his infinite essence the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me. The less I conceive it, the more I adore."

In the depths of my heart I find the rules for my conduct engraved by nature in ineffaceable characters. Everything is good that I feel to be so. The conscience is the most enlightened of all philosophers, and as safe a guide for the soul as instinct for the body. The infallibility of its judgment is evidenced by the agreement of different peoples; amid the surprising differences of manners you will everywhere find the same ideas of justice, the same notions of good and evil. Show me a land where it is a crime to keep one's word, to be merciful, benevolent, magnanimous, where the upright man is despised and the faithless honored! Conscience enjoins the limitation of our desires to the degree to which we are capable of satisfying them, but not their complete suppression-all passions are good when we control them, all evil when they control us.

In the second part of the "Profession du Foi du Vicaire Savoyard" Rousseau turns from his attacks on sensationalism, materialism, atheism, and the morality of interest, to the criticism of revelation. Why, in addition to natural religion, with its three fundamental doctrines, God, freedom, and immortality, should other special doctrines be necessary, which rather confuse than clear up our ideas of the Great Being, which exact from us the acceptance of absurdities, and make men proud, intolerant, and cruel-whereas God requires from us no other service than that of the heart? Every religion is good in which men serve God in a befitting manner. If God had prescribed one single religion for us, he would have provided it with infallible marks of its unique authenticity. The authority of the fathers and the priesthood is not decisive, for every religion claims to be revealed and alone true; the Mohammedan has the same right as the Christian to adhere to the religion of his fathers. Since all revelation comes down to us by human tradition, reason alone can be the judge of its divinity. The careful examination of the documents, which are written in ancient languages, would require an amount of learning which could not possibly be a condition of salvation and acceptance with God. Miracles and prophecy are not conclusive, for how are we to distinguish the true among them from the false? If we turn from the external to the internal criteria of the doctrines themselves, even here no decision can be reached between the reasons pro and con (the author puts the former into the mouth of a believer, and the latter into that of a rationalist); even if the former outweighed the latter, the difficulty would still remain of reconciling it with God's goodness and justice that the gospel has not reached so many of mankind, and of explaining how those to whom the divinity of Christ is now proclaimed can convince themselves of it, while his contemporaries misjudged and crucified him. In my opinion, I am incapable of fathoming the truth of the Christian religion and its value to those who confess it. The investigation of the reason ends in "reverential doubt": I neither accept revelation nor reject it, but I reject the obligation to accept it. My heart, however, judges otherwise than the reflection of my intellect; for this the sacred majesty and exalted simplicity of the Scriptures are a most cogent proof that they are more than human, and that He whose history they contain is more than man. The touching grace and profound wisdom of his words, the gentleness of his conduct, the loftiness of his maxims, his mastery over his passions, abundantly prove that he was neither an enthusiast nor an ambitious sectary. Socrates lived and died like a philosopher, Jesus like a God. The virtues of justice, patriotism, and moderation taught by Socrates, had been exercised by the great men of Greece before he inculcated them. But whence could Jesus derive in his time and country that lofty morality which he alone taught and exemplified? Things of this sort are not invented. The inventor of such deeds would be more wonderful than the doer of them. Thus again, in the question of revealed religion, the voice of the heart triumphs over the doubts of the reason, as, in the question of natural religion, it had done over the objections of opponents. It is true, however, that this enthusiasm is paid not to the current Christianity of the priests, but to I the real Christianity of the gospel.

Rousseau was the conscience of France, which rebelled against the negations and the bald emptiness of the materialistic and atheistic doctrines. By vindicating with fervid eloquence the participation of the whole man in the highest questions, in opposition to the one-sided illumination of the understanding, he became a pre-Kantian defender of the faith of practical reason. His emphatic summons aroused a loud and lasting echo, especially in Germany, in the hearts of Goethe, Kant, and Fichte.

CHAPTER VII.

LEIBNITZ.

In the contemporaries Spinoza and Locke, the two schools of modern philosophy, the Continental, starting from Descartes, and the English, which followed Bacon, had reached the extreme of divergence and opposition, Spinoza was a rationalistic pantheist, Locke, an empirical individualist. With Leibnitz a twofold approximation begins. As a rationalist he sides with Spinoza against Locke, as an individualist with Locke against Spinoza. But he not only separated rationalism from pantheism, but also qualified it by the recognition (which his historical tendencies had of themselves suggested to him) of a relative justification for empiricism, since he distinguished the factual truths of experience from the necessary truths of reason, gave to the former a no?tical principle of their own, the principle of sufficient reason, and made sensation an indispensable step to thought.

To the tendencies thus manifested toward a just estimation and peaceful reconciliation of opposing standpoints, Leibnitz remained true in all the fields to which he devoted his activity. Thus, in the sphere of religion, he took an active part in the negotiations looking toward the reunion of the Protestant and Catholic Churches, as well as in those concerning the union of the Lutheran and the Reformed. Himself a stimulating man, he yet needed stimulation from without. He was an astonishingly wide reader, and declared that he had never found a book that did not contain something of value. With a ready adaptability to the ideas of others he combined a remarkable power of transformative appropriation; he read into books more than stood written in them. The versatility of his genius was unlimited: jurist, historian, diplomat, mathematician, physical scientist, and philosopher, and in addition almost a theologian and a philologist-he is not only at home in all these departments, because versed in them, but everywhere contributes to their advancement by original ideas and plans. In such a combination of productive genius and wealth of knowledge Aristotle and Leibnitz are unapproached.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz was born in 1646 at Leipsic, where his father (Friederich Leibnitz, died 1652) was professor of moral philosophy; in his fifteenth year he entered the university of his native city, with law as his principal subject. Besides law, he devoted himself with quite as much of ardor to philosophy under Jacob Thomasius (died 1684, the father of Christian Thomasius), and to mathematics under E. Weigel in Jena. In 1663 (with a dissertation entitled De Principio Individui) he became Bachelor, in 1664 Master of Philosophy, and in 1666, at Altdorf, Doctor of Laws, and then declined the professorship extraordinary offered him in the latter place. Having made the acquaintance of the former minister of the Elector of Mayence, Freiherr von Boineburg, in Nuremberg, he went, after a short stay at Frankfort-on-the-Main, to the court of the Elector at Mayence, at whose request he devoted himself to the reform of legal procedure, besides writing, while there, on the most diverse subjects. In 1672 he went to Paris, where he remained during four years with the exception of a short stay in London. The special purpose of the journey to Paris-to persuade Louis XIV to undertake a campaign in Egypt, in order to divert him from his designs upon Germany-was not successful; but Leibnitz was captivated by the society of the Parisian scholars, among them the mathematician, Huygens. From the end of 1676 until his death in 1716 Leibnitz lived in Hanover, whither he had been called by Johann Friedrich, as court councillor and librarian. The successor of this prince, Ernst August, who, with his wife Sophie, and his daughter Sophie Charlotte, showed great kindness to the philosopher, wished him to write a history of the princely house of Brunswick; and a journey which he made in order to study for this purpose was extended as far as Vienna and Rome. Upon his return he took charge of the Wolfenbüttel library in addition to his other engagements.

The marriage of the Princess Sophie Charlotte with Frederick of Brandenburg, the first king of Prussia, brought Leibnitz into close relations with Berlin. At his suggestion the Academy (Society) of Sciences was founded there in 1700, and he himself became its first president. In Charlottenburg he worked on his principal work, the New Essays concerning the Human Understanding, which was aimed at Locke, but the publication of which was deferred on account of the death of the latter in the interim (1704), and did not take place until 1765, in Raspe's collective edition. The death of the Prussian queen in 1705 interrupted for several years the Theodicy, which had been undertaken at her request, and which did not appear until 1710. In Vienna, where he resided in 1713-14, Leibnitz composed a short statement of his system for Prince Eugen; this, according to Gerhardt, was not the sketch in ninety paragraphs, familiar under the title Monadology, which was first published in the original by J.E. Erdmann in his excellent Complete Edition of the Philosophical Works of Leibnitz, 1840, but the Principles of Nature and of Grace, which appeared two years after the author's death in L'Europe Savante. While Ernst August, as well as the German emperor and Peter the Great, distinguished the philosopher, who was not indifferent to such honors, by the bestowal of titles and preferments, his relations with the Hanoverian court, which until then had been so cordial, grew cold after the Elector Georg Ludwig ascended the English throne as George I. The letters which Leibnitz interchanged with his daughter-in-law, gave rise to the correspondence, continued to his death, with Clarke, who defended the theology of Newton against him. The contest for priority between Leibnitz and Newton concerning the invention of the differential calculus was later settled by the decision that Newton invented his method of fluxions first, but that Leibnitz published his differential calculus earlier and in a more perfect form. The variety of pursuits in which Leibnitz was engaged was unfavorable to the development and influence of his philosophy, in that it hindered him from working out his original ideas in systematic form, and left him leisure only for the composition of shorter essays. Besides the two larger works mentioned above, the New Essays and the Theodicy, we have of philosophical works by Leibnitz only a series of private letters, and articles for the scientific journals (the Journal des Savants in Paris, and the Acta Eruditorum in Leipsic, etc.), among which may be mentioned as specially important the New System of Nature, and of the Interaction of Substances as well as of the Union which exists between the Soul and the Body, 1695, which was followed during the next year by three explanations of it, and the paper De Ipsa Natura, 1698. Previous to Erdmann (1840) the following had deserved credit for their editions of Leibnitz: Feller, Kortholt, Gruber, Raspe, Dutens, Feder, Guhrauer (the German works), and since Erdmann, Pertz, Foucher de Careil, Onno Klopp, and especially J.C. Gerhardt. The last named published the mathematical works in seven volumes in 1849-63, and recently, Berlin, 1875-90, the philosophical treatises, also in seven volumes.[1] In our account of the philosophy of Leibnitz we begin with the fundamental metaphysical concepts, pass next to his theory of living beings and of man (theory of knowledge and ethics), and close with his inquiries into the philosophy of religion.

[Footnote 1: We have a life of Leibnitz by G.E. Guhrauer, jubilee edition, Breslau, 1846 [Mackie's Life, Boston, 1845 is based on Guhrauer]. Among recent works on Leibnitz, we note the little work by Merz, Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1884, and Ludwig Stein's Leibniz und Spinoza, Berlin, 1890, in which with the aid of previously unedited material the relations of Leibnitz to Spinoza (whom he visited at The Hague on his return journey from Paris) are discussed, and the attempt is made to trace the development of the theory of monads, down to 1697. The new exposition of the Leibnitzian monadology by Ed. Dillman, which has just appeared, we have not yet been able to examine [The English reader may be referred further to Dewey's Leibniz in Griggs's Philosophical Classics, 1888, and Duncan's Philosophical Works of Leibnitz (selections translated, with notes), New Haven, 1890, as well as to the work of Merz already mentioned.-TR.]]

%1. Metaphysics: the Monads, Representation, the Pre-established Harmony; the Laws of Thought and of the World.%

Leibnitz develops his new concept of substance, the monad,[1] in conjunction with, yet in opposition to, the Cartesian and the atomistic conceptions. The Cartesians are right when they make the concept of substance the cardinal point in metaphysics and explain it by the concept of independence. But they are wrong in their further definition of this second concept. If we take independence in the sense of unlimitedness and aseity, we can speak, as the example of Spinoza shows, of only one, the divine substance. If the Spinozistic result is to be avoided, we must substitute independent action for independent existence, self-activity for self-existence. Substance is not that which exists through itself (otherwise there would be no finite substances), but that which acts through itself, or that which contains in itself the ground of its changing states. Substance is to be defined by active force,[2] by which we mean something different from and better than the bare possibility or capacity of the Scholastics. The potentia sive facultas, in order to issue into action, requires positive stimulation from without, while the vis activa (like an elastic body) sets itself in motion whenever no external hindrance opposes. Substance is a being capable of action (la substance est un être capable d'action). With the equation of activity and existence (quod non agit, non existit) the substantiality which Spinoza had taken away from individual things is restored to them: they are active, consequently, in spite of their limitedness, substantial beings (quod agit, est substantia singularis). Because of its inner activity every existing thing is a determinate individual, and different from every other being. Substance is an individual being endowed with force.

[Footnote 1: According to L. Stein's conjecture, Leibnitz took the expression Monad, which he employs after 1696, from the younger (Franc. Mercurius) van Helmont.]

[Footnote 2: Francis Glisson (1596-1677, professor of medicine in Cambridge and London) had as early as 1671, conceived substances as forces in his treatise De Natura Substantiae Energetica. That Glisson influenced Leibnitz, as maintained by H. Marion (Paris, 1880), has not been proven; cf. L. Stein, p. 184.]

The atomists are right when they postulate for the explanation of phenomenal bodies simple, indivisible, eternal units, for every composite consists of simple parts. But they are wrong when they regard these invisible, minute corpuscles, which are intended to subserve this purpose as indivisible: everything that is material, however small it be, is divisible to infinity, nay, is in fact endlessly divided. If we are to find indivisible units, we must pass over into the realm of the immaterial and come to the conclusion that bodies are composed of immaterial constituents. Physical points, the atoms, are physical, but not points; mathematical points are indivisible, but not real; metaphysical or substantial points, the incorporeal, soul-like units, alone combine in themselves indivisibility and reality-the monads are the true atoms. Together with indivisibility they possess immortality; as it is impossible for them to arise and perish through the combination and separation of parts, they cannot come into being or pass out of it in any natural way whatever, but only by creation or annihilation. Their non-spatial or punctual character implies the impossibility of all external influence, the monad develops its states from its own inner nature, has need of no other thing, is sufficient unto itself, and therefore deserves the Aristotelian name, entelechy.

Thus two lines of thought combine in the concept of the monad. Gratefully recognizing the suggestions from both sides, Leibnitz called Cartesianism the antechamber of the true philosophy, and atomism the preparation for the theory of monads. From the first it followed that the substances were self-acting forces; from the second, that they were immaterial units. Through the combination of both determinations we gain information concerning the kind of force or activity which constitutes the being of the monad: the monads are representative forces. There is nothing truly real in the world save the monads and their representations [ideas, perceptions].

In discussing the representation in which the being and activity of the monads consist, we must not think directly of the conscious activity of the human soul. Representation has in Leibnitz a wider meaning than that usually associated with the word. The distinction, which has become of the first importance for psychology, between mere representation and conscious representation, or between perception and apperception, may be best explained by the example of the sound of the waves. The roar which we perceive in the vicinity of the sea-beach is composed of the numerous sounds of the single waves. Each single sound is of itself too small to be heard; nevertheless it must make an impression on us, if only a small one, since otherwise their total-as a sum of mere nothings-could not be heard. The sensation which the motion of the single wave causes is a weak, confused, unconscious, infinitesimal perception (petite, insensible perception), which must be combined with many similar minute sensations in order to become strong and distinct, or to rise above the threshold of consciousness. The sound of the single wave is felt, but not distinguished, is perceived, but not apperceived. These obscure states of unconscious representation, which are present in the mind of man along with states of clear consciousness, make up, in the lowest grade of existence, the whole life of the monad. There are beings which never rise above the condition of deep sleep or stupor.

In conformity with this more inclusive meaning, perception is defined as the representation of the external in the internal, of multiplicity in unity (representatio multitudinis in unitate). The representing being, without prejudice to its simplicity, bears in itself a multitude of relations to external things. What now is the manifold, which is expressed, perceived, or represented, in the unit, the monad? It is the whole world. Every monad represents all others in itself, is a concentrated all, the universe in miniature. Each individual contains an infinity in itself (substantia infinitas actiones simul exercet) and a supreme intelligence, for which every obscure idea would at once become distinct, would be able to read in a single monad the whole universe and its history-all that is, has been, or will be; for the past has left its traces behind it, and the future will bring nothing not founded in the present: the monad is freighted with the past and bears the future in its bosom. Every monad is thus a mirror of the universe,[1] but a living mirror (miror vivant de l'univers), which generates the images of things by its own activity or develops them from inner germs, without experiencing influences from without. The monad has no windows through which anything could pass in or out, but in its action is dependent only on God and on itself.

[Footnote 1: The objection has been made against Leibnitz, and not without reason, that strictly speaking there is no content for the representation of the monads, although he appears to offer them the richest of all contents, the whole world. The "All" which he makes them represent is itself nothing but a sum of beings, also representative. The objects of representation are merely representing subjects; the monad A represents the monads from B to Z, while these in turn do nothing more than represent one another. The monad mirrors mirrors-where is the thing that is mirrored? The essence of substance consists in being related to others, which themselves are only points of relation; amid mere relativities we never reach a real. That which prevented Leibnitz himself from recognizing this empty formalism was, no doubt, the fact that for him the mere form of representation was at once filled with a manifold experiential content, with the whole wealth of spiritual life, and that the quantitative differences in representation, which for him meant also degrees of feeling, desire, action, and progress, imperceptibly took on the qualitative vividness of individual characteristics. Moreover, it must not be overlooked that the spiritual beings represent not merely the universe but the Deity as well, hence a very rich object.]

All monads represent the same universe, but each one represents it differently, that is, from its particular point of view-represents that which is near at hand distinctly, and that which is distant confusedly. Since they all reflect the same content or object, their difference consists only in the energy or degree of clearness in their representations. So far then, as their action consists in representation, distinct representation evidently coincides with complete, unhindered activity, confused representation with arrested activity, or passivity. The clearer the representations of a monad the more active it is. To have clear and distinct perceptions only is the prerogative of God; to the Omnipresent everything is alike near. He alone is pure activity; all finite beings are passive as well, that is, so far as their perceptions are not clear and distinct. Retaining the Aristotelian-Scholastic terminology, Leibnitz calls the active principle form, the passive matter, and makes the monad, since it is not, like God, purus actus and pure form, consist of form (entelechy, soul) and matter. This matter, as a constituent of the monad, does not mean corporeality, but only the ground for the arrest of its activity. The materia prima (the principle of passivity in the monad) is the ground, the materia secunda (the phenomenon of corporeal mass) the result of the indistinctness of the representations. For a group of monads appears as a body when it is indistinctly perceived. Whoever deprives the monad of activity falls into the error of Spinoza; whoever takes away its passivity or matter falls into the opposite error, for he deifies individual beings.

No monad represents the common universe and its individual parts just as well as the others, but either better or worse. There are as many different degrees of clearness and distinctness as there are monads.

Nevertheless certain classes may be distinguished. By distinguishing between clear and obscure perceptions, and in the former class between distinct and confused ones-a perception is clear when it is sufficiently distinguished from others, distinct when its component parts are thus distinguished-Leibnitz reaches three principal grades. Lowest stand the simple or naked monads, which never rise above obscure and unconscious perception and, so to speak, pass their lives in a swoon or sleep. If perception rises into conscious feeling, accompanied by memory, then the monad deserves the name of soul. And if the soul rises to self-consciousness and to reason or the knowledge of universal truth, it is called spirit. Each higher stage comprehends the lower, since even in spirits many perceptions remain obscure and confused. Hence it was an error when the Cartesians made thought or conscious activity-by which, it is true, the spirit is differentiated from the lower beings-to such a degree the essence of spirit that they believed it necessary to deny to it all unconscious perceptions.

From perception arises appetition, not as independent activity, but as a modification of perception; it is nothing but the tendency to pass from one perception to another (l'appetit est la tendance d'une perception à une autre); impulse is perception in process of becoming. Where the perceptions are conscious and rational appetition rises into will. All monads are self-active or act spontaneously, but only the thinking ones are free. Freedom is the spontaneity of spirits. Freedom does not consist in undetermined choice, but in action without external compulsion according to the laws of one's own being. The monad develops its representations out of itself, from the germs which form its nature. The correspondence of the different pictures of the world, however, is grounded in a divine arrangement, through which the natures of the monads have from the beginning been so adapted to one another that the changes in their states, although they take place in each according to immanent laws and without external influence, follow an exactly parallel course, and the result is the same as though there were a constant mutual interaction. This general idea of a pre-established harmony finds special application in the problem of the interaction between body and soul. Body and soul are like two clocks so excellently constructed that, without needing to be regulated by each other, they show exactly the same time. Over the numberless lesser miracles with which occasionalism burdened the Deity, the one great miracle of the pre-established harmony has an undeniable advantage. As one great miracle it is more worthy of the divine wisdom than the many lesser ones, nay, it is really no miracle at all, since the harmony does not interfere with natural laws, but yields them. This idea may even be freed from its theological investiture and reduced to the purely metaphysical expression, that the natures of the monads, by which the succession of their representations is determined in conformity with law, consist in nothing else than the sum of relations in which this individual thing stands to all other parts of the world, wherein each member takes account of all others and at the same time is considered by them, and thus exerts influence as well as suffers it. In this way the external idea of an artificial adaptation is avoided. The essence of each thing is simply the position which it occupies in the organic whole of the universe; each member is related to every other and shares actively and passively in the life of all the rest. The history of the universe is a single great process in numberless reflections.

The metaphysics of Leibnitz begins with the concept of representation and ends with the harmony of the universe. The representations were multiplicity (the endless plurality of the represented) in unity (the unity of the representing monad); the harmony is unity (order, congruity of the world-image) in multiplicity (the infinitely manifold degrees of clearness in the representations). All monads represent the same universe; each one mirrors it differently. The unity, as well as the difference, could not be greater than it is; every possible degree of distinctness of representation is present in each single monad, and yet there is a single harmonic accord in which the unnumbered tones unite. Now order amid diversity, unity in variety make up the concept of beauty and perfection. If, then, this world shows, as it does, the greatest unity in the greatest multiplicity, so that there is nothing wanting and nothing superfluous, it is the most perfect, the best of all possible worlds. Even the lowest grades contribute to the perfection of the whole; their disappearance would mean a hiatus; and if the unclear and confused representations appear imperfect when considered in themselves, yet they are not so in reference to the whole; for just on this fact, that the monad is arrested in its representation or is passive, i.e., conforms itself to the others and subordinates itself to them, rest the order and connection of the world. Thus the idea of harmony forms the bridge between the Monadology and optimism.

As in regard to the harmony of the universe we found it possible to distinguish between a half-mythical, narrative form of presentation and a purely abstract conception, so we may make a similar distinction in the doctrine of creation. This actual world has been chosen by God as the best among many other conceivable worlds. Through the will of God the monads of which the world consists attained their reality; as possibilities or ideas they were present in the mind of God (as it were, prior to their actualization), present, too, with all the distinctive properties and perfections that they now exhibit in a state of realization, so that their merely possible or conceivable being had the same content as their actual being, and their essence is not altered or increased by their existence. Now, since the impulse toward actualization dwells in every possible essence, and is the more justifiable the more perfect the essence, a competition goes on before God, in which, first, those monod-possibilities unite which are mutually compatible or compossible, and, then, among the different conceivable combinations of monads or worlds that one is ordained for entrance into existence which shows the greatest possible sum of perfection. It was, therefore, not the perfection of the single monad, but the perfection of the system of which it forms a necessary part, that was decisive as to its admission into existence. The best world was known through God's wisdom, chosen through his goodness, and realized through his power.[1] The choice was by no means arbitrary, but wholly determined by the law of fitness or of the best (principe du meilleur); God's will must realize that which his understanding recognizes as most perfect. It is at once evident that in the competition of the possible worlds the victory of the best was assured by the lex melioris, apart from the divine decision.

[Footnote 1: In regard to the dependence of the world on God, there is a certain conflict noticeable in Leibnitz between the metaphysical interests involved in the substantiality of individual beings, together with the moral interests involved in guarding against fatalism, and the opposing interests of religion. On the one side, creation is for him only an actualization of finished, unchangeable possibilities, on the other, he teaches with the mediaeval philosophers that this was not accomplished by a single act of realization, that the world has need of conservation, i.e., of continuous creation.]

This law is the special expression of a more general one, the principle of sufficient reason, which Leibnitz added, as of equal authority, to the Aristotelian laws of thought. Things or events are real (and assertions true) when there is a sufficient reason for their existence, and for their determinate existence. The principium rationis sufficientis governs our empirical knowledge of contingent truths or truths of fact, while, on the other hand, the pure rational knowledge of necessary or eternal (mathematical and metaphysical) truths rests on the principium contradictionis. The principle of contradiction asserts, that is, whatever contains a contradiction is false or impossible; whatever contains no contradiction is possible; that whose opposite contains a contradiction is necessary. Or positively formulated as the principle of identity, everything and every representative content is identical with itself.[2] Upon this antithesis between the rational laws of contradiction and sufficient reason-which, however, is such only for us men, while the divine spirit, which cognizes all things a priori, is able to reduce even the truths of fact to the eternal truths-Leibnitz bases his distinction between two kinds of necessity. That is metaphysically necessary whose opposite involves a contradiction; that is morally necessary or contingent which, on account of its fitness, is preferred by God to its (equally conceivable) opposite. To the latter class belongs, further, the physically necessary: the necessity of the laws of nature is only a conditional necessity (conditioned by the choice of the best); they are contingent truths or truths of fact. The principle of sufficient reason holds for efficient as well as for final causes, and between the two realms there is, according to Leibnitz, the most complete correspondence. In the material world every particular must be explained in a purely mechanical way, but the totality of the laws of nature, the universal mechanism itself, cannot in turn be mechanically explained, but only on the basis of finality, so that the mechanical point of view is comprehended in, and subordinated to, the teleological. Thus it becomes clear how Leibnitz in the ratio sufficiens has final causes chiefly in mind.

[Footnote 2: Within the knowledge of reason, as well as in experiential knowledge, a further distinction is made between primary truths (which need no proof) and derived truths. The highest truths of reason are the identical principles, which are self-evident; from these intuitive truths all others are to be derived by demonstration-proof is analysis and, as free from contradictions, demonstration. The primitive truths of experience are the immediate facts of consciousness; whatever is inferred from them is less certain than demonstrative knowledge. Nevertheless experience is not to be estimated at a low value; it is through it alone that we can assure ourselves of the reality of the objects of thought, while necessary truths guarantee only that a predicate must be ascribed to a subject (e.g., a circle), but make no deliverance as to whether this subject exists or not.]

To the broad and comprehensive tendency which is characteristic of Leibnitz's thinking, philosophy owes a further series of general laws, which all stand in the closest relation to one another and to his monadological and harmonistic principles, viz., the law of continuity, the law of analogy, the law of the universal dissimilarity of things or of the identity of indiscernibles, and, finally, the law of the conservation of force.

The most fundamental of these laws is the lex continui. On the one hand, it forbids every leap, on the other, all repetition in the series of beings and the series of events. Member must follow member without a break and without superfluous duplication; in the scale of creatures, as in the course of events, absolute continuity is the rule. Just as in the monad one state continually develops from another, the present one giving birth to the future, as it has itself grown out of the past, just as nothing persists, as nothing makes its entrance suddenly or without the way being prepared for it, and as all extremes are bound together by connecting links and gradual transitions,-so the monad itself stands in a continuous gradation of beings, each of which is related to and different from each. Since the beings and events form a single uninterrupted series, there are no distinctions of kind in the world, but only distinctions in degree. Rest and motion are not opposites, for rest may be considered as infinitely minute motion; the ellipse and the parabola are not qualitatively different, for the laws which hold for the one may be applied to the other. Likeness is vanishing unlikeness, passivity arrested activity, evil a lesser good, confused ideas simply less distinct ones, animals men with infinitely little reason, plants animals with vanishing consciousness, fluidity a lower degree of solidity, etc. In the whole world similarity and correspondence rule, and it is everywhere the same as here-between apparent opposites there is a distinction in degree merely, and hence, analogy. In the macrocosm of the universe things go on as in the microcosm of the monad; every later state of the world is prefigured in the earlier, etc. If, on the one side, the law of analogy follows as a consequence from the law of continuity, on the other, we have the principium (identitatis) indiscernibilium. As nature abhors gaps, so also it avoids the superfluous. Every grade in the series must be represented, but none more than once. There are no two things, no two events which are entirely alike. If they were exactly alike they would not be two, but one. The distinction between them is never merely numerical, nor merely local and temporal, but always an intrinsic difference: each thing is distinguished from every other by its peculiar nature. This law holds both for the truly real (the monads) and for the phenomenal world-you will never find two leaves exactly alike. By the law of the conservation of force, Leibnitz corrects the Cartesian doctrine of the conservation of motion, and approaches the point of view of the present day. According to Descartes it is the sum of actual motions, which remains constant; according to Leibnitz, the sum of the active forces; while, according to the modern theory, it is the sum of the active and the latent or potential forces-a distinction, moreover, of which Leibnitz himself made use.

We now turn from the formal framework of general laws, to the actual, to that which, obeying these laws, constitutes the living content of the world.

%2. The Organic World.%

A living being is a machine composed of an infinite number of organs. The natural machines formed by God differ from the artificial machines made by the hand of man, in that, down to their smallest parts, they consist of machines. Organisms are complexes of monads, of which one, the soul, is supreme, while the rest, which serve it, form its body. The dominant monad is distinguished from those which surround it as its body by the greater distinctness of its ideas. The supremacy of the soul-monad consists in this one superior quality, that it is more active and more perfect, and clearly reflects that which the body-monads represent but obscurely. A direct interaction between soul and body does not take place; there is only a complete correspondence, instituted by God. He foresaw that the soul at such and such a moment would have the sensation of warmth, or would wish an arm-motion executed, and has so ordered the development of the body-monads that, at the same instant, they appear to cause this sensation and to obey this impulse to move. Now, since God in this foreknowledge and accommodation naturally paid more regard to the perfect beings, to the more active and more distinctly perceiving monads than to the less perfect ones, and subordinated the latter, as means and conditions, to the former as ends, the soul, prior to creation, actually exercised an ideal influence-through the mind of God-upon its body. Its activity is the reason why in less perfect monads a definite change, a passion takes place, since the action was attainable only in this way, "compossible" with this alone.[1] The monads which constitute the body are the first and direct object of the soul; it perceives them more distinctly than it perceives, through them, the rest of the external world. In view of the close connection of the elements of the organism thus postulated, Leibnitz, in the discussions with Father Des Bosses concerning the compatibility of the Monadology with the doctrine of the Church, especially with the real presence of the body of Christ in the Supper, consented, in favor of the dogma, to depart from the assumption that the simple alone could be substantial and to admit the possibility of composite substances, and of a "substantial bond" connecting the parts of living beings. It appears least in contradiction with the other principles of the philosopher to assign the r?le of this vinculum substantiate to the soul or central monad itself.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Gustav Class, Die metaphysischen Voraussetzungen des

Leibnizischen Determinismus, Tübingen, 1874.]

Everything in nature is organized; there are no soulless bodies, no dead matter. The smallest particle of dust is peopled with a multitude of living beings and the tiniest drop of water swarms with organisms: every portion of matter may be compared to a pond filled with fish or a garden full of plants. This denial of the inorganic does not release our philosopher from the duty of explaining its apparent existence. If we thoughtfully consider bodies, we perceive that there is nothing lifeless and non-representative. But the phenomenon of extended mass arises for our confused sensuous perception, which perceives the monads composing a body together and regards them as a continuous unity. Body exists only as a confused idea in the feeling subject; since, nevertheless, a reality without the mind, namely, an immaterial monad-aggregate, corresponds to it, the phenomenon of body is a well-founded one (phenomenon bene fundatum). As matter is merely something present in sensation or confused representation, so space and time are also nothing real, neither substances nor properties, but only ideal things-the former the order of coexistences, the latter the order of successions.

If there are no soulless bodies, there are also no bodiless souls; the soul is always joined with an aggregate of subordinate monads, though not always with the same ones. Single monads are constantly passing into its body, or into its service, while others are passing out; it is involved in a continuous process of bodily transformation. Usually the change goes on slowly and with a constant replacement of the parts thrown off. If it takes place quickly men call it birth or death. Actual death there is as little as there is an actual genesis; not the soul only, but every living thing is imperishable. Death is decrease and involution, birth increase and evolution. The dying creature loses only a portion of its bodily machine and so returns to the slumberous or germinal condition of "involution", in which it existed before birth, and from which it was aroused through conception to development. Pre-existence as well as post-existence must be conceded both to animals and to men. Leuwenhoek's discovery of the spermatozoa furnished a welcome confirmation for this doctrine, that all individuals have existed since the beginning of the world, at least as preformed germs. The immortality of man, conformably to his superior dignity, differs from the continued existence of all monads, in that after his death he retains memory and the consciousness of his moral personality.

%3. Man: Cognition and Volition.%

In reason man possesses reflection or self-consciousness as well as the knowledge of God, of the universal, and of the eternal truths or a priori knowledge, while the animal is limited in its perception to experience, and in its reasoning to the connection of perceptions in accordance with memory. Man differs from higher beings in that the majority of his ideas are confused. Under confused ideas Leibnitz includes both sense-perceptions-anyone who has distinct ideas alone, as God, has no sense-perceptions-and the feelings which mediate between the former and the perfectly distinct ideas of rational thought. The delight of music depends, in his opinion, on an unconscious numbering and measuring of the harmonic and rhythmic relations of tones, aesthetic enjoyment of the beautiful in general, and even sensuous pleasure, on the confused perception of a perfection, order, or harmony.

The application of the lex continui to the inner life has a very wide range. The principal results are: (1) the mind always thinks; (2) every present idea postulates a previous one from which it has arisen; (3) sensation and thought differ only in degree; (4) in the order of time, the ideas of sense precede those of reason. We are never wholly without ideas, only we are often not conscious of them. If thought ceased in deep sleep, we could have no ideas on awakening, since every representation proceeds from a preceding one, even though it be unconscious.

In the thoughtful New Essays concerning the Human Understanding Leibnitz develops his theory of knowledge in the form of a polemical commentary to Locke's chief work.[1] According to Descartes some ideas (the pure concepts) are innate, according to Locke none, according to Leibnitz all. Or: according to Descartes some ideas (sensuous perceptions) come from without, according to Locke all do so, according to Leibnitz none. Leibnitz agrees with Descartes against Locke in the position that the mind originally possesses ideas; he agrees with Locke against Descartes, that thought is later than sensation and the knowledge of universals later than that of particulars. The originality which Leibnitz attributes to intellectual ideas is different from that which Descartes had ascribed and Locke denied to them. They are original in that they do not come into the soul and are not impressed upon it from without; they are not original in that they can develop only from previously given sense-ideas; again, they are original in that they can be developed from confused ideas only because they are contained in them implicite or as pre-dispositions. Thus Leibnitz is able to agree with both his predecessors up to a certain point: with the one, that the pure concepts have their origin within the mind; with the other, that they are not the earliest knowledge, but are conditioned by sensations. This synthesis, however, was possible only because Leibnitz looked on sensation differently from both the others. If sensation is to be the mother of thought, and the latter at the same time to preserve its character as original, i.e., as something not obtained from without, sensation must, first, include an unconscious thinking in itself, and, secondly, must itself receive a title to originality and spontaneity. As the Catholic dogma added the immaculate conception of the mother to that of the Son, so Leibnitz transfers the (virginal) origin of rational concepts, independent of external influence, to sensations. The monad has no windows. It bears germinally in itself all that it is to experience, and nothing is impressed on it from without. The intellect should not be compared to a blank tablet, but to a block of marble in whose veins the outlines of the statue are prefigured. Ideas can only arise from ideas, never from external impressions or movements of corporeal parts. Thus all ideas are innate in the sense that they grow from inner germs; we possess them from the beginning, not developed (explicite), but potentially, that is, we have the capacity to produce them. The old Scholastic principle that "there is nothing in the understanding which was not previously in sense" is entirely correct, only one must add, except the understanding itself, that is, the faculty of developing our knowledge out of ourselves. Thought lies already dormant in perception. With the mechanical position (sensuous representation precedes and conditions rational thought) is joined the teleological position (sensuous representations exist, in order to render the origin of thoughts possible), and with this purposive determination, sensation attains a higher dignity: it is more than has been seen in it before, for it includes in itself the future concept of the understanding in an unconscious form, nay, it is itself an imperfect thought, a thought in process of becoming. Sensation and thought are not different in kind, and if the former is called a passive state, still passivity is nothing other than diminished activity. Both are spontaneous; thought is merely spontaneous in a higher degree.

[Footnote 1: A careful comparison of Locke's theory of knowledge with that of Leibnitz is given by G. Hartenstein, Abhandlungen der k. s?chs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Leipsic, 1865, included in Hartenstein's Historisch-philosophische Abhandlungen, 1870.]

By making sensation and feeling the preliminary step to thought, Leibnitz became the founder of that intellectualism which, in the system of Hegel, extended itself far beyond the psychological into the cosmical field, and endeavored to conceive not only all psychical phenomena but all reality whatsoever as a development of the Idea toward itself. This conception, which may be characterized as intellectualistic in its content, presents itself on its formal side as a quantitative way of looking at the world, which sacrifices all qualitative antitheses in order to arrange the totality of being and becoming in a single series with no distinctions but those of degree. If Leibnitz here appears as the representative of a view of the world which found in Kant a powerful and victorious opponent, yet, on the other hand, he prepared the way by his conception of innate ideas for the Critique of Reason. By his theory of knowledge he forms the transition link between Descartes and Kant, since he interprets necessary truths not as dwelling in the mind complete and explicit from the start, but as produced or raised into consciousness only on the occasion of sensuous experience. It must be admitted, moreover, that this in reality was only a restoration of Descartes's original position, i.e., a deliverance of it from the misinterpretations and perversions which it had suffered at the hands of adherents and opponents alike, but which Descartes, it is true, had failed to render impossible from the start by conclusive explanations. The author of the theory of innate ideas certainly did not mean what Locke foists upon him, that the child in the cradle already possesses the ideas of God, of thought, and of extension in full clearness. But whether Leibnitz improved or only restored Descartes, it was in any case an important advance when experience and thought were brought into more definite relation, and the productive force in rational concepts was secured to the latter and the occasion of their production to the former.

The unconscious or minute ideas, which in no?tics had served to break the force of Locke's objections against the innateness of the principles of reason, are in ethics brought into the field against indeterminism. They are involved whenever we believe ourselves to act without cause, from pure choice, or contrary to the motives present. In this last case, a motive which is very strong in itself is overcome by the united power of many in themselves weaken The will is always determined, and that by an idea (of ends), which generally is of a very complex nature, and in which the stronger side decides the issue. An absolute equilibrium of motives is impossible: the world cannot be divided into two entirely similar parts (this in opposition to "Buridan's ass"). A spirit capable of looking us through and through would be able to calculate all our volitions and actions beforehand.

In spite of this admitted inevitableness of our resolutions and actions, the predicate of freedom really belongs to them, and this on two grounds. First, they are only physically or morally, not metaphysically, necessary; as a matter of fact, it is true, they cannot happen otherwise, but their opposite involves no logical contradiction and remains conceivable. To express this thought the formula, often repeated since, that our motives only impel, incite, or stimulate the will, but do not compel it (inclinant, non necessitant), was chosen, but not very happily. Secondly, the determination of the will is an inner necessitation, grounded in the being's own nature, not an external compulsion. The agent determines himself in accordance with his own nature, and for this each bears the responsibility himself, for God, when he brought the monads out of possibility into actuality, left their natures as they had existed before the creation in the form of eternal ideas in His understanding. Though Leibnitz thus draws a distinction between his deterministic doctrine and the "fatalism" of Spinoza, he recognizes a second concept of freedom, which completely corresponds to Spinoza's. A decision is the more free the more distinct the ideas which determine it, and a man the more free the more he withdraws his will from the influence of the passions, i.e., confused ideas, and subordinates it to that of reason. God alone is absolutely free, because he has no ideas which are not distinct. The bridge between the two conceptions of freedom is established by the principle that reason constitutes the peculiar nature of man in a higher degree than the sum of his ideas; for it is reason which distinguishes him from the lower beings. According to the first meaning of freedom man is free, according to the second, which coincides with activity, perfection, and morality, he should become free.

Morality is the result of the natural development of the individual. Every being strives after perfection or increased activity, i.e., after more distinct ideas. Parallel to this theoretical advance runs a practical advance in a twofold form: the increasing distinctness of ideas, or enlightenment, or wisdom, raises the impulse to transitory, sensuous pleasure into an impulse to permanent delight in our spiritual perfection, or toward happiness, while, further, it opens up an insight into the connection of all beings and the harmony of the world, in virtue of which the virtuous man will seek to promote the perfection and happiness of others as well as his own, i.e., will love them, for to love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others. To promote the good of all, again, is the same as to contribute one's share to the world-harmony and to co-operate in the fulfillment of God's purposes. Probity and piety are the same. They form the highest of the three grades of natural right, which Leibnitz distinguishes as jus strictum (mere right, with the principle: Injure no one), aequitas (equity or charity, with the maxim: To each his due), and probitas sive pietas (honorableness joined with religion, according to the command: Lead an upright and morally pure life). They may also be designated as commutative, distributive, and universal justice. Belief in God and immortality is a condition of the last.

%4. Theology and Theodicy.%

God is the ground and the end of the world. All beings strive toward him, as all came out from him. In man the general striving toward the most perfect Being rises into conscious love to God, which is conditioned by the knowledge of God and produces virtuous action as its effect. Enlightenment and virtue are the essential constituents of religion; all else, as cultus and dogma, have only a derivative value. Religious ceremonies are an imperfect expression of the practical element in piety, as the doctrines of faith are a weak imitation of the theoretical. It is a direct contradiction of the intention of the Divine Teacher when occult formulas and ceremonies, which have no connection with virtue, are made the chief thing. The points in which the creeds agree are more important than those by which they are differentiated. Natural religion has found its most perfect expression in Christianity, although paganism and Judaism had also grasped portions of the truth. Salvation is not denied to the heathen, for moral purity is sufficient to make one a partaker of the grace of God. The religion of the Jews elevated monotheism, which, it is true, made its appearance among the heathen in isolated philosophers, but was never the popular religion, into a law; but it lacked the belief in immortality. Christianity made the religion of the sage the religion of the people.

Whatever of positive doctrine revelation has added to natural religion transcends the reason, it is true, but does not contradict it. It contains no principles contrary to reason (whose opposite can be proved), but, no doubt, principles above reason, i.e., such as the reason could not have found without help from without, and which it cannot fully comprehend, though it is able approximately to understand them and to defend them against objections. Hence Leibnitz defended the Trinity, which he interpreted as God's power, understanding, and will, the eternity of the torments of hell (which brought him the commendation of Lessing), and other dogmas. Miracles also belong among the things the how and why of which we are not in a position to comprehend, but only the that and what. Since the laws of nature are only physically or conditionally necessary, i.e. have been enacted only because of their fitness for the purposes of God, they may be suspended in special cases when a higher end requires it.

While the positive doctrines of faith cannot be proved-as, on the other hand, they cannot be refuted-the principles of natural religion admit of strict demonstration. The usual arguments for the existence of God are useful, but need amendment. The ontological argument of Descartes, that from the concept of a most perfect Being his existence follows, is correct so soon as the idea of God is shown to be possible or free from contradiction. The cosmological proof runs: Contingent beings point to a necessary, self-existent Being, the eternal truths especially presuppose an eternal intelligence in which they exist. If we ask why anything whatever, or why just this world exists, this ultimate ground of things cannot be found within the world. Every contingent thing or event has its cause in another. However far we follow out the series of conditions, we never reach an ultimate, unconditioned cause. Consequently the sufficient reason for the series must be situated without the world, and, as is evident from the harmony of things, can only be an infinitely wise and good Being. Here the teleological proof comes in: From the finality of the world we reason to the existence of a Being, as the author of the world, who works in view of ends and who wills and carries out that which is best,-to the supreme intelligence, goodness, and power of the Creator. A special inferential value accrues to this position from the system of pre-established harmony-it is manifest that the complete correspondence of the manifold substances in the world, which are not connected with one another by any direct interaction, can proceed only from a common cause endowed with infinite intelligence and power.

The possibility of proving the existence of one omnipotent and all-beneficent God, and the impossibility of refuting the positive dogmas, save the harmony of faith and reason, which Bayle had denied. The conclusion of the New Essays and the opening of the Theodicy are devoted to this theme. The second part gives, also against Bayle, the justification of God in view of the evil in the world. Si Deus est, unde malum? Optimism has to reckon with the facts of experience, and to show that this world, in spite of its undeniable imperfections, is still the best world. God could certainly have brought into actuality a world in which there would have been less imperfection than in ours, but it would at the same time have contained fewer perfections. No world whatever can exist entirely free from evil, entirely without limitation-whoever forbids God to create imperfect beings forbids him to create a world at all. Certain evils-in general terms, the evil of finitude-are entirely inseparable from the concept of created beings; imperfection attaches to every created thing as such. Other evils God has permitted because it was only through them that certain higher goods, which ought not to be renounced, could be brought to pass. Think of the lofty feelings, noble resolves, and great deeds which war occasions, think of national enthusiasm, readiness for sacrifice, and defiance of death-all these would be given over, if war should be taken out of the world on account of the suffering which it also brings in its train.

If we turn from the general principles to their application in detail, we find a separate proof for the inevitableness or salutary nature of each of the three kinds of evil-the metaphysical evil of created existence, the physical evil of suffering (and punishment), and the moral evil of sin. Metaphysical evil is absolutely unavoidable, if a world is to exist at all; created beings without imperfection, finiteness, limitation, are entirely inconceivable-something besides gods must exist. The physical evil of misery finds its justification in that it makes for good. First of all, the amount of suffering is not so great as it appears to discontented spirits to be. Life is usually quite tolerable, and vouchsafes more joy and pleasure than grief and hardship; in balancing the good and the evil we must especially remember to reckon on the positive side the goods of activity, of health, and all that which affords us, perchance, no perceptible pleasure, but the removal of which would be felt as an evil (Theodicy, ii. § 251). Most evils serve to secure us a much greater good, or to ward off a still greater evil. Would a brave general, if given the choice of leaving the battle unwounded, but also without the victory, or of winning the victory at the cost of a wound, hesitate an instant to choose the latter? Other troubles, again, must be regarded as punishment for sins and as means of reformation; the man who is resigned to God's will may be certain that the sufferings which come to him will turn out for his good.

Especially if we consider the world as a whole, it is evident that the sum of evil vanishes before the sum of good. It is wrong to look upon the happiness of man as the end of the world. Certainly God had the happiness of rational beings in mind, but not this exclusively, for they form only a part of the world, even if it be the highest part. God's purpose has reference rather to the perfection of the whole system of the universe. Now the harmony of the universe requires that all possible grades of reality be represented, that there should be indistinct ideas, sense, and corporeality, not merely a realm of spirits, and with these, conditions of imperfection, feelings of pain, and theoretical and moral errors are inevitably given. The connection and the order of the world demands a material element in the monad, but happiness without alloy can never be the lot of a spirit joined to a body. Thirdly, in regard to moral evil also we receive the assurance that the sum of the bad is much less than that of the good. Then, moral evil is connected with metaphysical evil: created beings cannot be absolutely perfect, hence, also, not morally perfect or sinless. But, in return for this, there is no being that is absolutely imperfect, none only and entirely evil. With this is joined the well-known principle of the earlier thinkers, that evil is nothing actual, but merely deprivation, absence of good, lack of clear reason and force of will. That which is real in the evil action, the power to act, is perfect and good, and, as force, comes from God-the negative or evil element in it comes from the agent himself; just as in the case of two ships of the same size, but unequally laden, which drift with the current, the speed comes from the stream and the retardation from the load of the vessels themselves. God is not responsible for sin, for he has only permitted it, not willed it directly, and man was already evil before he was created. The fact that God foresaw that man would sin does not constrain the latter to commit the evil deed, but this follows from his own (eternal) being, which God left unaltered when he granted him existence. The guilt and the responsibility fall wholly on the sinner himself. The permission of evil is explained by the predominantly good results which follow from it (not, as in physical evil, for the sufferer himself, but for others)-from the crime of Sextus Tarquinius sprang a great kingdom with great men (of. the beautiful myth in connection with a dialogue of Laurentius Valla, Theodicy, iii. 413-416). Finally, reference is made again to the contribution which evil makes to the perfection of the whole. Evil has the same function in the world as the discords in a piece of music, or the shadows in a painting-the beauty is heightened by the contrast. The good needs a foil in order to come out distinctly and to be felt in all its excellence.

In the Leibnitzian theodicy the least satisfactory part is the justification of moral evil. We miss the view defended in such grand outlines by Hegel, and so ingeniously by Fechner, that the good is not the flower of a quiet, unmolested development, but the fruit of energetic labor; that it has need of its opposite; that it not merely must approve itself in the battle against evil without and within the acting subject, but that it is only through this conflict that it is attainable at all. Virtue implies force of will as well as purity, and force develops only by resistance. Although he does not appreciate the full depth of the significance of pain, Leibnitz's view of suffering deserves more approval than his questionable application to the ethical sphere of the quantitative view of the world, with its interpretation of evil as merely undeveloped good. But, in any case, the compassionate contempt of the pessimism of the day for the "shallow" Leibnitz is most unjustifiable.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GERMAN ILLUMINATION.

%1. The Contemporaries of Leibnitz.%

The period between Kepler and Leibnitz in Germany was very poor in noteworthy philosophical phenomena. The physicist, Christoph Sturm[1] of Altdorf (died 1703), was a follower of Descartes, Joachim Jungius[2] (died 1657) a follower of Bacon, though not denying with the latter the value of the mathematical method in natural science. Hieronymus Hirnhaym, Abbot at Prague (The Plague of the Human Race, or the Vanity of Human Learning, 1676), declared the thirst for knowledge of his age a dangerous disease, knowledge uncertain, since no reliance can be placed on sense-perception and the principles of thought contradict the doctrines of faith, and harmful, since it contributes nothing to salvation, but makes its possessors proud and draws them away from piety. He maintained, further, that divine authority is the only refuge for man, and moral life the true science. Side by side with such skepticism Hirnhaym's contemporary, the poet Angelus Silesius (Joh. Scheffler, died 1667), defended mysticism. The teacher of natural law, Samuel Pufendorf[3] (1632-94, professor in Heidelberg and Lund, died in Berlin), aimed to mediate between Grotius and Hobbes. Natural law is demonstrable, its real ground is the will of God, its no?tical ground (not revelation, but) reason and observation of the (social) nature of man, and the fundamental law the promotion of universal good. The individual must not violate the interests of society in satisfying his impulse to self-preservation, because his own interests require social existence, and, consequently, respect for its conditions.

[Footnote 1: Chr. Sturm: Physica Conciliatrix, 1687; Physica Electiva, vol. i. 1697, vol. ii. with preface by Chr. Wolff, 1722; Compendium Universalium seu Metaphysica Euclidea.]

[Footnote 2: J. Jung Logica Hamburgiensis, 1638; cf. Guhrauer, 1859.]

[Footnote 3: Pufendorf: Elementa Juris Universalis, 1660; De Statu Imperii Germanici, 1667, under the pseudonym Monzambano; De Jure Natures et Gentium 1672, and an abstract of this, De Officio Hominis et Civis, 1673.]

Pufendorf was followed by Christian Thomasius[1] (1655-1728; professor of law at the University of Halle from its foundation in 1694). He was the first instructor who ventured to deliver lectures in the German language-in Leipsic from 1687-and at the same time was the editor of the first learned journal in German (Teutsche Monate, Geschichte der Weisheit und Thorheit). In Thomasius the characteristic features of the German Illumination first came out in full distinctness, namely, the avoidance of scholasticism in expression and argument, the direct relation of knowledge to life, sober rationality in thinking, heedless eclecticism, and the demand for religious tolerance. Philosophy must be generally intelligible, and practically useful, knowledge of the world (not of God); its form, free and tasteful ratiocination; its object, man and morals; its first duty, culture, not learning; its highest aim, happiness; its organ and the criterion of every truth, common sense. He alone gains true knowledge who frees his understanding from prejudice and judges only after examining for himself; the joy of mental peace is given to no one who does not free his heart from foolish desires and vehement passions, and devote it to virtue, to "rational love." The positive doctrines of Thomasius have less interest than this general standpoint, which prefigured the succeeding period. He divides practical philosophy into natural law which treats of the justum, politics which treats of the decorum, and ethics which treats of the honestum. Justice bids us, Do not to others what you would not that others should do to you; decorum, Do to others as you would that they should do to you; and morality, Do to yourself as you would that others should do to themselves. The first two laws relate to external, the third to internal, peace; legal duties may be enforced by compulsion, moral duties not.

[Footnote 1: Thomasius: Institutionum Jurisprudentiae Divinae Libri Tres, 1688; Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium, 1705, both in Latin; in German, appeared in 1691-96 the Introduction and Application of Rational and Moral Philosophy.]

If Thomasius was the leader of those popular philosophers who, unconcerned about systematic continuity, discussed every question separately before the tribunal of common sense, and found in their lack of allegiance to any philosophical sect a sufficient guarantee of the unprejudicedness and impartiality of their reflections, Count Walter von Tschirnhausen (1651-1708; Medecina Mentis sive Artis Inveniendi Praecepta Generalia, 1687), a friend of Spinoza and Leibnitz, became the prototype of another group of the philosophers of the Illumination. This group favored eclecticism of a more scientific kind, by starting from considerations of method and seeking to overcome the antithesis between rationalism and empiricism. While fully persuaded of the validity and necessity of the mathematical method in philosophical investigations, as well as elsewhere, Tschirnhausen still holds it indispensable that the deductions, on the one hand, start from empirical facts, and, on the other, that they be confirmed by experiments. Inner experience gives us four primal facts, of which the chief is the certainty of self-consciousness. The second, that many things affect us agreeably and many disagreeably, is the basis of morals; the third, that some things are comprehensible to us and others not, the basis of logic; the fourth, that through the senses we passively receive impressions from without, the basis of the empirical sciences, in particular, of physics. Consequently consciousness, will, understanding, and sensuous representation (imaginatio), together with corporeality, are our fundamental concepts. Not perception (perceptio), but conception (conceptio) alone gives science; that which we can "conceive" is true; the understanding as such cannot err, but undoubtedly the imagination can lead us to confuse the merely perceived with that which is conceived. The method of science is geometrical demonstration, which starts from (genetic) definitions, and from their analysis obtains axioms, from their combination, theorems. That which is thus proved a priori must, as already remarked, be confirmed a posteriori. The highest of all sciences is natural philosophy, since it considers not sense-objects only, not (like mathematics) the objects of reason only, but the actual itself in its true character. Hence it is the divine science, while the human sciences busy themselves only with our ideas or the relations of things to us.

%2. Christian Wolff.%

Christian Wolff was born at Breslau in 1679, studied theology at Jena, and in addition mathematics and philosophy, habilitated at Leipsic in 1703, and obtained, through the instrumentality of Leibnitz, a professorship of mathematics at Halle, in 1706. His lectures, which soon extended themselves over all philosophical disciplines, met with great success. This popularity, as well as the rationalistic tendency of his thinking, aroused the disfavor of the pietists, Francke and Lange, who succeeded, in 1723, in securing from King Frederick William I. his removal from his chair and his expulsion from the kingdom. Finding a refuge in Marburg, he was called back to Halle by Frederick the Great a short time after the latter's ascension of the throne. Here he taught and wrote zealously until his death in 1754. In his lectures, as well as in half of his writings,[1] he followed the example of Thomasius in using the German language, which he prepared in a most praiseworthy manner for the expression of philosophical ideas and furnished with a large part of the technical terms current to-day. Thus the terms Verh?ltniss (relation), Vorstellung (representation, idea), Bewusstsein (consciousness), stetig (continuus), come from Wolff, as well as the distinction between Kraft (power) and Verm?gen (faculty), and between Grund (ground) and Ursache (cause),[2] Another great service consisted in the reduction of the philosophy of Leibnitz to a systematic form, by which he secured a dissemination for it which otherwise it would scarcely have obtained. But he did not possess sufficient originality to contribute anything remarkable of his own, and it showed little self-knowledge when he became indignant at the designation Leibnitzio-Wolffian philosophy, which was first used by his pupil, Bilfinger. The alterations which he made in the doctrines of Leibnitz are far from being improvements, and the parts which he rejected are just the most characteristic and thoughtful of all. Such at least is the opinion of thinkers to-day, though this mutilation and leveling down of the most daring of Leibnitz's hypotheses was perhaps entirely advantageous for Wolff's impression on his contemporaries; what appeared questionable to him would no doubt have repelled them also. Leibnitz's two leading ideas, the theory of monads and the pre-established harmony, were most of all affected by this process of toning down. Wolff weakens the former by attributing a representative power only to actual souls, which are capable of consciousness, although he holds that bodies are compounded of simple beings and that the latter are endowed with (a not further defined) force. He limits the application of the pre-established harmony to the relation of body and soul, which to Leibnitz was only a case especially favorable for the illustration of the hypothesis. By such trifling the real meaning of both these ideas is sacrificed and their bloom rubbed off.-While depth is lacking in Wolff's thinking, he is remarkable for his power of systematization, his persevering diligence, and his logical earnestness, so that the praise bestowed on him by Kant, that he was the author of the spirit of thoroughness in Germany, was well deserved. He, too, finds the end of philosophy in the enlightenment of the understanding, the improvement of the heart, and, ultimately, in the promotion of the happiness of mankind. But while Thomasius demanded as a condition of such universal intelligibility and usefulness that, discarding the scholastic garb, philosophy should appear in the form of easy ratiocination, Wolff, on the other hand, regards methodical procedure and certainty in results as indispensable to its usefulness, and, in order to this certainty, insists on distinctness of conception and cogency of proof. He demands a philosophia et certa et utilis. If, finally, his methodical deliberateness, especially in his later works, leads him into wearisome diffuseness, this pedantry is made good by his genuinely German, honest spirit, which manifests itself agreeably in his judgment on practical questions.

[Footnote 1: Reasonable Thoughts on the Powers of the Human Understanding, 1712; Reasonable Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man, also on All Things in General, 1719 (Notes to this 1724); Reasonable Thoughts on the Conduct of Man, 1720; Reasonable Thoughts on the Social Life of Man, 1721; Reasonable Thoughts on the Operations of Nature, 1723; Reasonable Thoughts on the Purposes of Natural Things, 1724; Reasonable Thoughts on the Parts of Man, Animals, and Plants, 1725, all in German. Besides these there are extensive Latin treatises (1728-53) on Logic, Ontology, Cosmology, Empirical and Rational Psychology, Natural Theology, and all branches of Practical Philosophy. Detailed extracts may be found in Erdmann's Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung, ii. 2. The best account of the Wolffian philosophy has been given by Zeller (pp. 211-273).]

[Footnote 2: Eucken, Geschichte der Terminologie^ pp. 133-134.]

Wolff reaches his division of the sciences by combining the two psychological antitheses-the higher (rational) and lower (sensuous) faculties of cognition and appetition. On the first is based the distinction between the rational and the empirical or historical method of treatment. The latter concerns itself with the actual, the former with the possible and necessary, or the grounds of the actual; the one observes and describes, the other deduces. The antithesis of cognition and appetition gives the basis for the division into theoretical and practical philosophy. The former, called metaphysics, is divided into a general part, which treats of being in general whether it be of a corporeal or a spiritual nature, and three special parts, according to their principal subjects, the world, the soul, and God,-hence into ontology, cosmology, psychology, and theology. The science which establishes rules for action and regards man as an individual being, as a citizen, and as the head or member of a family, is divided (after Aristotle) into ethics, politics, and economics, which are preceded by practical philosophy in general, and by natural law. The introduction to the two principal parts is furnished by formal logic.

Philosophy is the science of the possible, i.e., of that which contains no contradiction; it is science from concepts, its principle, the law of identity, its form, demonstration, and its instrument, analysis, which in the predicate explicates the determinations contained in the concept of the subject. In order to confirm that which has been deduced from pure concepts by the facts of experience, psychologia rationalis is supplemented by psychologia empirica, rational cosmology by empirical physics, and speculative theology by an experimental doctrine of God (teleology). Wolff gives no explanation how it comes about that the deliverances of the reason agree so beautifully with the facts of experience; in his na?ve, unquestioning belief in the infallibility of the reason he is a typical dogmatist.

A closer examination of the Wolffian philosophy seems unnecessary, since its most essential portions have already been discussed under Leibnitz and since it will be necessary to recur to certain points in our chapter on Kant. Therefore, referring the reader to the detailed accounts in Erdmann and Zeller, we shall only note that Wolff's ethics opposes the principle of perfection to the English principle of happiness (that is good which perfects man's condition, and this is life in conformity with nature or reason, with which happiness is necessarily connected); that he makes the will determined by the understanding, and assigns ignorance as the cause of sin; that his philosophy of religion, which argues for a natural religion in addition to revealed religion (experiential and rational proofs for the existence of God, and a deduction of his attributes), and sets up certain tests for the genuineness of revelation, favors a rationalism which was flexible enough to allow his pupils either to take part in orthodox movements or to advance to a deism hostile to the Church.

Among the followers of Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) deserves the first place, as the founder of German aesthetics (Aesthetica, 1750 seq.). He perceives a gap in the system of the philosophical sciences. This contains in ethics a guide to right volition, and in logic a guide to correct thinking, but there are no directions for correct feeling, no aesthetic. The beautiful would form the subject of this discipline. For the perfection (the harmonious unity of a manifold, which is pleasant to the spectator), which manifests itself to the will as the good and to the clear thinking of the understanding as the true, appears-according to Leibnitz-to confused sensuous perception as beauty. From this on the name aesthetics was established for the theory of the beautiful, though in Kant's great work it is used in its literal meaning as the doctrine of sense, of the faculty of sensations or intuitions. Baumgarten's pupils and followers, the aesthetic writer G.F. Meier at Halle, Baumeister, and others, contributed like himself to the dissemination of the Wolffian system by their manuals on different branches of philosophy. To this school belong also the following: Thümmig (Institutiones Philosophia Wolfianae, 1725-26); the theologian Siegmund Baumgarten at Halle, the elder brother of the aesthete; the mathematician Martin Knutzen, Kant's teacher;[1] the literary historian Gottsched [2] at Leipsic; and G. Ploucquet, who in his Methodus Calculandi in Logicis, with a Commentatio de Arte Characteristica Universali appended to his Principia de Substantiis et Phaenomenis, 1753, took up again Leibnitz's cherished plan for a logical calculus and a universal symbolic language. The psychologist Kasimir von Creuz (Essay on the Soul, in two parts, 1753-54), and J.H. Lambert,[3] whom Kant deemed worthy of a detailed correspondence, take up a more independent position, both demanding that the Wolffian rationalism be supplemented by the empiricism of Locke, and the latter, moreover, in anticipation of the Critique of Reason, pointing very definitely to the distinction between content and form as the salient point in the theory of knowledge.

[Footnote 1: Benno Erdmann, M. Knutzen und seine Zeit, 1876.]

[Footnote 2: Th. W. Danzel, Gottsched und seine Zeit, 1848.]

[Footnote 3: Lambert: Cosmological Letters, 1761; New Organon, 1764; Groundwork of Architectonics, 1771. Bernoulli edited some of Lambert's papers and his correspondence.]

Among the opponents of the Wolffian philosophy, all of whom favor eclecticism, A. Rüdiger[1] and Chr. Aug. Crusius,[2] who was influenced by Rüdiger, and, like him, a professor at Leipsic, are the most important. Rüdiger divides philosophy according to its objects, "wisdom, justice, prudence," into three parts-the science of nature (which must avoid one-sided mechanical views, and employ ether, air, and spirit as principles of explanation); the science of duty (which, as metaphysics, treats of duties toward God, as natural law, of duties to our neighbor, and deduces both from the primary duty of obedience to the will of God); and the science of the good (in which Rüdiger follows the treatise of the Spaniard, Gracian, on practical wisdom). Crusius agrees with Rüdiger that mathematics is the science of the possible, and philosophy the science of the actual, and that the latter, instead of imitating to its own disadvantage the deductive-analytical method of geometry, must, with the aid of experience and with attention to the probability of its conclusions, rise to the highest principles synthetically. Besides its deduction the determinism of the Wolffian philosophy gave offense, for it was believed to endanger morals, justice, and religion. The will, the special fundamental power of the soul (consisting of the impulses to perfection, love, and knowledge), is far from being determined by ideas; it is rather they which depend on the will. The application of the principle of sufficient reason, which is wrongly held to admit of no exception, must be restricted in favor of freedom. For the rest, we may note concerning Crusius that he derives the principle of sufficient reason (everything which is now, and before was not, has a cause) and the principle of contingency from the principles of contradiction, inseparability, and incompatibility, and these latter from the principle of conceivability; that he rejects the ontological argument, and makes the ground of obligation in morality consist in obedience toward God, and its content in perfection. Among the other opponents of the Wolffian philosophy, we may mention the theologian Budde(us)[3] (Institutiones Philosophiae Eclecticae, 1705); Darjes (who taught in Jena and Frankfort-on-the-Oder; The Way to Truth, 1755); and Crousaz (1744).

[Footnote 1: Rüdiger: Disputatio de eo quod Omnes Idea Oriantur a Sensione, 1704; Philosophia Synthetica, 1707; Physica Divina, 1716; Philosophia Pragmatica, 1723.]

[Footnote 2: Crusius: De Usu et Limitibus Principii Rationis, 1743; Directions how to Live a Rational Life (theory of the will and of ethics), 1744; A Sketch of the Necessary Truths of Reason, 1745; Way to the Certainty and Trustworthiness of Human Knowledge, 1747.]

[Footnote 3: J.J. Brucker (Historia Critica Philosophiae, 5 vols., 1742-44; 2d ed., 6 vols., 1766-67) was a pupil of Budde.]

%3. The Illumination as Scientific and as Popular Philosophy.%

After a demand for the union of Leibnitz and Locke, of rationalism and empiricism, had been raised within the Wolffian school itself, and still more directly in the camp of its opponents, under the increasing influence of the empirical philosophy of England,[1] eclecticism in the spirit of Thomasius took full possession of the stage in the Illumination period. There was the less hesitation in combining principles derived from entirely different postulates without regard to their systematic connection, as the interest in scholastic investigation gave place more and more to the interest in practical and reassuring results. Metaphysics, no?tics, and natural philosophy were laid aside as useless subtleties, and, as in the period succeeding Aristotle, man as an individual and whatever directly relates to his welfare-the constitution of his inner nature, his duties, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God-became the exclusive subjects of reflection. The fact that, besides ethics and religion, psychology was chosen as a favorite field, is in complete harmony with the general temper of an age for which self-observation and the enjoyment of tender and elevated feelings in long, delightfully friendly letters and sentimental diaries had become a favorite habit. Hand in hand with this narrowing of the content of philosophy went a change in the form of presentation. As thinkers now addressed themselves to all cultivated people, intelligibility and agreeableness were made the prime requisites; the style became light and flowing, the method of treatment facile and often superficial. This is true not only of the popular philosophers proper-who, as Windelband pertinently remarks (vol. i. p. 563), did not seek after the truth, but believed that they already possessed it, and desired only to disseminate it; who did not aim at the promotion of investigation, but the instruction of the public-but to a certain extent, also, of those who were conscious of laboring in the service of science. Among the representatives of the more polite tendency belong, Moses Mendelssohn[2] (1729-86); Thomas Abbt (On Death for the Fatherland, 1761; On Merit, 1765); J.J. Engel (The philosopher for the World, 1775); G.S. Steinbart (The Christian Doctrine of Happiness, 1778); Ernst Platner (Philosophical Aphorisms, 1776, 1782; on Platner cf. M. Heinze, 1880); G.C. Lichtenberg (died 1799; Miscellaneous Writings, 1800 seq.; a selection is given in Reclam's Bibliothek); Christian Garve (died 1798; Essays, 1792 seq.; Translations from the Ethical Works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Ferguson); and Friedrich Nicolai[3] (died 1811). Eberhard, Feder, and Meiners will be mentioned later among the opponents of the Kantian philosophy.

[Footnote 1: The influence of the English philosophers on the German philosophy of the eighteenth century is discussed by Gustav Zart, 1881.]

[Footnote 2: Mendelssohn: Letters on the Sensations, 1755; On Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences, a prize essay crowned by the Academy, 1764; Phaedo, or on Immortality, 1767; Jerusalem, 1783; Morning Hours, or on the Existence of God, 1785; To the Friends of Lessing (against Jacobi), 1786; Works, 1843-44. Cf. on Mendelssohn, Kayserling, 1856, 1862, 1883.]

[Footnote 3: Nicolai: Library of Belles Lettres, from 1757; Letters on the Most Recent German Literature, from 1759; Universal German Library, from 1765; New Universal German Library, 1793-1805.]

Among the psychologists J.N. Tetens, whose Philosophical Essays on Human Nature, 1776-77, show a remarkable similarity to the views of Kant,[1] takes the first rank. The two thinkers evidently influenced each other. The three fold division of the activities of the soul, "knowing, feeling, and willing," which has now become popular and which appears to us self-evident, is to be referred to Tetens, from whom Kant took it; in opposition to the twofold division of Aristotle and Wolff into "cognition and appetition," he established the equal rights of the faculty of feeling-which had previously been defended by Sulzer (1751), the aesthetic writer, and by Mendelssohn (1755, 1763, 1785). Besides Tetens, the following should be mentioned among the psychologists: Tetens's opponent, Johann Lossius (1775), an adherent of Bonnet; D. Tiedemann (Inquiries concerning Man, from 1777), who was estimable also as a historian of philosophy (Spirit of Speculative Philosophy, 1791-97); Von Irwing (1772 seq.; 2d ed., 1777); and K. Ph. Moriz (Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenlehre, from 1785). Basedow (died 1790), Campe (died 1818), and J.H. Pestalozzi (1745-1827) did valuable work in pedagogics.

[Footnote 1: Sensation gives the content, and the understanding spontaneously produces the form, of knowledge. The only objectivity of knowledge which we can attain consists in the subjective necessity of the forms of thought or the ideas of relation. Perception enables us to cognize phenomena only, not the true essence of things and of ourselves, etc.]

One of the clearest and most acute minds among the philosophers of the Illumination was the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus[1] (1694-1768), from 1728 professor in Hamburg. He attacks atheism, in whatever form it may present itself, with as much zeal and conviction as he shows in breaking down the belief in revelation by his inexorable criticism (in his Defense, communicated in manuscript to a few friends only). He obtains his weapons for this double battle from the Wolffian philosophy. The existence of an extramundane deity is proved by the purposive arrangement of the world, especially of organisms, which aims at the good-not merely of man, as the majority of the physico-theologists have believed, but-of all living creatures. To believe in a special revelation, i.e., a miracle, in addition to such a revelation of God as this, which is granted to all men, and is alone necessary to salvation, is to deny the perfection of God, and to do violence to the immutability of his providence. To these general considerations against the credibility of positive revelation are to be added, as special arguments against the Jewish and Christian revelations, the untrustworthiness of human testimony in general, the contradictions in the biblical writings, the uncertainty of their meaning, and the moral character of the persons regarded as messengers of God, whose teachings, precepts, and deeds in no wise correspond to their high mission. Jewish history is a "tissue of sheer follies, shameful deeds, deceptions, and cruelties, the chief motives of which were self-interest and lust for power." The New Testament is also the work of man; all talk of divine inspiration, an idle delusion, the resurrection of Christ, a fabrication of the disciples; and the Protestant system, with its dogmas of the Trinity, the fall of man, original sin, the incarnation, vicarious atonement, and eternal punishment, contrary to reason. The advance of Reimarus beyond Wolff consists in the consistent application of the criteria for the divine character of revelation, which Wolff had set up without making a positive, not to speak of a negative, use of them. His weakness[2] consists in the fact that, on the one hand, he contented himself with a rationalistic interpretation of the biblical narratives, instead of pushing on-as Semler did after him at Halle (1725-91)-to a historical criticism of the sources, and, on the other, held fast to the alternative common to all the deists, "Either divine or human, either an actual event or a fabrication," without any suspicion of that great intermediate region of religious myth, of the involuntary and pregnant inventions of the popular fancy.

[Footnote 1: H.S. Reimarus: Discussions on the Chief Truths of Natural Religion, 1754; General Consideration of the Instincts of Animals, 1762; Apology or Defense for the Rational Worshipers of God. Fragments of the last of these works, which was kept secret during its author's life, were published by Lessing (the well-known "Wolffenbüttel Fragments," from 1774). A detailed table of contents is to be found in Reimarus und seine Schutzschrift, 1862, by D. Fr. Strauss, included in the fifth volume of his Gesammelte Schriften.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. O. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, vol. i. p. 102, p. 106 seq.]

The philosophico-religious standpoint of G.E. Lessing (1729-81), in whom the Illumination reached its best fruitage, was less one-sided. Apart from the important aesthetic impulses which flowed from the Laocoon (1766) and the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-69), his philosophical significance rests on two ideas, which have had important consequences for the religious conceptions of the nineteenth century: the speculative interpretation of certain dogmas (the Trinity, etc.), and the application of the Leibnitzian idea of development to the history of the positive religions. By both of these he prepared the way for Hegel. In regard to his relation to his predecessors, Lessing sought to mediate between the pantheism of Spinoza and the individualism of Leibnitz; and in his comprehension of the latter showed himself far superior to the Wolffians. He can be called a Spinozist only by those who, like Jacobi, have this title ready for everyone who expresses himself against a transcendent, personal God, and the unconditional freedom of the will. Moreover, in view of his critical and dialectical, rather than systematic, method of thinking, we must guard against laying too great stress on isolated statements by him.[1]

[Footnote 1: A caution which Gideon Spicker (Lessings Weltanschauung, 1883) counsels us not to forget, even in view of the oft cited avowal of determinism, "I thank God that I must, and that I must the best." Among the numerous treatises on Lessing we may note those by G.E. Schwarz (1854), and Zeller (in Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, 1870, incorporated in the second collection of Zeller's Vortr?ge und Abhandlungen, 1877); and on his theological position, that of K. Fischer on Lessing's Nathan der Weise, 1864, as well as J.H. Witte's Philosophie unserer Dichterheroen, vol. i. (Lessing and Herder), 1880. [Cf. in English, Sime, 2 vols., 1877, and Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. xiv. pp, 478-482.-TR.]]

Lessing conceives the Deity as the supreme, all-comprehensive, living unity, which excludes neither a certain kind of plurality nor even a certain kind of change; without life and action, without the experience of changing states, the life of God would be miserably wearisome. Things are not out of, but in him; nevertheless (as "contingent") they are distinct from him. The Trinity must be understood in the sense of immanent distinctions. God has conceived himself, or his perfections, in a twofold manner: he conceived them as united and himself as their sum, and he conceived them as single. Now God's thinking is creation, his ideas actualities. By conceiving his perfections united he created his eternal image, the Son of God; the bond between God representing and God represented, between Father and Son, is the Holy Spirit. But when he conceived his perfections singly he created the world, in which these manifest themselves divided among a continuous series of particular beings. Every individual is an isolated divine perfection; the things in the world are limited gods, all living, all with souls, and of a spiritual nature, though in different degrees. Development is everywhere; at present the soul has five senses, but very probably it once had less than five, and in the future it will have more. At first the actions of men were guided by obscure instinct; gradually the reason obtained influence over the will, and one day will govern it completely through its clear and distinct cognitions. Thus freedom is attained in the course of history-the rational and virtuous man consciously obeys the divine order of the world, while he who is unfree obeys unconsciously.

Lessing shares with the deistic Illumination the belief in a religion of reason, whose basis and essential content are formed by morality; but he rises far above this level in that he regards the religion of reason not as the beginning but as the goal of the development, and the positive religions as necessary transition stages in its attainment. As natural religion differs in each individual according to his feelings and powers, without positive enactments there would be no unity and community in religious matters. Nevertheless the statutory and historical element is not a graft from without, but a shell organically grown around natural religion, indispensable for its development, and to be removed but gradually and by layers-when the inclosed kernel has become ripe and firm. The history of religions is an education of the human race through divine revelation; so teaches his small but thoughtful treatise of 1780.[1] As the education of the individual man puts nothing extraneous into him, but only gives him more quickly and easily that which he could have reached of himself, so human reason is illuminated by revelation concerning things to which it could have itself attained, only that without God's help the process would have been longer and more difficult-perhaps it would have wandered about for many millions of years in the errors of polytheism, if God had not been pleased by a single stroke (his revelation to Moses) to give it a better direction. And as the teacher does not impart everything to the pupil at once, but considers the state of development reached by him at each given period, so God in his revelation observes a certain order and measure. To the rude Jewish people he revealed himself first as a national God, as the God of their fathers; they had to wait for the Persians to teach them that the God whom they had hitherto worshiped as the most powerful among other gods was the only one. Although this lowest stage in the development of religion lacked the belief in immortality, yet it must not be lightly valued; let us acknowledge that it was an heroic obedience for men to observe the laws of God simply because they are the laws of God, and not because of temporal or future rewards! The first practical teacher of immortality was Christ; with him the second age of religion begins: the first good book of elementary instruction, the Old Testament, from which man had hitherto learned, was followed by the second, better one, the New Testament. As we now can dispense with the first primer in regard to the doctrine of the unity of God, and as we gradually begin to be able to dispense with the second in regard to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, so this New Testament may easily contain still further truths, which for the present we wonder at as revelations, until the reason shall learn to derive them from other truths already established. Lessing himself makes an attempt at a philosophical interpretation of the dogmas of the Trinity (see above), of original sin, and of atonement. Such an advance from faith to knowledge, such a development of revealed truths into proved truths of reason, is absolutely necessary. We cannot dispense with the truths of revelation, but we must not remain content with simply believing them, but must endeavor to comprehend them; for they have been revealed in order that they may become rational. They are, as it were, the sum which the teacher of arithmetic tells his pupils beforehand so that they may guide themselves by it; but if they content themselves with this solution-which was given merely as a guide-they would never learn to calculate. Hand in hand with the advance of the understanding goes the progress of the will. Future recompenses, which the New Testament promises as rewards of virtue, are means of education, and will gradually fall into disuse: in the highest stage, the stage of purity of heart, virtue will be loved and practiced for its own sake, and no longer for the sake of heavenly rewards. Slowly but surely, along devious paths which are yet salutary, we are being led toward that great goal. It will surely come, the time of consummation, when man will do the good because it is good, this time of the new, eternal Gospel, this third age, this "Christianity of reason." Continue, Eternal Providence, thine imperceptible march; let me not despair of thee because it is imperceptible, not even when to me thy steps seem to lead backward. It is not true that the straight line is always the shortest.

[Footnote 1: Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlects.]

With the thought that every individual must traverse the same course as that by which the race attains its perfection, Lessing connects the idea of the transmigration of souls. Why may not the individual man have been present in this world more than once? Is this hypothesis so ridiculous because it is the oldest?

If Lessing abandoned the ranks of the deists by his recognition of the fact that the positive religions contain truth in a gradual process of purification, by his free criticism, on the other hand, he broke with the orthodox, whose idolatrous reverence for the Bible was to him an abomination. The letter is not the spirit, the Bible is not religion, nor yet its foundation, but only its records. Contingent historical truths can never serve as a proof of the necessary truths of reason. Christianity is older than the New Testament.

Already, in the case of Lessing, we may doubt, in view of his historical temper and of certain speculative tendencies, whether he is to be included among the Illuminati. In the case of Kant a decided protest must be raised against such a classification. When Hegel numbers him among the philosophers of the Illumination, on account of his lack of rational intuition, and some theologians on account of his religious rationalism, the answer to the former is that Kant did not lack the speculative gift, but only that it was surpassed by his gift of reflection, and, to the latter, that in regard to the positive element in religion he judged very differently from the deists and appreciated the historical element more justly than they-if not to the same extent as Lessing and Herder. We do not need to lay great stress on the fact that Kant had a lively consciousness that he was making a contribution to thought, and that the Illumination contemplated this new doctrine without comprehending it, in order to recognize that the difference between his efforts and achievements and those of the Illumination is far greater than their kinship. For although Kant is upon common ground with it, in so far as he adheres to its motto, "Have courage to use thine own understanding, become a man, cease to trust thyself to the guidance of others, and free thyself in all fields from the yoke of authority," and, although besides such formal injunctions to freedom of thought, he also shares in certain material tendencies and convictions (the turning from the world to man, the attempt at a synthesis of reason and experience, and the belief in a religion of reason); yet in method and results, he stands like a giant among a race of dwarfs, like one instructed, who judges from principles, among men of opinion, who merely stick results together, a methodical systematizer among well-meaning but impotent eclectics. The philosophy of the Illumination is related to that of Kant as argument to science, as halting mediation to principiant resolution, as patchwork to creation out of full resources, yet at the same time as wish to deed and as negative preparation to positive achievement. It was undeniably of great value to the Kantian criticism that the Illumination had created a point of intersection for the various tendencies of thought, and had brought about the approximation and mutual contact of the opposing systems which then existed, while, at the same time, it had crumbled them to pieces, and thus awakened the need for a new, more firmly and more deeply founded system.

%4. The Faith Philosophy.%

The philosophers of feeling or faith stand in the same relation to the German Illumination as Rousseau to the French. Here also the rights of feeling are vindicated against those of the knowing reason. Among the distinguished representatives of this anti-rationalistic tendency Hamann led the way, Herder was the most prolific, and Jacobi the clearest. That the fountain of certitude is to be sought not in discriminating thought, but in intuition, experience, revelation, and tradition; that the highest truths can be felt only and not proved; that all existing things are incomprehensible, because individual-these are convictions which, before Jacobi defended them as based on scientific principles, had been vehemently proclaimed by that singular man, J.G. Hamann (died 1788) of K?nigsberg. From an unprinted review by Hamann, Herder drew the objections which his "Metacritique" raises against Kant's Critique of Reason-that the division of matter and form, of sensibility and understanding, is inadmissible; that Kant misunderstood the significance of language, which is just where sensibility and understanding unite, etc.

In Herder[1] (1744-1803: after 1776 Superintendent-General in Weimar) the philosophy of feeling gained a finer, more perspicuous and harmonious nature, who shared Lessing's interest in history and his tendency to hold fast equally to pantheism and to individualism. God is the all-one, infinite, spiritual (non-personal) primal force, which wholly reveals itself in each thing (God: Dialogues on the System of Spinoza, 1787). To the life, power, wisdom, and goodness of God correspond the life and perfection of the universe and of individual creatures, each of which possesses its own irreplaceable value and bears in itself its future in germ. Everywhere, one and the same life in an ascending series of powers and forms with imperceptible transitions. Always, an inner and an outer together; no power without organ, no spirit without a body. As thought is only a higher stage of sensation, which develops from the lower by means of language-reason, like sense, is not a productive but a receptive faculty of knowing, perceiving ("Vernehmen")-so the free process of history is only the continuation and completion of the nature-process (Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 1784 seq.). Man, the last child of nature and her first freedman, is the nodal point where the physical series of events changes into the ethical; the last member of the organisms of earth is at the same time the first in the spiritual development. The mission of history is the unfolding of all the powers which nature has concentrated in man as the compendium of the world; its law, that everywhere on our earth everything be realized that can be realized there; its end, humanity and the harmonious development of all our capacities. As nature forms a single great organism, and from the stone to man describes a connected development, so humanity is a one great individual which passes through its several ages, from infancy (the Orient), through boyhood (Eygpt and Phoenicia), youth (Greece), and manhood (Rome), to old age (the Christian world). The spirit stands in the closest dependence upon nature, and nature is concerned in history throughout. The finer organization of his brain, the possession of hands, above all, his erect position, make man, man and endow him with reason. Similarly it is natural conditions, climate, the character of the soil, the surrounding animal and vegetable life, etc., that play an essential part in determining the manners, the characters, and the destinies of nations. The connection of nature with history by means of the concept of development and through the idea that the two merely represent different stages of the same fundamental process, made Herder the forerunner of Schelling.

[Footnote 1: On Herder cf. the biography by R. Haym, 2 vols., 1877, 1885; and the work by Witte which has been referred to above (p. 306, note).]

His polemic against Kant in the Metacritique, 1799 (against the Critique of Pure Reason), and the dialogue Calligone, 1800 (against the Critique of Judgment), is less pleasing. These are neither dignified in tone nor essentially of much importance. In the former the distinction between sensibility and reason is censured, and in the latter the separation of the beautiful from the true and the good, but Kant's theory of aesthetics is for the most part grossly misunderstood. The "disinterested" satisfaction Herder makes a cold satisfaction; the harmonious activity of the cognitive powers, a tedious, apish sport; the satisfaction "without a concept," judgment without ground or cause. The positive elements in his own views are more valuable. Pleasure in mere form, without a concept, and without the idea of an end, is impossible. All beauty must mean or express something, must be a symbol of inner life; its ground is perfection or adaptation. Beauty is that symmetrical union of the parts of a being, in virtue of which it feels well itself and gives pleasure to the observer, who sympathetically shares in this well-being. The charm and value of the Calligone lie more in the warmth and clearness with which the expressive beauty of single natural phenomena is described than in the abstract discussion.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) gave the most detailed statement of the position of the philosophy of feeling, and the most careful proof of it. He was born in Düsseldorf, the son of a manufacturer; until 1794 he lived in his native place and at his country residence in Pempelfort; later he resided in Holstein, and, from 1805, in Munich, where, in 1807-13, he was president of the Academy of Sciences. Of his works, collected in five volumes, 1812-25, we are here chiefly concerned with the letters On the Doctrine of Spinoza, 1785; David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, 1787; and the treatise On Divine Things, 1811, which called out Schelling's merciless response, Memorial of Jacobi. Besides Hume and Spinoza, the sensationalism of Bonnet and the criticism of Kant had made the most lasting impression on Jacobi. His relation to Kant is neither that of an opponent nor of a supporter and popularizer. He declares himself in accord with Kant's critique of the understanding (the understanding is merely a formal function, one which forms and combines concepts only, but does not guarantee reality, one to which the material of thought must be given from elsewhere and for which the suprasensible remains unattainable); in regard to the critique of reason he raises the objection that it; makes the Ideas mere postulates, which possess no guarantee for their reality. The critique of sensibility appears to him still more unsatisfactory, as it does not explain the origin of sensations. Without the concept of the "thing-in-itself" one cannot enter the Kantian philosophy, and with it one cannot remain there. Fichte has drawn the correct conclusion from the Kantian premises; idealism is the unavoidable result of the Critique of Reason and foretold by; it as the Messiah was foretold by John the Baptist. And by the evil fruit we know the evil root: the idealistic theory is philosophical nihilism, for it denies the reality of the external world, as the materialism of Spinoza denies a transcendent God and the freedom of the will. Reality slips away from both these systems-they are the only consistent ones there are-material reality escaping from the former and suprasensible reality from the latter; and this must be so, because reality, of whatever kind it be, cannot be known, but only believed and felt. The actual, the existence of the noumenal as well as of the external world, even the existence of our own body, makes itself known to us through revelation alone; the understanding comprehends relations only; the certainty that a thing exists is attained only through experience and faith. Sense and reason are the organs of faith, and hence the true sources of knowledge; the former apprehends the natural, the latter, the supernatural, while for the understanding is left only the analysis and combination of given intuitions.

Philosophy as a science from concepts must necessarily prove atheistic and fatalistic. Conception and proof mean deduction from conditions. How shall that which has no cause from which to explain it, the unconditioned, God, and freedom, be comprehended and proved? Demonstration rises along the chain of causes to the universe alone, not to a transcendent Creator; mediate knowledge is confined to the sphere of conditioned being and mechanical becoming. The intuitive knowledge of feeling alone leads us beyond this, and along with the wonderful, the inconceivable power of freedom in ourselves, which is above all nature, shows us the primal source of all wonders, the transcendent God above us. The inference from our own spiritual, self-conscious, free personality to that of God is no unauthorized anthropomorphism-in the knowledge of God we may fearlessly deify our human existence, because God, when he created man, gave his divine nature human form. Reason and freedom are the same: the former is theoretical, the latter practical elevation to the suprasensible. Nevertheless virtue is not based upon an inflexible, despotic, abstractly, formal law, but upon an instinct, which, however, does not aim at happiness. Thus Jacobi attempts to mediate between the ethics of the Illumination and the ethics of Kant, by agreeing with the former in regard to the origin of virtue (it arises from a natural impulse), and with the latter in regard to its nature (it consists in disinterestedness). Hence with the Illumination he rejects the imperative form, and with Kant the eudemonistic end. At the same time he endeavors to introduce Herder's idea of individuality into ethics, by demanding that morality assume a special form in each man. Schiller and the romantic school take from Jacobi their ideal of the "beautiful soul," which from natural impulse realizes in its action, and still more in its being, the good in an individual way.

%PART II. FROM KANT TO THE PRESENT TIME.%

CHAPTER IX.

KANT.

The suit between empiricism and rationalism had continued for centuries, but still awaited final decision. Are all our ideas the result of experience, or are they (wholly or in part) an original possession of the mind? Are they received from without (by perception), or produced from within (by self-activity)? Is knowledge a product of sensation or of pure thought? All who had thus far taken part in this discussion had resembled partisans or advocates rather than disinterested judges. They had given less attention to investigation than to the defense of the traditional theses of their schools; they had not endeavored to obtain results, but to establish results already determined; and, along with real arguments, popular appeals had not been despised. Each of the opposing schools had given variations on a definite theme, and whenever timid attempts had been made to bring the two melodies into harmony they had met with no approval. The proceedings thus far had at least made it evident to the unbiased hearer that each of the two parties made extravagant claims, and, in the end, fell into self-contradiction. If the claim of empiricism is true, that all our concepts arise from perception, then not only the science of the suprasensible, which it denies, but also the science of the objects of experience, about which it concerns itself, is impossible. For perception informs us concerning single cases merely, it can never comprehend all cases, it yields no necessary and universal truth; but knowledge which is not apodictically valid for every reasoning being and for all cases is not worthy the name. The very reasons which were intended to prove the possibility of knowledge give a direct inference to its impossibility. The empirical philosophy destroys itself, ending with Hume in skepticism and probabilism. Rationalism is overtaken by a different, and yet an analogous fate-it breaks up into a popular eclecticism. It believes that it has discovered an infallible criterion of truth in the clearness and distinctness of ideas, and a sure example for philosophical method in the method of mathematics. In both points it is wrong. The criterion of truth is insufficient, for Spinoza and Leibnitz built up their opposing theories-the pantheism of the one and the monadology of the other-from equally clear and distinct conceptions; tried by this standard individualism is just as true as pantheism. Mathematics, again, does not owe its unquestioned acceptance and cogent force to the clearness and distinctness of its conceptions, but to the fact that these are capable of construction in intuition. The distinction between mathematics and metaphysics was overlooked, namely, that mathematical thought can transform its conceptions into intuitions, can generate its objects or sensuously present them, which philosophical thought is not in a position to do. The objects of the latter must be given to it, and to the human mind they are given in no other way than through sensuous intuition. Metaphysics seeks to be a science of the real, but it is impossible to conjure being out of thought; reality cannot be proved from concepts, it can only be felt. In making the unperceivable and suprasensible (the real nature of things, the totality of the world, the Deity, and immortality) the special object of philosophy, rationalism looked on the understanding as a faculty of knowledge by which objects are given. In reality objects can never be given through concepts; these only render it possible to think objects given in some other way (by intuition). It is true that concepts of the suprasensible exist, but nothing can be known through them, there is nothing intuitively given to be subsumed under them.

With this failure to perceive the intuitive element in mathematics was joined the mistake of overlooking its synthetic character. The syllogistic method of presentation employed in the Euclidean geometry led to the belief that the more special theorems had been derived from the simpler ones, and these from the axioms, by a process of conceptual analysis; while the fact is that in mathematics all progress is by intuition alone, the syllogism serving merely to formulate and explain truths already attained, but not to supply new ones. Following the example of mathematics thus misunderstood, the mission of philosophy was made to consist in the development of the truths slumbering in pregnant first principles by means of logical analysis. If only there were metaphysical axioms! If we only did not demand, and were not compelled to demand, of true science that it increase our knowledge, and not merely give an analytical explanation of knowledge. When once the clearness and distinctness of conceptions had been taken in so purely formal a sense, it was inevitable that in the end, as productivity became less, the principle should be weakened down to a mere demand for the explanation and elucidation of the metaphysical ideas present in popular consciousness. Thus the rationalistic current lost itself in the shallow waters of the Illumination, which soon gave as ready a welcome to the empirical theories-since these also were able to legitimate themselves by clear and distinct conceptions-as it had given to the results of the rationalistic systems.

It was thus easy to see that each of the contending parties had been guilty of one-sidedness, and that in order to escape this a certain mean must be assumed between the two extremes; but it was a much more difficult matter to discover the due middle ground. Neither of the opposing standpoints is so correct as its defenders believe, and neither so false as its opponents maintain. Where, then, on either side, does the mistaken narrowness begin, and how far does the justification of each extend?

The conflict centers, first, about the question concerning the origin of human knowledge and the sphere of its validity. Rationalism is justified when it asserts that some ideas do not come from the senses. If knowledge is to be possible, some concepts cannot originate in perception, those, namely, by which knowledge is constituted, for if they should, it would lack universality and necessity. The sole organ of universally valid knowledge is reason. Empiricism, on the other hand, is justified when it asserts that the experiential alone is knowable. Whatever is to be knowable must be given as a real in sensuous intuition. The only organ of reality is sensibility. Rationalism judges correctly concerning the origin of the most important classes of ideas; empiricism concerning the sphere of their validity. The two may be thus combined: some concepts (those which produce knowledge) take their origin in reason or are a priori, but they are valid for objects of experience alone. The conflict concerns, secondly, the use of the deductive (syllogistic) or the inductive method. Empiricism, through its founder Bacon, had recommended induction in place of the barren syllogistic method, as the only method which would lead to new discoveries. It demands, above all things, the extension of knowledge. Rationalism, on the contrary, held fast to the deductive method, because the syllogism alone, in its view, furnishes knowledge valid for all rational beings. It demands, first of all, universality and necessity in knowledge. Induction has the advantage of increasing knowledge, but it leads only to empirical and comparative, not to strict universality. The syllogism has the advantage of yielding universal and necessary truth, but it can only explicate and establish knowledge, not increase it. May it not be possible so to do justice to the demands of both that the advantages which they seek shall be combined, and the disadvantages which have been feared, avoided? Are there not cognitions which increase our knowledge (are synthetic) without being empirical, which are universally and necessarily valid (a priori) without being analytic? From these considerations arises the main question of the Critique of Pure Reason: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?

The philosophy of experience had overestimated sense and underestimated the understanding, when it found the source of all knowledge in the faculty of perception and degraded the faculty of thought to an almost wholly inactive recipient of messages coming to it from without. From the standpoint of empiricism concepts (Ideas) deserve confidence only in so far as they can legitimate themselves by their origin in sensations (impressions). It overlooks the active character of all knowing. Among the rationalists, on the other hand, we find an underestimation of the senses and an overestimation of the understanding. They believe that sense reveals only the deceptive exterior of things, while reason gives their true non-sensuous essence. That which the mind perceives of things is deceptive, but that which it thinks concerning them is true. The former power is the faculty of confused, the latter the faculty of distinct knowledge. Sense is the enemy rather than the servant of true knowledge, which consists in the development and explication of pregnant innate conceptions and principles. These philosophers forget that we can never reach reality by conceptual analysis; and that the senses have a far greater importance for knowledge than merely to give it an impulse; that it is they which supply the understanding with real objects, and so with the content of knowledge. Beside the (formal) activity (of the understanding), cognition implies a passive factor, a reception of impressions. Neither sense alone nor the understanding alone produces knowledge, but both cognitive powers are necessary, the active and the passive, the conceptual and the intuitive. Here the question arises, How do concept and intuition, sensuous and rational knowledge, differ, and what is the basis of their congruence? Notwithstanding their different points of departure and their variant results, the two main tendencies of modern philosophy agree in certain points. If the conflict between the two schools and their one-sidedness suggested the idea of supplementing the conclusions of the one by those of the other, the recognition of the incorrectness of their common convictions furnished the occasion to go beyond them and to establish a new, a higher point of view above them both, as also above the eclecticism which sought to unite the opposing principles. The errors common to both concern, in the first place, the nature of judgment and the difference between sensibility and understanding. Neither side had recognized that the peculiar character of judgment consists in active connection. The rationalists made judgment an active function, it is true, but a mere activity of conscious development, of elucidation and analytical inference, which does not advance knowledge a single step. The empiricists described it as a process of comparison and discrimination, as the mere perception and recognition of the relations and connections already existing between ideas; while in reality judgment does not discover the relations and connections of representations, but itself establishes them. In the former case the synthetic moment is ignored, in the latter the active moment. The imperfect view of judgment was one of the reasons for the appearance of extreme theories concerning the origin of ideas in reason or in perception. Rationalism regards even those concepts which have a content as innate, whereas it is only formal concepts which are so. Empiricism regards all, even the highest formal concepts (the categories), as abstracted from experience, whereas experience furnishes only the content of knowledge, and not the synthesis which is necessary to it. On the one hand too much, and on the other too little, is regarded as the original possession of the understanding. The question "What concepts are innate?" can be decided only by answering the further question, What are the concepts through which the faculty of judgment connects the representations obtained from experience? These connective concepts, these formal instruments of synthesis are a priori. The agreement of the two schools is still greater in regard to the relation of sense and understanding, notwithstanding the apparently sharp contrast between them. The empiricist considers thought transformed, sublimated perception, while the rationalist sees in perception only confused and less distinct thought. For the former concepts are faded images of sensations, for the latter sensations are concepts which have not yet become clear; the difference is scarcely greater than if the one should call ice frozen water, and the other should prefer to call water melted ice. Both arrange intuition and thought in a single series, and derive the one from the other by enhancement or attenuation. Both make the mistake of recognizing only a difference in degree where a difference in kind exists. In such a case only an energetic dualism can afford help. Sense and understanding are not one and the same cognitive power at different stages, but two heterogeneous faculties. Sensation and thought are not different in degree, but in kind. As Descartes began with the metaphysical dualism of extension and thought, so Kant begins with the no?tical dualism of intuition and thought.

Much more serious, however, than any of the mistakes yet mentioned was a sin of omission of which the two schools were alike guilty, and the recognition and avoidance of which constituted in Kant's own eyes the distinctive character of his philosophy and its principiant-advance beyond preceding systems. The pre-Kantian thinker had proceeded to the discussion of knowledge without raising the question of the possibility of knowledge. He had approached things in the full confidence that the human mind was capable of cognizing them, and with a na?ve trust in the power of reason to possess itself of the truth. His trust was na?ve and ingenuous, because the idea that it could deceive him had never entered his mind. Now no matter whether this belief in man's capacity for knowledge and in the possibility of knowing things is justifiable or not, and no matter how far it may be justifiable, it was in any case untested; so that when the skeptic approached with his objections the dogmatist was defenseless. All previous philosophy, so far as it had not been skeptical, had been, according to Kant's expression, dogmatic; that is, it had held as an article of faith, and without precedent inquiry, that we possess the power of cognizing objects. It had not asked how this is possible; it had not even asked what knowledge is, what may and must be demanded of it, and by what means our reason is in a position to satisfy such demands. It had left human intelligence and its extent uninvestigated. The skeptic, on the other hand, had been no more thorough. He had doubted and denied man's capacity for knowledge just as uncritically as the dogmatist had believed and presupposed it. He had directed his ingenuity against the theories of dogmatic philosophy, instead of toward the fundamental question of the possibility of knowledge. Human intelligence, which the dogmatist had approached with unreasoned trust and the skeptic with just as unreasoned distrust, is subjected, according to the plan of the critical philosopher, to a searching examination. For this reason Kant termed his standpoint "criticism," and his undertaking a "Critique of Reason." Instead of asserting and denying, he investigates how knowledge arises, of what factors it is composed, and how far it extends. He inquires into the origin and extent of knowledge, into its sources and its limits, into the grounds of its existence and of its legitimacy. The Critique of Reason finds itself confronted by two problems, the second of which cannot be solved until after the solution of the first. The investigation of the sources of knowledge must precede the inquiry into the extent of knowledge. Only after the conditions of knowledge have been established can it be ascertained what objects are attainable by it. Its sphere cannot be determined except from its origin.

Whether the critical philosopher stands nearer to the skeptic or to the dogmatist is rather an idle question. He is specifically distinct from both, in that he summons and guides the reason to self-contemplation, to a methodical examination of its capacity for knowledge. Where the one had blindly trusted and the other suspected and denied, he investigates; they overlook, he raises the question of the possibility of knowledge. The critical problem does not mean, Does a faculty of knowledge exist? but, Of what powers is it composed? are all objects knowable which have been so regarded? Kant does not ask whether, but how and by what means, knowledge is possible. Everyone who gives himself to scientific reflection must postulate that knowledge is possible, and the demand of the no?tical theorists of the day for a philosophy absolutely without assumptions is quite incapable of fulfillment. Nay, in order to be able to begin his inquiry at all, it was necessary for Kant to assume still more special postulates; for that a cognition of cognition is possible, that there is a critical, self-investigating reason could, at first, be only a matter of belief. This would not have excluded a supplementary detailed statement concerning the how of this self-knowledge, concerning the organ of the critical philosophy. But Kant never gave one, and the omission subsequently led to a sharp debate concerning the character and method of the Critique of Reason. On this point, if we may so express it, Kant remained a dogmatist.

Kant felt himself to be the finisher of skepticism; but this was chiefly because he had received the strongest impulse to the development of his critique of knowledge from Hume's inquiries concerning causation. Brought up in the dogmatic rationalism of the Wolffian school, to which he remained true for a considerable period as a teacher and writer (till about 1760), although at the same time he was inquiring with an independent spirit, Kant was gradually won over through the influence of the English philosophy to the side of empirical skepticism. Then-as the result, no doubt, of reading the Nouveaux Essais of Leibnitz, published in 1765-he returned to rationalistic principles, until finally, after a renewal of empirical influences,[1] he took the position crystallized in the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, which, however, experienced still other, though less considerable, changes in the sequel, just as in itself it shows the traces of previous transformations.

[Footnote 1: Cf. H. Vaihinger's Kommentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, vol. i., 1881, pp. 48-49. This is a work marked by acuteness, great industry, and an objective point of view which merits respect. The second volume, which treats of the Transcendental Aesthetic, appeared in 1892.]

It would be a most interesting task to trace in the writings which belong to Kant's pre-critical period the growth and development of the fundamental critical positions. Here, however, we can only mention in passing the subjects of his reflection and some of the most striking anticipations and beginnings of his epoch-making position. Even his maiden work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Vis Viva, 1747, betokens the mediating nature of its author. In this it is argued that when men of profound and penetrating minds maintain exactly opposite opinions, attention must be chiefly directed to some intermediate principle to a certain degree compatible with the correctness of both parties. The question under discussion was whether the measure of vis viva is equal, as the Cartesians thought, to the product of the mass into the velocity, or, according to the Leibnitzians, to the product of the mass into the square of the velocity. Kant's unsatisfactory solution of the problem-the law of Descartes holds for dead, and that of Leibnitz for living forces-drew upon him the derision of Lessing, who said that he had endeavored to estimate living forces without having tested his own. A similar tendency toward compromise-this time it is a synthesis of Leibnitz and Newton-is seen in his Habilitationsschrift, Principiorum Primorum Cognitionis Metaphysicae Nova Dilucidatio, 1755, and in the dissertation Monadologia Physica, 1756. The former distinguishes between ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi, rejects the ontological argument, and defends determinism against Crusius on Leibnitzian grounds. In the Physical Monadology Kant gives his adherence to dynamism (matter the product of attraction and repulsion), and makes the monads or elements of body fill space without prejudice to their simplicity. A series of treatises is devoted to subjects in natural science: The Effect of the Tides in retarding the Earth's Rotation; The Obsolescence of the Earth; Fire (Inaugural Dissertation), Earthquakes, and the Theory of the Winds. The most important of these, the General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 1755, which for a long time remained unnoticed, and which was dedicated to Frederick II., developed the hypothesis (carried out forty years later by Laplace in ignorance of Kant's work) of the mechanical origin of the universe and of the motion of the planets. It presupposes merely the two forces of matter, attraction and repulsion, and its primitive chaotic condition, a world-mist with elements of different density. It is noticeable that Kant acknowledges the failure of the mechanical theory at two points: it is brought to a halt at the origin of the organic world and at the origin of matter. The mechanical cosmogony is far from denying creation; on the contrary, the proof that this well-ordered and purposive world necessarily arose from the regular action of material forces under law and without divine intervention, can only serve to support our assumption of a Supreme Intelligence as the author of matter and its laws; the belief is necessary, just because nature, even in its chaotic condition, can act only in an orderly and regular way.

The empirical phase of Kant's development is represented by the writings of the 60's. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, 1762, asserts that the first figure is the only natural one, and that the others are superfluous and need reduction to the first. In the Only Possible Foundation for a Demonstration of the Existence of God, 1763, which, in the seventh Reflection of the Second Division, recapitulates the cosmogony advanced in the Natural History of the Heavens, the discussions concerning being ("existence" is absolute position, not a predicate which increases the sum of the qualities but is posited in a merely relative way), and the conclusion, prophetical of his later point of view, "It is altogether necessary that we should be convinced of the existence of God, but not so necessary that his existence should be demonstrated" are more noteworthy than the argument itself. This runs: All possibility presupposes something actual wherein and whereby all that is conceivable is given as a determination or a consequence. That actuality the destruction of which would destroy all possibility is absolutely necessary. Therefore there exists an absolutely necessary Being as the ultimate real ground of all possibility; this Being is one, simple, unchangeable, eternal, the ens realissimum and a spirit. The Attempt to introduce the Notion of Negative Quantities into Philosophy, 1763, distinguishes-contrary to Crusius-between logical opposition, contradiction or mere negation (a and not-a, pleasure and the absence of pleasure, power and lack of power), and real opposition, which cannot be explained by logic (+a and -a, pleasure and pain, capital and debts, attraction and repulsion; in real opposition both determinations are positive, but in opposite directions). Parallel with this it distinguishes, also, between logical ground and real ground. The prize essay, Inquiry concerning the Clearness (Evidence) of the Principles of Natural Theology and Ethics, 1764, draws a sharp distinction between mathematical and metaphysical knowledge, and warns philosophy against the hurtful imitation of the geometrical method, in place of which it should rather take as an example the method which Newton introduced into natural science. Quantity constitutes the object of mathematics, qualities, the object of philosophy; the former is easy and simple, the latter difficult and complicated-how much more comprehensible the conception of a trillion is than the philosophical idea of freedom, which the philosophers thus far have been unable to make intelligible. In mathematics the general is considered under symbols in concrete, in philosophy, by means of symbols in abstracto; the former constructs its object in sensuous intuition, while the object of the latter is given to it, and that as a confused concept to be decomposed. Mathematics, therefore, may well begin with definitions, since the conception which is to be explained is first brought into being through the definition, while philosophy must begin by seeking her conceptions. In the former the definition is first in order, and in the latter almost always last; in the one case the method is synthetic, in the other it is analytic. It is the function of mathematics to connect and compare clear and certain concepts of quantity in order to draw conclusions from them; the function of philosophy is to analyze concepts given in a confused state, and to make them detailed and definite. Philosophy has also this disadvantage, that it possesses very many undecomposable concepts and undemonstrable propositions, while mathematics has only a few such. "Philosophical truths are like meteors, whose brightness gives no assurance of their permanence. They vanish, but mathematics remains. Metaphysics is without doubt the most difficult of all human sciences (Einsichten), but a metaphysic has never yet been written"; for one cannot be so kind as to "apply the term philosophy to all that is contained in the books which bear this title." In the closing paragraphs, on the ultimate bases of ethics, the stern features of the categorical imperative are already seen, veiled by the English theory of moral sense, while the attractive Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, which appeared in the same year, still na?vely follow the empirical road.

The empirical phase reaches its skeptical termination in the satire Dreams of a Ghost-seer explained by the Dreams of Metaphysics, 1766, which pours out its ingenious sarcasm impartially on spiritualism and on the assumed knowledge of the suprasensible. Here Kant is already clearly conscious of his new problem, a theory of the limits of human reason, conscious also that the attack on this problem is to be begun by a discussion of the question of space. This second question had been for many years a frequent subject of his reflections;[1] and it was this part of the general critical problem that first received definitive solution. In the Latin dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World, 1770, which concludes the pre-critical period, and which was written on the occasion of his assumption of his chair as ordinary professor, the critique of sensibility, the new theory of space and time, is set forth in approximately the same form as in the Critique of Pure Reason, while the critique of the understanding and of reason, the theory of the categories and the Ideas and of the sphere of their validity, required for its completion the intellectual labor of several more years. For this essay, De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis, leaves unchallenged the possibility of a knowledge of things in themselves and of God, thus showing that its author has abandoned the skepticism maintained in the Dreams of a Ghost-seer, and has turned anew to dogmatic rationalism, whose final overthrow required another swing in the direction of skeptical empiricism. In regard to the progress of this latter phase of opinion, the letters to M. Herz are almost the only, though not very valuable, source of information.

[Footnote 1: New Theory of Motion and Rest, 1758; On the First Ground of the Distinction of Positions in Space, 1768; besides several of the works mentioned above.]

The Critique of Pure Reason appeared in 1781, much later than Kant had hoped when he began a work on "The Limits of Sensibility and Reason," and a second, altered edition in 1787.[1] After the Prolegomena to every Future Metaphysic which may present itself as Science, 1783, had given a popular form to the critical doctrine of knowledge, it was followed by the critical philosophy of ethics in the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Ethics, 1785, and the Critique of Practical Reason, 1788; by the critical aesthetics and teleology in the Critique of Judgment, 1790; and by the critical philosophy of religion in Religion within the Limits of Reason Only, 1793[2] (consisting of four essays, of which the first, "Of Radical Evil," had already appeared in the Berliner Monatsschrift in 1792). The Metaphysical Elements of Natural Science, 1786, and the Metaphysics of Ethics, 1797 (in two parts, "Metaphysical Elements of the Theory of Right," and "Metaphysical Elements of the Theory of Virtue "), are devoted to the development of the system. The year 1798 brought two more larger works, the Conflict of the Faculties and the Anthropology. Of the reviews, that on Herder's Ideen maybe mentioned, and among the minor essays, the following: Idea for a Universal History in a Cosmopolitan Sense, Answer to the Question: What is Illumination f both in 1784; What does it mean to Orient oneself in Thought? 1786; On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy, 1788; On a Discovery according to which all Recent Criticism of Pure Reason is to be superseded by a Previous One, 1790; On the Progress of Metaphysics since the Time of Wolff; On Philosophy in General, The End of all Things, 1794; On Everlasting Peace, 1795. Kant's Logic was published by J?sche in 1800; his Physical Geography and his Observations on Pedagogics by F.T. Rink in 1803; his lectures on the Philosophical Theory of Religion (1817; 2d. ed., 1830) and on Metaphysics (1821; cf. Benno Erdmann in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xix. 1883, p. 129 seq., and vol. xx. 1884, p. 65 seq.) by P?litz. If we may judge by the specimens given by Reicke in the Altpreussische Monatsschrift, 1882-84, and by Krause himself,[3] the promised publication of a manuscript of Kant's last years, now in possession of the Hamburg pastor, Albrecht Krause, and which discusses the transition from the metaphysical elements of natural science to physics, will hardly meet the expectations which some have cherished concerning it. Benno Erdmann has issued Nachtr?ge zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft aus Kants Nachlass, 1881, and Reflexionen Kants zur kritischen Philosophie aus handschriftlichen Aufzeichnungen-the first volume first Heft (Reflexionen zur Anthropologie) appearing in 1882, the second volume (Reflexionen zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, aus Kants Handexemplar von Baumgartens Metaphysica) in 1884. Max Müller has made an English translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, 2 vols., 1881.[4]

[Footnote 1: There has been much discussion and much has been written concerning the relation of the two editions. In opposition to Schopenhauer and Kuno Fischer it must be maintained that the alterations in the second edition consist in giving greater prominence to realistic elements, which in the first edition remained in the background, though present even there.]

[Footnote 2: This publication was the occasion of a conflict between Kant and the censorship concerning the right of free religious inquiry; cf. Dilthey in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. in. 1890, pp. 418-450.]

[Footnote 3: A. Krause: I. Kant wider K. Fischer, zum ersten Male mit Hülfe des verloren gewesenen Kantischen Hauptwerkes vertheidigt, 1884 (in reply, K. Fischer, Das Streber- und Gründerthum in der Litteratur, 1884); also, Das nachgelassene Werk I. Kants, mit Belegen popul?r-wissenschaftlich dargestellt, 1888.]

[Footnote 4: Besides this (centenary) translation the English reader may be referred to the earlier version of Meiklejohn in Bonn's Library; to the versions of the Prolegomena by Bax (also in Bonn's Library, and including the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Science), and Mahaffy and Bernard, new ed., 1889; to Abbot's Kant's Theory of Ethics, 4th ed., 1889, containing the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Ethics and the Critique of Practical Reason entire, with portions of the Metaphysics of Ethics and Religion within the Limits of Reason Only; to Bernard's translation of the Kritik of Judgment, 1892; and to Watson's Selections from Kant, 2d ed., 1888 (in Sneath's Modern Philosophers, 1892).-TR.]

The best complete edition of the works of Kant is the second edition of Hartenstein, in eight volumes, 1867-68, which is chronologically arranged and excellently gotten up. Simultaneously with the first edition of Hartenstein in ten volumes, in 1838 seq., appeared the edition in twelve volumes by K. Rosenkranz and F.W. Schubert (containing in the last volumes a biography of Kant by Schubert, and a history of the Kantian philosophy by Rosenkranz, 1842). Kehrbach's edition of the principal works in Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek, with the pagination of the original and collective editions (1877 seq.), is more valuable than Von Kirchmann's edition of the complete works in his Philosophische Bibliothek.

Among the works on Kant those of Kuno Fischer (vols. iii.-iv. of the Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, 3d ed., 1882; also Kant's Leben und die Grundlagen seiner Lehre, 1860) take the first place. The writings of Liebmann, Cohen, Stadler, Riehl, Volkelt, and others will be mentioned later, in connection with the neo-Kantian movement; here we may give some of the more important monographs and essays, selected from the enormously developed Kantian literature:

Ad. B?hringer, Kants erkenntnisstheoretischer Idealismus, 1888; K. Dieterich, Die Kantische Philosophie in ihrer inneren Entwickelungsgeschichte, 2 parts, 1885 (first published separately, Kant und Newton, 1877; Kant und Rousseau, 1878); W. Dilthey, Aus den Rostocker Kanthandschriften in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vols. ii.-iii. 1889-90; M.W. Drobisch, Kants Ding an sich und sein Erfahrungsbegriff, 1885; B. Erdmann, Kants Kritizismus in der I. und II. Auflage der Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1878; the same, Kants Prolegomena herausgegeben und erl?utert, 1878, Introduction (in reply Emil Arnoldt, Kants Prolegomena nicht doppelt redigiert, 1879; cf. also H. Vaihinger, Die Erdmann-Arnoldtsche Kontroverse in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xvi. 1880); Franz Erhardt, Kritik der Kantischen Antinomienlehre, 1888; R. Eucken, Ueber Bilder und Gleichnisse bei Kant, Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. lxxxiii, 1883, reprinted in his Beitr?ge zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, 1886; F. Frederichs, Der ph?nomenale Idealismus Berkeleys und Kants, 1871; the same, Kants Prinzip der Ethik, 1879; Ed. von Hartmann, Das Ding an sich und seine Beschaffenheit, 1871, in the 2d ed., 1875, and the 3d, 1885, entitled Kritische Grundlegung des transzendentalen Realismus; C. Hebler, Kantiana, in his Philosophische Aufs?tze, 1869; Alfred Hegler, Die Psychologie in Kants Ethik, 1891; A. H?lder, Darstellung der Kantischen Erkenntnisstheorie, 1873 J. Jacobson, Die Auffindung des Apriori, 1876; the same, Ueber die Beziehungen zwischen Kategorien und Urtheilsformen, 1877; Wilhelm Koppelmann, Kants Lehre vom analytischen Urtheil, Philosoph. Monatshefte, vol. xxi, 1885; the same, Lotzes Stellung zu Kants Kritizismus, Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. lxxxviii, 1886; the same, Kants Lehre vom kategorischen Imperativ, 1888; the same, Kant und die Grundlagen der Christlichen Religion, 1890; E. Laas, Kants Analogien der Erfahrung, 1876; the same, Einige Bemerkungen zur Transzendentalphilosophie, Strassburg Abhandlungen, 1884; J. Mainzer, Die kritische Epoche in der Lehre von der Einbildungskraft, 1881; J.B. Meyer, Kants Psychologie, 1870; F. Paulsen, Was Kant uns sein kann, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 1881; B. Pünjer, Die Religionslehre Kants, 1874; R. Quaebicker, Kants und Herbarts metaphysische Grundansichten über das Wesen der Seele, 1870; J. Rehmke, Physiologie und Kantianismus, address in Eisenach, 1883; Rud. Reicke, Lose Bl?tter aus Kants Nachlass, 1889 (on this H. Vaihinger in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. xcvi. 1889); O. Riedel, Die monadologischen Bestimmungen in Kants Lehre vom Ding an sich, dissertation at Kiel, 1884; O. Schneider, Die psychologische Entwickelung des Apriori, 1883; the same, Transzendentalpsychologie, 1891; F. Staudinger, Noumena, 1884; M. Steckelmacher, Die formale Logik Kants, Breslau Prize Essay, 1879; A. Stern, Die Beziehung Garves zu Kant, nebst ungedruckten Briefen, 1884; C. Stumpf, Psychologie und Erkenntnisstheorie, Abhandlungen der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1891; G. Thiele, Kants intellectuelle Anschauung als Grundbegriff seines Kritizismus, 1876; the same, Die Philosophie Kants nach ihrem systematischen Zusammenhange und ihrer logischhistorischen Entiwickelung, I. (1) Kants vorkritische Naturphilosophie, 1882; (2) Kants vorkritische Erkenntnisstheorie, 1887; Ad. Trendelenburg, Ueber eine Lücke in Kants Beweis von der ausschliessenden Subjectivit?t des Raumes and der Zeit in vol. iii. of his Historische Beitr?ge zur Philosophie, 1867; Ueberhorst, Kants Lehre von dem Verh?ltnisse der Kategorien zu der Erfahrung, 1878; H. Vaihinger, Eine Blattversetzung in Kants Prolegomena, Philosoph. Monatshefte, vol. xv. 1879; the same, Zu Kants Widerlegung des Idealismus, Strassburg Abhandlungen, 1884; J. Walter, Zum Ged?chtniss Kants, Festrede, 1881; Th. Weber, Zur Kritik der Kantischen Erkenntnisstheorie (from the Zeitschrift für Philosophie), 1882; W. Windelband, Ueber die verschiedenen Phasen der Kantischen Lehre vom Ding an sich, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 1877 (cf. the same author's Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, § 58); J. Witte, Beitr?ge zum Verst?ndniss Kants, 1874; the same, Kantischer Kritizismus gegenüber unkritischem Dilettantismus (against A. St?hr), 1885; Wohlrabe, Kants Lehre vom Gewissen, 1889; E. Zeller, Ueber das Kantische Moralprinzip, 1880; R. Zimmermann, Ueber Kants Widerlegung des Idealismus von Berkeley, 1871; the same, Ueber Kants mathematisches Vorurtheil und dessen Folgen, 1871.

Popular expositions have been given by the following: K. Fortlage (in his Philos. Vortr?ge, 1869); E. Last, Mehr Licht! Die Haups?tze Kants und Schopenhauers, 1879; the same, Die realistiche und die idealistische Anschauung entwickelt an Kants Idealit?t von Raum und Zeit, 1884; H. Romundt, Antaeus, neuer Aufbau der Lehre Kants über Seele, Freiheit, und Gott, 1882; the same, Grundlegung zur Reform der Philosophie, vereinfachte und erweiterte Darstellung von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1885; the same, Die Vollendung des Socrates, Kants Grundlegung zur Reform der Sittenlehre; the same, Ein neuer Paulus, Kants Grundlegung zu einer sicheren Lehre von der Religion, 1886; the same, Die drei Fragen Kants, 1887; A. Krause, Popul?re Darstellung von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1881; K. Lasswitz, Die Lehre Kants von der Idealit?t des Raumes und der Zeit, 1883; Wilhelm Münz, Die Grundlagen der Kantischen Erkenntnisstheorie, 2d ed., 1885.

Among foreigners Villers, Cousin, Nolen, Desdouits, Cantoni, E. Caird [\A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, 1877; The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, 2 vols., 1889], Adamson [On the Philosophy of Kant, 1879, and a valuable article in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. xiii.], Stirling [Text-book to Kant, 1881], [Watson, Kant and his English Critics, 1881], Morris Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Griggs's Philosophical Classics, 1882, [Wallace, Kant, Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1882; Porter, Kant's Ethics, Griggs's Philosophical Classics, 1886; Green, Lectures, Works, vol. ii., 1886.-Tr.], have among others made contributions to Kantian literature. Of the older works we may mention the dictionaries of E. Schmid, 1788, and Mellin (in six volumes), 1797 seq., the critique of the Kantian philosophy in the first volume of Schopenhauer's chief work, 1819, and the essay of C.H. Weisse, In welchem Sinne hat sich die deutsche Philosophie jetzt wieder an Kant zu orientieren, 1847.

Kant's outward life was less eventful and less changeful than his philosophical development.[1] Born in K?nigsberg in 1724, the son of J.G. Cant, a saddler of Scottish descent, his home and school training were both strict and of a markedly religious type. He was educated at the university of his native city, and for nine years, from 1746 on, filled the place of a private tutor. In 1755 he became Docent, in 1770 ordinary professor in K?nigsberg, serving also for six years of this time as under-librarian. He seldom left his native city and never the province. The clearness which marked his extremely popular lectures on physical geography and anthropology was due to his diligent study of works of travel, and to an unusually acute gift of observation, which enabled him to draw from his surroundings a comprehensive knowledge of the world and of man. He ceased lecturing in 1797, and in 1804 old age ended a life which had always, even in minute detail, been governed by rule. A man of extreme devotion to duty, particularity, and love of truth, and an amiable, bright, and witty companion, Kant belongs to the acute rather than to the profound thinkers. Among his manifold endowments the tendency to combination and the faculty of intuition (as the Critique of Judgment especially shows) are present to a noticeable degree, yet not so markedly as the power of strict analysis and subtle discrimination. So that, although a mediating tendency is rightly regarded as the distinguishing characteristic of the Kantian thinking, it must also be remembered that synthesis is everywhere preceded by a mighty work of analysis, and that this still exerts its power even after the adjustment is complete. Thus Kant became the energetic defender of a qualitative view of the world in opposition to the quantitative view of Leibnitz, for which antitheses (e.g., sensation and thought, feeling and cognition, good and evil, duty and inclination) fade into mere differences of degree.

[Footnote 1: The following have done especially valuable service in the investigation of the development of Kant's doctrine: Paulsen (Versuch einer Entwickelungsgeschichte der Kantischen Erkenntnisstheorie, 1875), B. Erdmann, Vaihinger, and Windelband. Besides Hume and Leibnitz, Newton, Locke, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Wolff exercised an important influence on Kant.]

In the beginning of this chapter we have indicated how the new ideal of knowledge, under whose banner Kant brought about a reform of philosophy, grew out of the conflict between the rationalistic (dogmatic) and the empirical (skeptical) systems. This combines the Baconian ideal of the extension of knowledge with the Cartesian ideal of certainty in knowledge. It is synthetic judgments alone which extend knowledge, while analytic judgments are explicative merely.[1] A priori judgments alone are perfectly certain, absolutely universal, and necessarily valid; while a posteriori judgments are subjectively valid merely, lack necessity, and, at best, yield only relative universality.[2] All analytic judgments are a priori, all empirical or a posteriori judgments are synthetic. Between the two lies the object of Kant's search. Do synthetic judgments a priori exist, and how are they possible?

[Footnote 1: "All bodies are extended" is an analytic judgment; "all bodies possess weight," a synthetic judgment. The former explicates the concept of the subject by bringing into notice an idea already contained in it and belonging to the definition as a part thereof; it is based on the law of contradiction: an unextended body is a self-contradictory concept. The latter, on the contrary, goes beyond the concept of the subject and adds a predicate which had not been thought therein. It is experience which teaches us that weight is joined to matter, a fact which cannot be derived from the concept of matter. Almost all mathematical principles are synthetic, and here, as will be shown, it is not experience but "pure intuition" which permits us to go beyond the concept and add a new mark to it.]

[Footnote 2: The Scholastics applied the term a priori to knowledge from causes (from that which precedes), and a posteriori to knowledge from effects. Kant, following Leibnitz and Lambert, uses the terms to designate the antithesis, knowledge from reason and knowledge from experience. An a priori judgment is a judgment obtained without the aid of experience. When the principle from which it is derived is also independent of experience it is absolutely a priori, otherwise it is relatively a priori.]

Two sciences discuss the how, and a third the if of such judgments, which, at the same time, are ampliative and absolutely universal and necessary. The first two sciences are pure mathematics and pure natural science, of which the former is protected against doubt concerning its legitimacy by its evident character, and the latter, by the constant possibility of verification in experience; each, moreover, can point to the continuous course of its development. All this is absent in the third science, metaphysics, as science of the suprasensible, and to its great disadvantage. Experiential verification is in the nature of things denied to a presumptive knowledge of that which is beyond experience; it lacks evidence to such an extent that there is scarcely a principle to be found to which all metaphysicians assent, much less a metaphysical text-book to compare with Euclid; there is so little continuous advance that it is rather true that the later comers are likely to overthrow all that their predecessors have taught. In metaphysics, therefore, which, it must be confessed, is actual as a natural tendency, the question is not, as in the other two sciences, concerning the grounds of its legitimacy, but concerning this legitimacy itself. Mathematics and pure physics form synthetic judgments a priori, and metaphysics does the same. But the principles of the two former are unchallenged, while those of the third are not. In the former case the subject for investigation is, Whence this authority? in the latter case, Is she thus authorized?

Thus the main question, How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? divides into the subordinate questions, How is pure mathematics possible? How is pure natural science possible, and, How is metaphysics (in two senses: metaphysics in general, and metaphysics as science) possible? The Transcendental Aesthetic (the critique of sensibility or the faculty of intuition) answers the first of these questions; the Transcendental Analytic (the critique of the understanding), the second; and the Transcendental Dialectic (the critique of "reason" in the narrower sense) and the Transcendental Doctrine of Method (Methodenlehre), the third. The Analytic and the Dialectic are the two parts of the Transcendental "Logic" (critique of the faculty of thought), which, together with the Aesthetic, forms the Transcendental "Doctrine of Elements" (Elementarlehre), in contrast to the Doctrine of Method. The Critique of Pure Reason follows this scheme of subordinate division, while the Prolegomena co-ordinates all four parts in the manner first mentioned.

Let us anticipate the answers. Pure mathematics is possible, because there are pure or a priori intuitions (space and time), and pure natural science or the metaphysics of phenomena, because there are a priori concepts (categories) and principles of the pure understanding. Metaphysics as a presumptive science of the suprasensible has been possible in the form of unsuccessful attempts, because there are Ideas or concepts of reason which point beyond experience and look as though knowable objects were given through them; but as real science it is not possible, because the application of the categories is restricted to the limits of experience, while the objects thought through the Ideas cannot be sensuously given, and all assumed knowledge of them becomes involved in irresolvable contradictions (antinomies). On the other hand, a science is possible and necessary to teach the correct use of the categories, which may be applied to phenomena alone, and of the Ideas, which may be applied only to our knowledge of things (and our volition), and to determine the origin and the limits of our knowledge-that is to say, a transcendental philosophy. In regard to metaphysics (knowledge from pure reason), then, this is the conclusion reached: Rejection of transcendent metaphysics (that which goes beyond experience), recognition and development of immanent metaphysics (that which remains within the limits of possible experience). It is not possible as a metaphysic of things in themselves; it is possible as a metaphysic of nature (of the totality of phenomena), and as a metaphysic of knowledge (critique of reason).

The interests of the reason are not exhausted, however, by the question, What can we know? but include two further questions, What ought we to do? and, What may we hope? Thus to the metaphysics of nature there is added a metaphysics of morals, and to the critique of theoretical reason, a critique of practical reason or of the will, together with a critique of religious belief. For even if a "knowledge" of the suprasensible is denied to us, yet "practical" grounds are not wanting for a sufficiently certain "conviction" concerning God, freedom, and immortality.

After carrying the question of the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori from the knowledge of nature over to the knowledge of our duty, Kant raises it, in the third place, in regard to our judgment concerning the subjective and objective purposiveness of things, or concerning their beauty and their perfection, and adds to his critique of the intellect and the will a critique of the faculty of aesthetic and teleological judgment.

The Kantian philosophy accordingly falls into three parts, one theoretical, one practical (and religious), one aesthetic and teleological.

* * * * *

Before advancing to our account of the first of these parts, a few preliminary remarks are indispensable concerning the presuppositions involved in Kant's critical work and on the method which he pursues. The presuppositions are partly psychological, partly (as the classification of the forms of judgment and inference, and the twofold division of judgments) logical, either in the formal or the transcendental sense, and partly metaphysical (as the thing in itself). Kant takes the first of these from the psychology of his time, by combining the Wolffian classification of the faculties with that of Tetens, and thus obtains six different faculties: lower (sensuous) and higher (intellectual) faculties of cognition, of feeling, and of appetition; or sensibility (the capacity for receiving representations through the way in which we are affected by objects), understanding (the faculty of producing representations spontaneously and of connecting them); the sensuous feelings of pleasure and pain, taste; desire, and will. The understanding in the wide sense is equivalent to the higher faculty of cognition, and divides further into understanding in the stricter sense (faculty of concepts), judgment (faculty of judging), and reason (faculty of inference). Of these the first gives laws to the faculty of cognition or to nature, the second laws to taste, and the third laws to the will.

The most important of the fundamental assumptions concerns the relation, the nature, and the mission of the two faculties of cognition. These do not differ in degree, through the possession of greater or less distinctness-for there are sensuous representations which are distinct and intellectual ones which are not so-but specifically: Sensibility is the faculty of intuitions, understanding the faculty of concepts. Intuitions are particular, concepts general representations. The former relate to objects directly, the latter only indirectly (through the mediation of other representations). In intuition the mind is receptive, in conception it acts spontaneously. "Through intuitions objects are given to us; through concepts they are thought." It results from this that neither of the two faculties is of itself sufficient for the attainment of knowledge, for cognition is objective thinking, the determination of objects, the unifying combination or elaboration of a given manifold, the forming of a material content. Rationalists and empiricists alike have been deceived in regard to the necessity for co-operation between the senses and the understanding. Sensibility furnishes the material manifold, which of itself it is not able to form, while the understanding gives the unifying form, to which of itself it cannot furnish a content. "Intuitions without concepts are blind" (formless, unintelligible), "concepts without intuitions are empty" (without content). In the one case, form and order are wanting; in the other, the material to be formed. The two faculties are thrown back on each other, and knowledge can arise only from their union.

A certain degree of form is attained in sense, it is true, since the chaos of sensations is ordered under the "forms of intuition," space and time, which are an original possession of the intuiting subject, but this is not sufficient, without the aid of the understanding, for the genesis of knowledge. In view of the a priori nature of space and time, though without detraction from their intuitive character (they are immediate particular representations), we may assign pure sensibility to the higher faculty of cognition and speak of an intuiting reason.

The forms of intuition and of thought come from within, they lie ready in the mind a priori, though not as completed representations. They are functions, necessary actions of the soul, for the execution of which a stimulus from without, through sensations, is necessary, but which, when once this is given, the soul brings forth spontaneously. The external impulse merely gives the soul the occasion for such productive acts, while their grounds and laws are found in its own nature. In this sense Kant terms them "originally acquired," and in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason declares that although it is indubitable that "all our knowledge begins with experience (impressions of sense), yet it does not all arise from experience." That a representation or cognition is a priori[1] does not mean that it precedes experience in time, but that (apart from the merely exciting, non-productive stimulation through impressions already mentioned) it is independent of all experience, that it is not derived or borrowed from experience.

[Footnote 1: The terms a priori representation and pure representation (concept, intuition) are equivalent; but in judgments, on the other hand, there is a distinction. A judgment is a priori when the connection takes place independently of experience, no matter whether the concepts connected are a priori or not. If the former is the case the a priori judgment is pure (mixed with nothing empirical); if the latter, it is mixed.]

The material of intuition and thought is given to the soul, received by it; it arises through the action of objects upon the senses, and is always empirical. Intuition is the only organ of reality; in sensation the presence of a real object as the cause of the sensation is directly revealed. When Kant's transcendental idealism was placed by a reviewer on a level with the empirical idealism of Berkeley, which denies the existence of the external world, he distinctly asserted that it had never entered his mind to question the reality of external things. Further, after the existence of real things affecting the senses had been transformed in his mind from a basis of the investigation into an object of inquiry, he endeavored to defend this assumption (which at first he had na?vely borrowed from the realism of pre-scientific thought) by arguments, but without any satisfactory result.[1]

[Footnote 1: The task of confirming the existence of things in themselves changes under his hands into another, that of proving the existence of external phenomena. "That external objects are real as representations" Berkeley had never disputed.]

On the basis of the inseparability of sensibility and understanding the ideal of knowledge-an extension of knowledge to be attained by a priori means (p. 333)-experiences a remarkable addition in the position that the rational synthesis thus obtained must be a knowledge of reality, must be applied to matter given in intuition. To the question, "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" is joined a second equally legitimate inquiry, "How do they become objectively valid, or applicable to objects of experience?" The principle from which their validity is proved-they are applicable to objects of experience because without them experience would not be possible, because they are conditions of experience-like the criterion of apriority (strict universality and necessity), is one of the no?tic assumptions of the critical theory.[1]

[Footnote 1: Cf. Vaihinger, Kommentar, i. pp. 425-430.]

Inasmuch as its investigation relates to the conditions of experience the Kantian criticism follows a method which it itself terms transcendental. Heretofore, when the metaphysical method had been adopted, the object had been the suprasensible; and when knowledge had been made the object of investigation, the method followed had been empirical, psychological. Kant had the right to consider himself the creator of no?tics, for he showed it the transcendental point of view. Knowledge is an object of experience, but its conditions are not. The object is to explain knowledge, not merely to describe it psychologically,-to establish a new science of knowledge from principles, from pure reason. That which lies beyond experience is sealed from our thought; that which lies on this side of it is still uninvestigated, though capable and worthy of investigation, and in extreme need thereof. Criticism forbids the transcendent use of reason (transcending experience); it permits, demands, and itself exercises the transcendental[1] use of it, which explains an experiential object, knowledge, from its conditions, which are not empirically given.

[Footnote A: Kant applies the term transcendental to the knowledge (the discovery, the proof) of the a priori factor and its relation to objects of experience. Unfortunately he often uses the same word not only to designate the a priori element itself, but also as a synonym for transcendent. In all three cases its opposite is empirical, namely, empirico-psychological investigation by observation in distinction from no?tical investigation from principles; empirical origin in distinction from an origin in pure reason, and empirical use in distinction from application beyond the limits of experience.]

There is, apparently, a contradiction between the empiristic result of the Critique of Reason (the limitation of knowledge to objects of experience) and its rationalistic proofs (which proceed metaphysically, not empirically), and, in fact, a considerable degree of opposition really exists. Kant argues in a metaphysical way that there can be no metaphysics. This contradiction is solved by the distinction which has been mentioned between that which is beyond, and that which lies within, the boundary of experience. That metaphysic is forbidden which on the objective side soars beyond experience, but that pure rational knowledge is permissible and necessary which develops from principles the grounds of experiential knowledge existing in the subject. In the Kantian school, however, these complementary elements,-empirical result, transcendental or metaphysical, properly speaking, pro-physical method,-were divorced, and the one emphasized, favored, and further developed at the expense of the other. The empiricists hold to the result, while they either weaken or completely misunderstand the rationalism of the method: the a priori factor, says Fries, was not reached by a priori, but by a posteriori, means, and there is no other way by which it could have been reached. The constructive thinkers, Fichte and his successors, adopt and continue the metaphysical method, but reject the empirical result. Fichte's aim is directed to a system of necessary, unconscious processes of reason, among which, rejecting the thing in itself, he includes sensation. According to Schelling nature itself is a priori, a condition of consciousness. This discrepancy between foundation and result continues in an altered form even among contemporary thinkers-as a discussion whether the "main purpose" of Criticism is to be found in the limitation of knowledge to possible experience, or the establishment of a priori elements-though many, in adherence to Kant's own view, maintain that the metaphysics of knowledge and of phenomena (immanent rationalism) is the only legitimate metaphysics.

%1. Theory of Knowledge.

(a) The Pure Intuitions (Transcendental Aesthetic).%-The first part of the Critique of Reason, the Transcendental Aesthetic, lays down the position that space and time are not independent existences, not real beings, and not properties or relations which would belong to things in themselves though they were not intuited, but forms of our intuition, which have their basis in the subjective constitution of our, the human, mind. If we separate from sensuous intuition all that the understanding thinks in it through its concepts, and all that belongs to sensation, these two forms of intuition remain, which may be termed pure intuitions, since they can be considered apart from all sensation. As subjective conditions (lying in the nature of the subject) through which alone a thing can become an object of intuition for us, they precede all empirical intuitions or are a priori.

Space and time are neither substantial receptacles which contain all that is real nor orders inhering in things in themselves, but forms of intuition. Now all our representations are either pure or empirical in their origin, and either intuitive or conceptual in character. Kant advances four proofs for the position that space and time are not empirical and not concepts, but pure intuitions: (1) Time is not an empirical concept which has been abstracted from experience. For the coexistence or succession of phenomena, i.e., their existence at the same time or at different times (from which, as many believe, the representation of time is abstracted), itself presupposes time-a coexistence or succession is possible only in time. It is no less false that space is abstracted from the empirical space relations of external phenomena, their existence outside and beside one another, or in different places, for it is impossible to represent relative situation except in space. Therefore experience does not make space and time possible; but space and time first of all make experience possible, the one outer, the other inner experience. They are postulates of perception, not abstractions from it. (2) Time is a necessary representation a priori. We can easily think all phenomena away from it, but we cannot remove time itself in view of phenomena in general; we can think time without phenomena, but not phenomena without time. The same is true of space in reference to external objects. Both are conditions of the possibility of phenomena. (3) Time is not a discursive or general concept. For there is but one time. And different times do not precede the one time as the constituent parts of which it is made up, but are mere limitations of it; the part is possible only through the whole. In the same way the various spaces are only parts of one and the same space, and can be thought in it alone. But a representation which can be given only by a single object is a particular representation or an intuition. Because, therefore, of the oneness of space and time, the representation of each is an intuition. The a priori, immediate intuition of the one space is entirely different from the empirical, general conception of space, which is abstracted from the various spaces. (4) Determinate periods of time arise by limitation of the one, fundamental time. Consequently this original time must be unlimited or infinite, and the representation of it must be an intuition, not a concept. Time contains in itself an endless number of representations (its parts, times), but this is never the case with a generic concept, which, indeed, is contained as a partial representation in an endless number of representations (those of the individuals having the same name), and, consequently, comprehends them all under itself, but which never contains them in itself. The general concept horse is contained in each particular representation of a horse as a general characteristic, and that of justice in each representation of a definite just act; time, however, is not contained in the different times, but they are contained in it. Similarly the relation of infinite space to the finite spaces is not the logical relation of a concept to examples of it, but the intuitive relation of an unlimited whole to its limited parts.

The Prolegomena employs as a fifth proof for the intuitive character of space, an argument which had already appeared in the essay On the Ultimate Ground of the Distinction of Positions in Space. There are certain spatial distinctions which can be grasped by intuition alone, and which are absolutely incapable of comprehension through the understanding-for example, those of right and left, above and below, before and behind. No logical marks can be given for the distinction between the object and its image in the mirror, or between the right ear and the left. The complete description of a right hand must, in all respects (quality, proportionate position of parts, size of the whole), hold for the left as well; but, despite the complete similarity, the one hand cannot be exactly super-imposed on the other; the glove of the one cannot be worn on the other. This difference in direction, which has significance only when viewed from a definite point, and the impossibility mentioned of a congruence between an object (right hand) and its reflected image (left hand) can be understood only by intuition; they must be seen and felt, and cannot be made clear through concepts, and, consequently, can never be explained to a being which lacks the intuition of space.

In the "transcendental" exposition of space and time Kant follows this "metaphysical" exposition, which had to prove their non-empirical, and non-discursive, hence their a priori and intuitive, character, with the proof that only such an explanation of space and time could make it conceivable how synthetic cognitions a priori can arise from them. The principles of mathematics are of this kind. The synthetic character of geometrical truths is explained by the intuitive nature of space, their apodictic character by its apriority, and their objective reality or applicability to empirical objects by the fact that space is the condition of (external) perception. The like is true of arithmetic and time.

If space were a mere concept, no proposition could be derived from it which should go beyond the concept and extend our knowledge of its properties. The possibility of such extension or synthesis in mathematics depends on the fact that spatial concepts can always be presented or "constructed" in intuition. The geometrical axiom that in the triangle the sum of two sides is greater than the third is derived from intuition, by describing the triangle in imagination or, actually, on the board. Here the object is given through the cognition and not before it.-If space and time were empirical representations the knowledge obtained from them would lack necessity, which, as a matter of fact, it possesses in a marked degree. While experience teaches us only that something is thus or so, and not that it could not be otherwise, the axioms, (space has only three dimensions, time only one; only one straight line is possible between two points), nay, all the propositions of mathematics are strictly universal and apodictically certain: we are entirely relieved from the necessity of measuring all triangles in the world in order to find out whether the sum of their angles is equal to two right angles, and we do not need, as in the case of judgments of experience, to add the limitation, so far as it is yet known there are no exceptions to this rule. The apriority is the ratio essendi of the strict necessity involved in the "it must be so" (des Soseinmüssens), while the latter is the ratio cognoscendi of the former. Now since the necessity of mathematical judgments can only be explained through the ideality of space, this doctrine is perfectly certain, not merely a probable hypothesis.-The validity of mathematical principles for all objects of perception, finally, is based on the fact that they are rules under which alone experience is possible for us. It should be mentioned, further, that the conceptions of change and motion (change of place) are possible only through and in the representation of time. No concept could make intelligible the possibility of change, that is, of the connection of contradictory predicates in one and the same thing, but the intuition of succession easily succeeds in accomplishing it.

The argument is followed by conclusions and explanations based upon it; (1) Space is the form of the outer, time of the inner, sense. Through the outer sense external objects are given to us, and through the inner sense our own inner states. But since all representations, whether they have external things for their objects or not, belong in themselves, as mental determinations, to our inner state, time is the formal condition of all phenomena in general, directly of internal (psychical) phenomena, and, thereby, indirectly of external phenomena also. (2) The validity of the relations of space and time cognizable a priori is established for all objects of possible experience, but is limited to these. They are valid for all phenomena (for all things which at any time may be given to our senses), but only for these, not for things as they are in themselves. They have "empirical reality, but, at the same time, transcendental ideality." As external phenomena all things are beside one another in space, and all phenomena whatever are in time and of necessity under temporal relations; in regard to all things which can occur in our experience, and in so far as they can occur, space and time are objectively, therefore empirically, real. But they do not possess absolute reality (neither subsistent reality nor the reality of inherence); for if we abstract from our sensuous intuition both vanish, and, apart from the subject (N.B., the transcendental subject, concerning which more below), they are naught. It is only from man's point of view that we can speak of space, and of extended, moveable, changeable things; for we can know nothing concerning the intuitions of other thinking beings, we have no means of discovering whether they are bound by the same conditions which limit our intuitions, and which for us are universally valid. (3) Nothing which is intuited in space is a thing in itself. What we call external objects are nothing but mere representations of our sensibility, whose true correlative, the thing in itself, cannot be known by ever so deep penetration into the phenomenon; such properties as belong to things in themselves can never be given to us through the senses. Similarly nothing that is intuited in time is a thing in itself, so that we intuit ourselves only as we appear to ourselves, and not as we are.

The merely empirical reality of space and time, the limitation of their validity to phenomena, leaves the certainty of knowledge within the limits of experience intact; for we are equally certain of it, whether these forms necessarily belong to things in themselves, or only to our intuitions of things. The assertion of their absolute reality, on the other hand, involves us in sheer absurdities (that is, it necessitates the assumption of two infinite nonentities which exist, but without being anything real, merely in order to comprehend all reality, and on one of which even our own existence would be dependent), in view of which the origin of so peculiar a theory as the idealism of Berkeley appears intelligible. The critical theory of space and time is so far from being identical with, or akin to, the theory of Berkeley, that it furnishes the best and only defense against the latter. If anyone assumes the absolute or transcendental reality of these forms, it is impossible for him to prevent everything, including even our own existence, from being changed thereby into mere illusion. But the critical philosopher is far from degrading bodies to mere illusion; external phenomena are just as real for him as internal phenomena, though only as phenomena, it is true, as (possible) representations.

Phenomenon and illusion are not the same. The transcendental distinction between phenomena and things in themselves must not be confused with the distinction common to ordinary life and to physics, in accordance with which we call the rainbow a mere appearance (better, illusion), but the combination of sun and rain which gives rise to this illusion the thing in itself, as that which in universal experience and in all different positions with respect to the senses, is thus and not otherwise determined in intuition, or that which essentially belongs to the intuition of the object, and is valid for every human sensibility (in antithesis to that which only contingently belongs to it, and is valid only for a special position or organization of this or that sense). Similarly an object always appears to grow smaller as its distance increases, while in itself it is and remains of some fixed size. And this use of words is perfectly correct, in the physical or empirical sense of "in itself"; but in the transcendental sense the raindrops, also, together with their form and size, are themselves mere phenomena, the "in itself" of which remains entirely unknown to us. Kant, moreover, does not wish to see the subjectivity of the forms of intuition placed on a level with the subjectivity of sensations or explained by this, though he accepts it as a fact long established. The sensations of color, of tone, of temperature are, no doubt, like the representation of space in that they belong only to the subjective constitution of the sensibility, and can be attributed to objects only in relation to our senses. But the great difference between the two is that these sense qualities may be different in different persons (the color of the rose may seem different to each eye), or may fail to harmonize with any human sense; that they are not a priori in the same strict sense as space and time, and consequently afford no knowledge of the objects of possible experience independently of perception; and that they are connected with the phenomenon only as the contingently added effects of a particular organization, while space, as the condition of external objects, necessarily belongs to the phenomenon or intuition of them. It is through space alone that it is possible for things to be external objects for us. The subjectivity of sensation is individual, while that of space and time is general or universal to mankind; the former is empirical, individually different, and contingent, the latter a priori and necessary. Space alone, not sensation, is a conditio sine qua non of external perception. Space and time are the sole a priori elements of the sensibility; all other sensuous concepts, even motion and change, presuppose perception; the movable in space and the succession of properties in an existing thing are empirical data.

In confirmation of the theory that all objects of the senses are mere phenomena, the fact is adduced that (with the exception of the will and the feelings, which are not cognitions) nothing is given us through the senses but representations of relations, while a thing in itself cannot be known by mere relations. The phenomenon is a sum total of mere relations. In regard to matter we know only extension, motion, and the laws of this motion or forces (attraction, repulsion, impenetrability), but all these are merely relations of the thing to something, else, that is, external relations. Where is the inner side which underlies this exterior, and which belongs to the object in itself? This is never to be found in the phenomenon, and no matter how far the observation and analysis of nature may advance (a work with unlimited horizons!) they reach nothing but portions of space occupied by matter and effects which matter exercises, that is, nothing beyond that which is comparatively internal, and which, in its turn, consists of external relations. The absolutely inner side of matter is a mere fancy; and if the complaint that the "inner side" of things is concealed from us is to mean that we do not comprehend what the things which appear to us may be in themselves, it is unjust and irrational, for it demands that we should be able to intuit without senses, in other words, that we should be other than men. The transcendent questions concerning the noumenon of things are unanswerable; we know ourselves, even, only as phenomena! A phenomenon consists in nothing but the relation of something in general to the senses.

It is indubitable that something corresponds to phenomena, which, by affecting our sensibility, occasions sensations in us, and thereby phenomena. The very word, the very concept, "phenomenon", indicates a relation to something which is not phenomenon, to an object not dependent on the sensibility. What this may be continues hidden from us, for knowledge is impossible without intuition. Things in themselves are unknowable. Nevertheless the idea (it must be confessed, the entirely empty idea) of this "transcendental object", as an indeterminate somewhat = x which underlies phenomena, is not only allowable, but, as a limiting concept, unavoidable in order to confine the pretensions of sense to the only field which is accessible to it, that is, to the field of phenomena.

The inference "space and time are nothing but representations and representations are in us, therefore space and time as well as all phenomena in them, bodies with their forces and motions, are in us," does not accurately express Kant's position, for he might justly reply that, according to him, bodies as phenomena are in different parts in space from that which we assign to ourselves, and thus without us; that space is the form of external intuition, and through it external objects arise for us from sensations; but that, in regard to the things in themselves which affect us, we are entirely ignorant whether they are within or without us.

It can easily be shown by literal quotations that there were distinct tendencies in Kant, especially in the first edition of his principal work, toward a radical idealism which doubts or denies not merely the cognizability, but also the existence of objects external to the subject and its representations, and which degrades the thing in itself to a mere thought in us, or completely does away with it (e.g., "The representation of an object as a thing in general is not only insufficient, but, ... independently of empirical conditions, in itself contradictory "). But these expressions indicate only a momentary inclination toward such a view, not a binding avowal of it, and they are outweighed by those in which idealism is more or less energetically rejected. That which according to Kant exists outside the representation of the individual is twofold: (1) the unknown things in themselves with their problematical characteristics, as the ground of phenomena; (2) the phenomena "themselves" with their knowable immanent laws, and their relations in space and time, as possible representations. When I turn my glance away from the rose its redness vanishes, since this predicate belongs to it only in so far and so long as it acts in the light on my visual apparatus. What, then, is left? That thing in itself, of course, which, when it appears to me, calls forth in me the intuition of the rose. But there is still something else remaining-the phenomenon of the rose, with its size, its form, and its motion in the wind. For these are predicates which must be attributed to the phenomenon itself as the object of my representation. If the rose, as determined in space and time, vanished when I turned my head away, it could not, unless intuited by a subject, experience or exert effects in space and time, could not lose its leaves in the wind and strew the ground with its petals. Perception and thought inform me not merely concerning events of which I am a witness, but also of others which have occurred, or which will occur, in my absence. The process of stripping the leaves from the rose has actually taken place as a phenomenon and does not first become real by my subsequent representation of it or inference to it. The things and events of the phenomenal world exist both before and after my perception, and are something distinct from my subjective and momentary representations of them. The space and time, however, in which they exist and happen are not furnished by the intuiting individual, but by the supra-individual, transcendental consciousness or generic reason of the race. The phenomenon thus stands midway between its objective ground (the absolute thing in itself) and the subject, whose common product it is, as a relative thing in itself, as a reality which is independent of the contingent and changing representation of the individual, empirical subject, which is dependent for its form on the transcendental subject, and which is the only reality accessible to us, yet entirely valid for us. The phenomenal world is not a contingent and individual phenomenon, but one necessary for all beings organized as we are, a phenomenon for humanity. My representations are not the phenomena themselves, but images and signs through which I cognize phenomena, i.e., real things as they are for me and for every man (not as they are in themselves). The reality of phenomena consists in the fact that they can be perceived by men, and the objective validity of my knowledge of them in the fact that every man must agree in it. The laws which the understanding (not the individual understanding!) imposes upon nature hold for phenomena, because they hold for every man. Objectivity is universal validity. If the world of phenomena which is intuited and known by us wears a different appearance from the world of things in themselves, this does not justify us in declaring it to be mere seeming and dreaming; a dream which all dream together, and which all must dream, is not a dream, but reality. As we must represent the world> so it is, though for us, of course, and not in itself.

Many places in Kant's works seem to argue against the intermediate position here ascribed to the world of phenomena-according to which it is less than things in themselves and more than subjective representation-which, since they explain the phenomenon as a mere representation, leave room for only two factors (on the one hand, the thing in itself = that in the thing which cannot be represented; on the other, the thing for me = my representation of the thing). In fact, the distinction between the phenomenon "itself" and the representation which the individual now has of it and now does not have, is far from being everywhere adhered to with desirable clearness; and wherever it is impossible to substitute that which has been represented and that which may be represented or possible intuitions for "mere representations in me," we must acknowledge that there is a departure from the standpoint which is assumed in some places with the greatest distinctness. The latter finds unequivocal expression, among other places, in the "Analogies of Experience" and the "Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding," § 2, No. 4 (first edition). The second of these passages speaks of one and the same universal experience, in which all perceptions are represented in thoroughgoing and regular connection, and of the thoroughgoing affinity of phenomena as the basis of the possibility of the association of representations. This affinity is ascribed to the objects of the senses, not to the representations, whose association is rather the result of the affinity, and not to the things in themselves, in regard to which the understanding has no legislative power.

The relation between the thing in itself and the phenomenon is also variable. Now they are regarded as entirely heterogeneous (that which can never be intuited exists in a mode opposed to that of the intuited and intuitable), and now as analogous to each other (non-intuitable properties of the thing in itself correspond to the intuitable characteristics of the phenomenon). The former is the case when it is said that phenomena are in space and time, while things in themselves are not; that in the first of these classes natural causation rules, and in the second freedom; that in the one-conditioned existence alone is found, in the other unconditioned.[1] But just as often things in themselves and phenomena are conceived as similar to one another, as two sides of the same object,[2] of which one, like the counter-earth of the Pythagoreans, always remains turned away from us, while the other is turned toward us, but does not reveal the true being of the object. According to this each particular thing, state, relation, and event in the world of phenomena would have its real counterpart in the noumenal sphere: un-extended roses in themselves would lie back of extended roses, certain non-temporal processes back of their growth and decay, intelligible relations back of their relations in space. This is approximately the relation of the two conceptions as in part taught by Lotze himself, in part represented by him as taught by Kant. Herbart's principle, "So much seeming, so much indication of being" (wie viel Schein so viel Hindeutung aufs Sein), might also be cited in this connection. That which continually impelled Kant, in spite of his proclamation of the unknowableness of things in themselves, to form ideas about their character, was the moral interest, but this sometimes threw its influence in favor of their commensurability with phenomena and sometimes in the opposite scale. For in his ethics Kant needs the intelligible character or man as noumenon, and must assume as many men in themselves (to be consistent, then, in general, as many beings in themselves) as there are in the world of phenomena. But for practical reasons, again, the causality of the man in himself must be thought of as entirely different from, and opposed to, the mechanical causality of the sense world. Kant's judgment is, also, no more stable concerning the value of the knowledge of the suprasensible, which is denied to us. "I do not need to know what things in themselves may be, because a thing can never be presented to me otherwise than as a phenomenon." And yet a natural and ineradicable need of the reason to obtain some conviction in regard to the other world is said to underlie the abortive attempts of metaphysics; and Kant himself uses all his efforts to secure to the practical reason the satisfaction of this need, though he has denied it to the speculative reason, and to make good the gap in knowledge by faith. From the theoretical standpoint an extension of knowledge beyond the limits of phenomena appears impossible, but unnecessary; from the practical standpoint it is, to a certain extent, possible and indispensable.

[Footnote 1: Kant's conjectures concerning a common ground of material and mental phenomena, and those concerning the common root of sensibility and understanding, show the same tendency. On the one hand, duality, on the other, unity.]

[Footnote 2: "Phenomenon, which always has two sides, the one when the object in itself is considered (apart from the way in which it is intuited, and just because of which fact its character always remains problematical), the other when we regard the form of the intuition of this object, which must be sought not in the object in itself, but in the subject to whom the object appears, while it nevertheless actually and necessarily belongs to the phenomenon of this object." "This predicate "-sc., spatial quality, extension-"is attributed to things only in so far as they appear to us."]

There is, then, a threefold distinction to be made: (1) Things in themselves, which can never be the object of our knowledge, because our forms of intuition are not valid for them. (2) Phenomena, things for us, nature or the totality of that which either is or, at least, may be the object of our knowledge (here belong the possible inhabitants of the moon, the magnetic matter which pervades all bodies, and the forces of attraction and repulsion, though the first have never been observed, and the second is not perceptible on account of the coarseness of our senses, and the last, because forces in general are not perceptible; nature comprehends everything whose existence "is connected with our perceptions in a possible experience"[1]). (3) Our representations of phenomena, i.e., that of the latter which actually enters into the consciousness of the empirical individual. In the realm of things in themselves there is no motion whatever, but at most an intelligible correlate of this relation; in the world of phenomena, the world of physics, the earth moves around the sun; in the sphere of representation the sun moves around the earth. It is true, as has been said, that Kant sometimes ignores the distinction between phenomena as related to noumena and phenomena as related to representations; and, as a result of this, that the phenomenon is either completely volatilized into the representation[2] or split up into an objective half independent of us and a representative half dependent on us, of which the former falls into the thing in itself,[3] while the latter is resolved into subjective states of the ego.

[Footnote 1: "Nothing is actually given to us but the perception and the empirical progress from this to other possible perceptions." "To call a phenomenon a real thing antecedent to perception, means ... that in the progress of experience we must meet with such a perception."]

[Footnote 2: Phenomena "are altogether in me," "exist only in our sensibility as a modification of it." "There is nothing in space but that which is actually represented in it." Phenomena are "mere representations, which, if they are not given in us (in perception) nowhere exist."]

[Footnote 3: Here Kant is guilty of the fault which he himself has censured, of confusing the physical and transcendental meanings of "in itself." He forgets that the thing, if it is momentarily not intuited or represented by me, and therefore is not immediately given for me as an individual, is nevertheless still present for me as man, is mediately given, that is, is discoverable by future search. That which is without my present consciousness is not for this reason without all human consciousness. In fact, Kant often overlooks the distinction between actual and possible intuition, so that for him the "objects" of the latter slip out of space and time and into the thing in itself. To the "transcendental object we may ascribe the extent and connection of our possible perceptions, and say that it is given in itself before all experience." In it "the real things of the past are given."]

After the possibility and the legitimacy of synthetic judgments a priori have been proved for pure mathematics upon the basis of the pure intuitions, there emerges, in the second place, the problem of the possibility of a priori syntheses in pure natural science, or the question, Do pure concepts exist? And after this has been answered in the affirmative, the further questions come up, Is the application of these, first, to phenomena, and second, to things in themselves, possible and legitimate, and how far?

%(b) The Concepts and Principles of the Pure Understanding (Transcendental Analytic).%-Sensations, in order to become "intuition" or the perception of a phenomenon, needed to be ordered in space and time; in order to become "experience" or a unified knowledge of objects, intuitions need a synthesis through concepts. In order to objective knowledge the manifold of intuition (already ordered by its arrangement in space and time) must be connected in the unity of the concept. Sensibility gives the manifold to be connected, the understanding the connecting unity. The former is able to intuit only, the latter only to think; knowledge can arise only as the result of their union. Intuitions depend on affections, concepts on functions, that is, on unifying acts of the understanding.

To discover the pure forms of thought it is necessary to isolate the understanding, just as an isolation of the sensibility was necessary above in order to the discovery of the pure forms of intuition. We obtain the elements of the pure knowledge of the understanding by rejecting all that is intuitive and empirical. These elements must be pure, must be concepts, further, not derivative or composite, but fundamental concepts, and their number must be complete. This completeness is guaranteed only when the pure concepts or categories are sought according to some common principle, which assigns to each its position in the connection of the whole, and not (as with Aristotle) collected by occasional, unsystematic inquiries undertaken at random. The table of the forms of judgment will serve as a guide for the discovery of the categories. Thought is knowledge through concepts; the understanding can make no other use of concepts than to judge by means of them. Hence, since the understanding is the faculty of judging, the various kinds of connection in judgment must yield the various pure "connective-concepts" (Verknüpfungsbegriffe.-K. Fischer) or categories.

In regard to quantity, every judgment is universal, particular, or singular; in regard to quality, affirmative, negative, or infinite; in regard to relation, categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive; and in regard to modality, problematical, assertory, or apodictic. To these twelve forms of judgment correspond as many categories, viz., I., Unity, Plurality, Totality; II., Reality, Negation, Limitation; III., Subsistence and Inherence (Substance and Accident), Causality and Dependence (Cause and Effect), Community (Reciprocity between the Active and the Passive); IV., Possibility-Impossibility, Existence-Non-existence, Necessity-Contingency.

The first six of these fundamental concepts, which have no correlatives, constitute the mathematical, the second six, which appear in pairs, the dynamical categories. The former relate to objects of (pure or of empirical) intuition, the latter to the existence of these objects (in relation to one another or to the understanding). Although all other a priori division though concepts must be dichotomous, each of the four heads includes three categories, the third of which in each case arises from the combination of the second and first,[1] but, nevertheless, is an original (not a derivative) concept, since this combination requires a special actus of the understanding. Universality or totality is plurality regarded as unity, limitation is reality combined with negation, community is the reciprocal causality of substances, and necessity is the actuality given by possibility itself. Kant omits, as unnecessary here, the useful, easy, and not unpleasant task of noting the great number of derivative concepts a priori (predicables) which spring from the combination of these twelve original concepts (predicaments = categories) with one another, or with the modes of pure sensibility,-the concepts force, action, passion, would belong as subsumptions under causality, presence and resistance under community, origin, extinction, and change under modality,-since his object is not a system, but only the principles of one. His liking or even love for this division according to quantity, quality, relation, and modality, which he always has ready as though it were a universal key for philosophical problems, reveals a very strong architectonic impulse, against which even his ever active skeptical tendency is not able to keep up the battle.

[Footnote 1: Concerning this "neat observation," Kant remarked that it might "perhaps have important consequences in regard to the scientific form of all knowledge of reason." This prophecy was fulfilled, although in a different sense from that which floated before his mind. Fichte and Hegel composed their "thought-symphonies" in the three-four time given by Kant.]

In view of the derivation of the forms of thought from the forms of judgment Kant does not stop to give a detailed proof that the categories are concepts, and that they are pure. Their discursive (not intuitive) character is evident from the fact that their reference to the object is mediate only (and not, as in the case of intuition, immediate), and their a priori origin, from the necessity which they carry with them, and which would be impossible if their origin were empirical. Here Kant starts from Hume's criticism of the idea of cause. The Scottish skeptic had said that the necessary bond between cause and effect can neither be perceived nor logically demonstrated; that, therefore, the relation of causality is an idea which we-with what right?-add to perceived succession in time. This doubt (without the hasty conclusions), says Kant, must be generalized, must be extended to the category of substance (which had been already done by Hume, pp. 226-7, though the author of the Critique of Reason was not aware of the fact), and to all other pure concepts of the understanding. Then we may hope to kindle a torch at the spark which Hume struck out. The problem "It is impossible to see why, because something exists, something else must necessarily exist," is the starting point alike of Hume's skepticism and Kant's criticism. The former recognized that the principle of causality is neither empirical nor analytic, and therefore concluded that it is an invention of reason, which confuses subjective with objective necessity. The latter shows that in spite of its subjective origin it has an objective value; that it is a truth which is independent of all experience, and yet valid for all who have experience, and for all that can be experienced.

Of the two questions, "How can the concepts which spring from our understanding possess objective validity?" and, "How (through what means or media) does their application to objects of experience take place?" the first is answered in the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, and the second in the chapter on their Schematism.

The Deduction, the most difficult portion of the Critique, shows that the objective validity of the categories, as concepts of objects in general, depends on the fact that through them alone experience as far as regards the form of thought _is possible, i.e., it is only through them that any object whatever can be thought. All knowledge consists in judgments; all judgments contain a connection of representations; all connection-whether it be conscious or not, whether it relates to concepts or to pure or empirical intuitions-is an act of the understanding; it cannot be given by objects, but only spontaneously performed by the subject itself. We cannot represent anything as connected in the object unless we have ourselves first connected it. The connection includes three conceptions: that of the manifold to be connected (which is given by intuition), that of the act of synthesis, and that of the unity; this last is two-fold, an objective unity (the conception of an object in general in which the manifold is united), and a subjective unity (the unity of consciousness under which or, rather, through which the connection is effected). The categories represent the different kinds of combination, each one of these, again, being completed in three stages, which are termed the Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition, the Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination, and the Synthesis of Recognition in Concepts. If I wish to think the time from one noon to the next, I must (1) grasp (apprehend) the manifold representations (portions of time) in succession; (2) retain or renew (reproduce) in thought those which have preceded in passing to those which follow; (3) be conscious that that which is now thought is the same with that thought before, or know again (recognize) the reproduced representation as the one previously experienced. If the mind did not exercise such synthetic activity the manifold of representation would not constitute a whole, would lack the unity which consciousness alone can impart to it. Without this one consciousness, concepts and knowledge of objects would be wholly impossible. The unity of pure self-consciousness or of "transcendental apperception" is the postulate of all use of the understanding. In the flux of internal phenomena there is no constant or abiding self, but the unchangeable consciousness here demanded is a precedent condition of all experience, and gives to phenomena a connection according to laws which determine an object for intuition, i.e., the conception of something in which they are necessarily connected.[1] Reference to an object is nothing other than the necessary unity of consciousness. The connective activity of the understanding, and with it experience, is possible only through "the synthetic unity of pure apperception," the "I think," which must be able to accompany all my representations, and through which they first become mine.

[Footnote 1: Object is "that which opposes the random or arbitrary determination of our cognitions," and which causes "them to be determined in a certain way a priori."]

Experience (in the strict sense) is distinguished from perception (experience in the wide sense) by its objectivity or universal validity. A judgment of perception (the sun shines upon the stone and the stone becomes warm) is only subjectively valid; while, on the other hand, a judgment of experience (the sun warms the stone) aims to be valid not only for me and my present condition, but always, for me and for everyone else. If the former is to become the latter, an a priori concept must be added to the perception (in the above case, the concept of cause), under which the perception is subsumed. The category determines the perceptions in view of the form of the judgment, gives to the judgment its reference to an object, and thus gives to the percepts, or rather, concepts (sunshine and warmth), necessary and universally valid connection. The "reason why the judgments of others" must "agree with mine" is "the unity of the object to which they all relate, with which they agree, and hence must also all agree with one another."

Though the categories take their origin in the nature of the subject, they are objective and valid for objects of experience, because experience is possible alone through them. They are not the product, but the ground of experience. The second difficulty concerns their applicability to phenomena, which are wholly disparate. By what means is the gulf between the categories, which are concepts and a priori, and perceptions, which are intuitous and empirical, bridged over? The connecting link is supplied by the imagination, as the faculty which mediates between sensibility and understanding to provide a concept with its image, and consists in the intuition of time, which, in common with the categories, has an a priori character, and, in common with perceptions, an intuitive character, so that it is at once pure and sensuous. The subsumption of phenomena or empirical intuitions under the category is effected through the Schemata[1] of the concepts of the understanding, i.e., through a priori determinations of time according to rules, which relate to time-series, time-content, time-order, and time-comprehension, and indicate whether I have to apply this or that category to a given object.

[Footnote 1: The schema is not an empirical image, but stands midway between this (the particular intuition of a definite triangle or dog) and the unintuitable concept, as a general intuition (of a triangle or a dog in general, which holds alike for right- and oblique-angled triangles, for poodles and pugs), or as a rule for determining our intuition in accordance with a concept.]

Each category has its own schema. The schema of quantity is number, as comprehending the successive addition of homogeneous parts. Filled time (being in time) is the schema of reality, empty time (not-being in time) the schema of negation, and more or less filled time (the intensity of sensation, indicating the degree of reality) the schema of limitation. Permanence in time is the sign for the application of the category of substance;[1] regular succession, for the application of the concept of cause; the coexistence of the determinations of one substance with those of another, the signal for their subsumption under the concept of reciprocity. The schemata of possibility, actuality, and necessity, finally, are existence at any time whatever (whensoever), existence at a definite time, and existence at all times. By such schematic syntheses the pure concept is brought near to the empirical intuition, and the way is prepared for an application of the former to the latter, or, what is the same thing, for the subsumption of the latter under the former.

[Footnote 1: This determination is important for psychology. Since the inner sense shows nothing constant, but everything in a continual flux,-for the permanent subject of our thoughts is an identical activity of the understanding, not an intuitable object,-the concept of substance is not applicable to psychical phenomena. Representations of a permanent (material substances) exist, indeed, but not permanent representations. The abiding self (ego, soul) which we posit back of internal phenomena is, as the Dialectic will show, a mere Idea, which, or, rather, the object of which, maybe "thought" as substance, it is true, but cannot be "given" in intuition, hence cannot be "known."]

As a result of the fact that the schematism permits a presentation of the categories in time intuition antecedent to all experience, the possibility is given of synthetic judgments a priori concerning objects of possible experience. Such judgments, in so far as they are not based on higher and more general cognitions, are termed "principles," and the system of them-to be given, with the table of the categories as a guide, in the Analytic of Principles or the Doctrine of the Faculty of Judgment-furnishes the outlines of "pure natural science." When thus the rules of the subsumption to be effected have been found in the pure concepts, and the conditions and criteria of the subsumption in the schemata, it remains to indicate the principles which the understanding, through the aid of the schemata, actually produces a priori from its concepts.

The principle of quantity is the Axiom of Intuition, the principle of quality the Anticipation of Perception; the principles of relation are termed Analogies of Experience, those of modality Postulates of Empirical Thought in General. The first runs, "All intuitions are extensive quantities"; the second, "In all phenomena sensation, and the real which corresponds to it in the object, has an intensive quantity, i.e., a degree." The principle of the "Analogies" is, "All phenomena, as far as their existence is concerned, are subject a priori to rules, determining their mutual relation in time" (in the second edition this is stated as follows: "Experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions"). As there are three modes of time, there result three "Analogies," the principles of permanence, of succession (production), and of coexistence. These are: (1) "In all changes of phenomena the substance is permanent, and its quantum is neither increased nor diminished in nature." (2) "All changes take place according to the law of connection between cause and effect"; or, "Everything that happens (begins to be) presupposes something on which it follows according to a rule." (3) "All substances, in so far as they are coexistent, stand in complete community, that is, reciprocity, one to another." And, finally, the three "Postulates": "That which agrees with the formal conditions of experience (in intuition and in concepts) is possible," "That which is connected with the material conditions of experience (sensation) is actual" (perception is the only criterion of actuality). "That which, in its connection with the actual, is determined by universal conditions of experience, is (exists as) necessary."

As the categories of substance and causality are specially preferred to the others by Kant and the Kantians, and are even proclaimed by some as the only fundamental concepts, so also the principles of relation have an established reputation for special importance. The leading ideas in the proofs of the "Analogies of Experience"-for in spite of their underivative character the principles require, and are capable of, proof-may next be noted.

The time determinations of phenomena, the knowledge of their duration, their succession, and their coexistence, form an indispensable part of our experience, not only of scientific experience, but of everyday experience as well. How is the objective time-determination of things and events possible? If the matter in hand is the determination of the particulars of a fight with a bloody ending, the witnesses are questioned and testify: We heard and saw how A began the quarrel by insulting B, and the latter answered the insult with a blow, whereupon A drew his knife and wounded his opponent. Here the succession of perceptions on the part of the persons present is accepted as a true reproduction of the succession of the actual events. But the succession of perceptions is not always the sure indication of an actual succession: the trees along an avenue are perceived one after the other, while they are in reality coexistent. We might now propose the following statement: The representation of the manifold of phenomena is always successive, I apprehend one part after another. I can decide whether these parts succeed one another in the object also, or whether they are coexistent, by the fact that, in the second case, the series of my perceptions is reversible, while in the first it is not. I can, if I choose, direct my glance along the avenue in such a way that I shall begin the second time with the tree at which I left off the first time; if I wish to assure myself that the parts of a house are coexistent, I cause my eye to wander from the upper to the lower portions, from the right side to the left, and then to perform the same motions in the opposite direction. On the other hand, it is not left to my choice to hear the thunder either before or after I see the lightning, or to see a passing wagon now here, now there, but in these cases I am bound in the succession of my sensuous representations. The possibility of interchange in the series of perceptions proves an objective coexistence, the impossibility of this, an objective succession. But this criterion is limited to the immediate present, and fails us when a time relation between unobserved phenomena is to be established. If I go at evening into the dining room and see a vessel of bubbling water, which is to be used in making tea, over a burning spirit lamp, whence do I derive the knowledge that the water began, and could begin, to boil only after the alcohol had been lighted, and not before? Because I have often seen the flame precede the boiling of the water, and in this the irreversibility of the two perceptions has guaranteed to me the succession of the events perceived? Then I may only assume that it is very probable, not that it is certain, that in this case also the order of the two events has been the same as I have observed several times before. As a matter of fact, however, we all assert that the water could not have come into a boiling condition unless the generation of heat had preceded; that in every case the fire must be there before the boiling of the water can commence. Whence do we derive this must? Simply and alone from the thought of a causal connection between the two events. Every phenomenon must follow in time that phenomenon of which it is the effect, and must precede that of which it is the cause. It is through the relation of causality, and through this alone, that the objective time relation of phenomena is determined. If nothing preceded an event on which it must follow according to a rule,[1] then all succession in perception would be subjective merely, and nothing whatever would be objectively determined by it as to what was the antecedent and what the consequent in the phenomenon itself. We should then have a mere play of representations without significance for the real succession of events. Only the thought of a rule, according to which the antecedent state contains the necessary condition of the consequent state, justifies us in transferring the time order of our representations to phenomena.[2] Nay, even the distinction between the phenomenon itself, as the object of our representations, and our representations of it, is effected only by subjecting the phenomenon to this rule, which assigns to it its definite position in time after another phenomenon by which it is caused, and thus forbids the inversion of the perceptions. We can derive the rule of the understanding which produces the objective time order of the manifold from experience, only because we have put it into experience, and have first brought experience into being by means of the rule. We recapitulate in Kant's own words: The objective (time) relation of phenomena remains undetermined by mere perception (the mere succession in my apprehension, if it is not determined by means of a rule in relation to an antecedent, does not guarantee any succession in the object). In order that this may be known as determined, the relation between the two states must be so conceived (through the understanding's concept of causality) that it is thereby determined with necessity which of them must be taken as coming first, and which second, and not conversely. Thus it is only by subjecting the succession of phenomena to the law of causality that empirical knowledge of them is possible. Without the concept of cause no objective time determination, and hence, without it, no experience.

[Footnote 1: "A reality following on an empty time, that is, a beginning of existence preceded by no state of things, can as little be apprehended as empty time itself."]

[Footnote 2: "If phenomena were things in themselves no one would be able, from the succession of the representations of their manifold, to tell how this is connected in the object."]

That which the relation of cause and effect does for the succession[1] of phenomena, the relation of reciprocity does for their coexistence, and that of substance and accident for their duration. Since absolute time is not an object of perception, the position of phenomena in time cannot be directly determined, but only through a concept of the understanding. When I conclude that two objects (the earth and the moon) must be coexistent, because perceptions of them can follow upon one another in both ways, I do this on the presupposition that the objects themselves reciprocally determine their position in time, hence are not isolated, but stand in causal community or a relation of reciprocal influence. It is only on the condition of reciprocity between phenomena, through which they form a whole, that I can represent them as coexistent.

[Footnote 1: Against the objection that cause and effect are frequently, indeed in most cases, simultaneous (e.g. the heated stove and the warmth of the room), Kant remarks that the question concerns the order of time merely, and not the lapse of time. The ball lying on a soft cushion is simultaneous, it is true, with its effect, the depression in the cushion. "But I, nevertheless, distinguish the two by the time relation of dynamical connection. For if I place the ball on the cushion, its previously smooth surface is followed by a depression, but if there is a depression in the cushion (I know not whence) a leaden ball does not follow from it."]

Coexistence and succession can be represented only in a permanent substratum; they are merely the modes in which the permanent exists. Since time (in which all change takes place, but which itself abides and does not change) in itself cannot be perceived, the substratum of simultaneity and succession must exist in phenomena themselves: the permanent in relation to which alone all the time relations of phenomena can be determined, is substance; that which alters is its determinations, accidents, or special modes of existing. Alteration, i.e., origin and extinction, is true of states only, which can begin and cease to be, and not of substances, which change (sich ver?ndern), i.e., pass from one mode of existence into another, but do not alter (wechseln), i.e., pass from non-existence into existence, or the reverse. It is the permanent alone that changes, and its states alone that begin and cease to be. The origin and extinction of substances, or the increase and diminution of their quantum, would remove the sole condition of the empirical unity of time; for the time relations of the coexistent and the successive can be perceived only in an identical substratum, in a permanent, which exists always. The law "From nothing nothing comes, and nothing can return to nothing," is everywhere assumed and has been frequently advanced, but never yet proved, for, indeed, it is impossible to prove it dogmatically. Here the only possible proof for it, the critical proof, is given: the principle of permanence is a necessary condition of experience. The same argument establishes the principle of sufficient reason, and the principle of the community of substances, together with the unity of the world to be inferred from this. The three Analogies together assert: "All phenomena exist in one nature and must so exist, because without such a unity a priori no unity of experience, and therefore no determination of objects in experience, would be possible."-In connection with the Postulates the same transcendental proof is given for a series of other laws of nature a priori, viz., that in the course of the changes in the world-for the causal principle holds only for effects in nature, not for the existence of things as substances-there can be neither blind chance nor a blind necessity (but only a conditional, hence an intelligible, necessity); and, further, that in the series of phenomena, there can be neither leap, nor gap, nor break, and hence no void-in mundo non datur casus, non datur fatum, non datur saltus, non datur hiatus.

While the dynamical principles have to do with the relation of phenomena, whether it be to one another (Analogies), or to our faculty of cognition (Postulates), the mathematical relate to the quantity of intuitions and sensations, and furnish the basis for the application of mathematics to natural science.[1] An extensive quantity is one in which the representation of the parts makes the representation of the whole possible, and so precedes it. I cannot represent a line without drawing it in thought, i.e., without producing all parts of it one after the other, starting from a point. All phenomena are intuited as aggregates or as collections of previously given parts. That which geometry asserts of pure intuition (i.e., the infinite divisibility of lines) holds also of empirical intuition. An intensive quantity is one which is apprehended only as unity, and in which plurality can be represented only by approximation to negation = 0. Every sensation, consequently every reality in phenomena, has a degree, which, however small it may be, is never the smallest, but can always be still more diminished; and between reality and negation there exists a continuous connection of possible smaller intermediate sensations, or an infinite series of ever decreasing degrees. The property of quantities, according to which no part in them is the smallest possible part, and no part is simple, is termed their continuity. All phenomena are continuous quantities, i.e., all their parts are in turn (further divisible) quantities. Hence it follows, first, that a proof for an empty space or empty time can never be drawn from experience, and secondly, that all change is also continuous. "It is remarkable," so Kant ends his proof of the Anticipation, "that of quantities in general we can know one quality only a priori, namely, their continuity, while with regard to quality (the real of phenomena) nothing is known to us a priori but their intensive quantity, that is, that they must have a degree. Everything else is left to experience."

[Footnote 1: In each particular science of nature, science proper (i.e., apodictically certain science) is found only to the extent in which mathematics can be applied therein. For this reason chemistry can never be anything more than a systematic art or experimental doctrine; and psychology not even this, but only a natural history of the inner sense or natural description of the soul. That which Kant's Metaphysical Elements of Natural Science, 1786-in four chapters, Phoronomy, Dynamics, Mechanics, and Phenomenology-advances as pure physics or the metaphysics of corporeal nature, is a doctrine of motion. The fundamental determination of matter (of a somewhat which is to be the object of the external senses) is motion, for it is only through motion that these senses can be affected, and the understanding itself reduces all other predicates of matter to this. The second and most valuable part of the work defines matter as the movable, that which fills space by its moving force, and recognizes two original forces, repulsive, expansive superficial force or force of contact, by which a body resists the entrance of other bodies into its own space, and attractive, penetrative force or the force which works at a distance, in virtue of which all particles of matter attract one another. In order to a determinate filling of space the co-operation of both fundamental forces is required. In opposition to the mechanical theory of the atomists, which explains forces from matter and makes them inhere in it, Kant holds fast to the dynamical view which he had early adopted (cf. p. 324), according to which forces are the primary factor and matter is constituted by them.]

The outcome of the Analytic of Principles sounds bold enough. The understanding is the lawgiver of nature: "It does not draw its laws a priori from nature, but prescribes them to it"; the principles of the pure understanding are the most universal laws of nature, the empirical laws of nature only particular determinations of these. All order and regularity take their origin in the spirit, and are put into objects by this. Universal and necessary knowledge remained inexplicable so long as it was assumed that the understanding must conform itself to objects; it is at once explained if, conversely, we make objects conform themselves to the understanding. This is a reversal of philosophical opinion which may justly be compared to the Copernican revolution in astronomy; it is just as paradoxical as the latter, but just as incontestably true, and just as rich in results. The sequel will show that this strangely sounding principle, that things conform themselves to our representations and the laws of nature are dependent on the understanding, is calculated to make us humble rather than proud. Our understanding is lawgiver within the limits of its knowledge, no doubt, but it knows only within the limits of its legislative authority; nature, to which it dictates laws, is nothing but a totality of phenomena; beyond the limits of the phenomenal, where its commands become of no effect, its wishes also find no hearing.

In the second edition the Analytic of Principles contains as a supplement a "Refutation of Idealism," which, in opposition to Descartes's position that the only immediate experience is inner experience, from which we reach outer experience by inference alone, argues that, conversely, it is only through outer experience, which is immediate experience proper, that inner experience-as the consciousness of my own existence in time-is possible. For all time determination presupposes something permanent in perception, and this permanent something cannot be in me (the mere representation of an external thing), but only actually existing things which I perceive without me. There is, further, a chapter on the "Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in general into Phenomena and Noumena," with an appendix on the Amphiboly (ambiguity) of the Concepts of Reflection. The latter shows that the concepts of comparison: identity and difference, agreement and opposition, the internal and the external, matter and form, acquire entirely different meanings when they relate to phenomena and to things in themselves (in other words, to things in their relation to the sensibility, and in relation to the understanding merely); and further, in a criticism of the philosophy of Leibnitz, reproaches him with having intellectualized phenomena, while Locke is said to have sensationalized the concepts of the understanding.

The chapter on the distinction between phenomena and noumena very much lessens the hopes, aroused, perchance, by the establishment of the non-empirical origin of the categories, for an application of these not confined to any experience. Although the categories, that is, are in their origin entirely independent of all experience (so much so that they first make experience possible), they are yet confined in their application within the bounds of possible experience. They "serve only to spell phenomena, that we may be able to read them as experience," and when applied to things in themselves lose all significance.[1] Similarly the principles which spring from them are "nothing more than principles of possible experience," and can be referred to phenomena alone, beyond which they are arbitrary combinations without objective reality. Things in themselves may be thought, but they can never be known; for knowledge, besides the empty thought of an object, implies intuitions which must be subsumed under it or by which the object must be determined. In themselves the pure concepts relate to all that is thinkable, not merely to that which can be experienced, but the schemata, which assures their applicability in the field of experience, at the same time limit them to this sphere. The schematism makes the immanent use of the categories, and thus a metaphysics of phenomena, possible, but the transcendent use of them, and consequently the metaphysics of the suprasensible, impossible. The case would be different if our intuition were intellectual instead of sensuous, or, which is the same thing, if our understanding were intuitive instead of discursive; then the objects which we think would not need to be given us from another source (through sensuous intuition), but would be themselves produced in the act by which we thought them. The divine spirit may be such an archetypal, creative understanding (intellectus archetypus), which generates objects by its thought; the human spirit is not such, and therefore is confined, with its knowledge, within the circle of possible perception.-The conception of "intellectual intuition" leads to a distinction in regard to things in themselves: in its negative meaning noumenon denotes a thing in so far as it is not the object of our sensuous intuition, in its positive meaning a thing which is the object of a non-sensuous intuition. The positive thing in itself is a problematical concept; its possibility depends on the existence of an intuitive understanding, something about which we are ignorant. The negative thing in itself cannot be known, indeed, but it can be thought; and the representation of it is a possible concept, one which is not self-contradictory[2] (a principle which is of great importance for practical philosophy). Still further, it is an indispensable concept, which shows that the boundary where our intuition ends is not the boundary of the thinkable as well; and even if it affords no positive extension of knowledge[3] it is, nevertheless, very useful, since it sets bounds to the use of the understanding, and thus, as it were, negatively extends our knowledge. That which lies beyond the boundary, the "how are they possible" (Wiem?glichkeit) of things in themselves is shrouded in darkness, but the boundary itself, i.e., the "that they are possible" (Dassm?glichkeit), of things in themselves, and the unknowableness of their nature, belongs to that which is within the boundary and lies in the light. In this way Kant believed that the categories of causality and substance might be applied to the relation of things in themselves to phenomena without offending against the prohibition of their transcendent use, since here the boundary appeared only to be touched, and not overstepped.

[Footnote 1: "A pure use of the categories is no doubt possible, that is, not self-contradictory, but it has no kind of objective validity, because it refers to no intuition to which it is meant to impart the unity of an object. The categories remain forever mere functions of thought by which no object can be given to me, but by which I can only think whatever may be given to me in intuition" (Critique of Pure Reason, Max Müller's translation, vol. ii. p. 220). Without the condition of sensuous intuition, for which they supply the synthesis, the categories have no relation to any definite object; for without this condition they contain nothing but the logical function, or the form of the concept, by means of which alone nothing can be known and distinguished as to any object belonging to it (Ibid., pp. 213, 214).]

[Footnote 2: The thing in itself denotes the object in so far as it can be thought by us, but not intuited, and consequently not determined by intuitions, i.e., cannot be known. It is only through the schematism that the categories are limited to phenomena. O. Liebmann (Kant und die Epigonen, p. 27, and passim) overlooks or ignores this when he says: Kant here allows himself to "recognize an object emancipated from the forms of knowledge, therefore an irrational object, i.e., to represent something which is not representable-wooden iron." The thing in itself is insensible, but not irrational, and the forms of intuition and forms of thought joined by Liebmann under the title forms of knowledge have in Kant a by no means equal rank.]

[Footnote 3: A category by itself, freed from all conditions of intuition (e.g., the representation of a substance which is thought without permanence in time, or of a cause which should not act in time), can yield no definite concept of an object.]

Though the concepts of the understanding possess a cognitive value in the sphere of phenomena alone, the hope still remains of gaining an entrance into the suprasensible sphere through the concepts of reason. It is indubitable that our spirit is conscious of a far higher need than that for the mere connection of phenomena into experience; it is that which cannot be experienced, the Ideas God, freedom, and immortality, which form the real end of its inquiry. Can this need be satisfied, and how? Can this end be attained, and reality be given to the Ideas? This is the third question of the Critique of Reason.

%(c) The Reason's Ideas of the Unconditioned (Transcendental Dialectic).%-"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds thence to the understanding, and ends with reason." The understanding is the faculty of rules, reason the faculty of principles. The categories of the understanding are necessary concepts which make experience possible, and which, therefore, can always be given in experience; the Ideas of reason are necessary concepts to which no corresponding object can be given. Each of the Ideas gives expression to an unconditioned. How does the concept of the unconditioned arise, and what service does it perform for knowledge?

As perceptions are connected by the categories in the unity of the understanding, and thus are elevated into experience, so the manifold knowledge of experience needs a higher unity, the unity of reason, in order to form a connected system. This is supplied to it by the Ideas-which, consequently, do not relate directly to the objects of intuition, but only to the understanding and its judgments-in order, through the concept of the unconditioned, to give completion to the knowledge of the understanding, which always moves in the sphere of the conditioned, i.e., to give it the greatest possible unity together with the greatest possible extension. The concept of the absolute grows out of the logical task which is incumbent on reason, i.e., inference, and it may be best explained from this as a starting point. In the syllogism the judgment asserted in the conclusion is derived from a general rule, the major premise. The validity of this general proposition is, however, itself conditional, dependent on higher conditions. Then, as reason seeks the condition for each conditioned moment, and always commands a further advance in the series of conditions, it acts under the Idea of the totality of conditions, which, nevertheless, since it can never be given in experience, does not denote an object, but only an heuristic maxim for knowledge, the maxim, namely, never to stop with any one condition as ultimate, but always to continue the search further. The Idea of the unconditioned or of the completeness of conditions is a goal which we never attain, but which we are continually to approach. The categories and the principles of the understanding were constitutive principles, the Ideas are regulative merely; their function is to guide the understanding, to give it a direction helpful for the connection of knowledge, not to inform it concerning the actual character of things.

Since reason is the faculty of inference (as the understanding was found to be the faculty of judgment), the forms of the syllogism perform the same service for us in our search for the Ideas as the forms of judgment in the discovery of the categories. To the categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive syllogisms correspond the three concepts of reason, the soul or the thinking subject, the world or the totality of phenomena, and God, the original being or the supreme condition of the possibility of all that can be thought. By means of these we refer all inner phenomena to the ego as their (unknown) common subject, think all beings and events in nature as ordered under the comprehensive system of the (never to be experienced) universe, and regard all things as the work of a supreme (unknowable) intelligence. These Ideas are necessary concepts; not accidental products nor mere fancies, but concepts sprung from the nature of reason; their use is legitimate so long as we remember that we can have a problematical concept of objects corresponding to them, but no knowledge of these; that they are problems and rules for knowledge, never objects and instruments of it. Nevertheless the temptation to regard these regulative principles as constitutive and these problems as knowable objects is almost irresistible; for the ground of the involuntary confusion of the required with the given absolute lies not so much in the carelessness of the individual as in the nature of our cognitive faculty. The Ideas carry with them an unavoidable illusion of objective reality, and the sophistical inferences which spring from them are not sophistications of men, but of pure reason itself, are natural misunderstandings from which even the wisest cannot free himself. At best we can succeed in avoiding the error, not in doing away with the transcendental illusion from which it proceeds. We can see through the illusion and avoid the erroneous conclusions built upon it, not shake off the illusion itself.

On this erroneous objective use of the Ideas three so-called sciences are based: speculative psychology, speculative cosmology, and speculative theology, which, together with ontology, constitute the stately structure of the (Wolffian) metaphysics. The Critique of Reason completes its work of destruction when, as Dialectic (Logic cf. Illusion), it follows the refutation of dogmatic ontology-developed in the Analytic-which believed that it knew things in themselves through the concepts of the understanding, with a refutation of rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology. It shows that the first is founded on paralogisms, and the second entangled in irreconcilable contradictions, while the third makes vain efforts to prove the existence of the Supreme Being.

(i) The Paralogisms of Rational Psychology. The transcendental self-consciousness or pure ego which accompanies and connects all my representations, the subject of all judgments which I form, is, as the Analytic recognized, the presupposition of all knowing (pp. 358-359), but as such it can never become an object of knowledge. We must not make a given object out of the subject which never can be a predicate, nor substitute a real thinking substance for the logical subject of thought, nor revamp the unity of self-consciousness into the simplicity and identical personality of the soul. The rational psychology of the Wolffian school is guilty of this error, and whatever of proof it advances for the substantiality, simplicity, and personality of the soul, and, by way of deduction, for its immateriality and immortality as well as for its relation to the body, is based upon this substitution, this ambiguity of the middle term, and therefore upon a quaternio terminorum,-all its conclusions are fallacious. It is allowable and unavoidable to add in thought an absolute subject, the unity of the ego, to inner phenomena;[1] it is inadmissible to treat the Idea of the soul as a knowable thing. In order to be able to apply the category of substance to it, we would have to lay hold of a permanent in intuition such as cannot be found in the inner sense. Empirical psychology, then, alone remains for the extension of our knowledge of mental life, while rational psychology shrivels up from a doctrine into a mere discipline, which watches that the limits of experience are not overstepped. But even as a mere limiting determination it has great value. For, along with the hope of proving the immateriality and immortality of the soul, the fear of seeing them disproved is also dissipated; materialism is just as unfounded as spiritualism, and if the conclusions of the latter concerning the soul as a simple, immaterial substance which survives the death of the body, cannot be proved, yet we need not, for that reason, regard them as erroneous, for the opposite is as little susceptible of demonstration. The whole question belongs not in the forum of knowledge, but in the forum of faith, and that which we gain by the proof that nothing can be determined concerning it by theoretical reasoning (viz., assurance against materialistic objections) is far more valuable than what we lose.

[Footnote 1: The rational concept of the soul as a simple, independent intelligence does not signify an actual being, but only expresses certain principles of systematic unity in the explanation of psychical phenomena, viz., "To regard all determinations as existing in one subject, all powers, as far as possible, as derived from, one fundamental power, all change as belonging to the states of one and the same permanent being, and to represent all phenomena in space as totally distinct from acts of thought."]

(2) The Antinomies of Rational Cosmology. If in its endeavor to spin metaphysical knowledge concerning the nature of the spirit and the existence of the soul after death out of the concept of the thinking ego the reason falls into the snare of an ambiguous terminus medius, the difficulties which frustrate its attempts to use the Idea of the world in the extension of its knowledge a priori are of quite a different character. Here the formal correctness of the method of inference is not open to attack. It may be proved with absolute strictness (and in the apagogical or indirect form, from the impossibility of the contrary) that the world has a beginning in time, and also that it is limited in space; that every compound substance consists of simple parts; that, besides the causality according to the laws of nature, there is a causality through freedom, and that an absolutely necessary Being exists, either as a part of the world or as the cause of it. But the contrary may be proved with equal stringency (and indirectly, as before): The world is infinite in space and time; there is nothing simple in the world; there is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place entirely according to the laws of nature; and there exists no absolutely necessary Being either within the world or without it. This is the famous doctrine of the conflict of the four cosmological theses and antitheses or of the Antinomy of Pure Reason, the discovery of which indubitably exercised a determining influence upon the whole course of the Kantian Critique of Reason, and which forms one of its poles. The transcendental idealism, the distinction between phenomena and noumena, and the limitation of knowledge to phenomena, all receive significant confirmation from the Antithetic. Without the critical idealism (that which is intuited in space and time, and known through the categories, is merely the phenomenon of things, whose "in itself" is unknowable), the antinomies would be insoluble. How is reason to act in view of the conflict? The grounds for the antitheses are just as conclusive as those for the theses; on neither side is there a preponderance which could decide the result. Ought reason to agree with both parties or with neither?

The solution distinguishes the first two antinomies, as the mathematical, from the second two, as the dynamical antinomies; in the former, since it is a question of the composition and division of quanta, the conditions may be homogeneous with the conditioned, in the latter, heterogeneous. In the former, thesis and antithesis are alike false, since both start from the inadmissible assumption that the universe (the complete series of phenomena) is given, while in fact it is only required of us (is an Idea). The world does not exist in itself, but only in the empirical regress of phenomenal conditions, in which we never can reach infinity and never the limitation of the world by an empty space or an antecedent empty time, for infinite space, like empty space (and the same holds in regard to time), is not perceivable. Consequently the quantity of the world is neither finite nor infinite. The question of the quantity of the world is unanswerable, because the concept of a sense-world existing by itself (before the regress) is self-contradictory. Similarly the problem whether the composite consists of simple elements is insoluble, because the assumption that the phenomenon of body is a thing in itself, which, antecedent to all experience, contains all the parts that can be reached in experience-in other words, that representations exist outside of the representative faculty-is absurd. Matter is infinitely divisible, no doubt, yet it does not consist of infinitely numerous parts, and just as little of a definite number of simple parts, but the parts exist merely in the representation of them, in the division (decomposition), and this goes as far as possible experience extends. The case is different with the dynamical antinomies, where thesis and antithesis can both be true, in so far as the former is referred to things in themselves and the latter to phenomena. The contradiction vanishes if we take that which the thesis asserts and the antithesis denies in different senses. The fact that in the world of phenomena the causal nexus proceeds without interruption and without end, so that there is no room in it either for an absolutely necessary Being or for freedom, does not conflict with this other, that beyond the world of sense there may exist an omnipotent, omniscient cause of the world, and an intelligible freedom as the ground of our empirically necessary actions. "May exist," since for the critical philosopher, who has learned that every extension of knowledge beyond the limits of experience is impossible, the question can concern only the conceivability of the world-ground and of freedom. This possibility is amply sufficient to give a support for faith, as, on the other hand, it is indispensable in order to satisfy at once the demands of the understanding and of reason, especially to satisfy their practical interests. For if it were not possible to resolve the apparent contradiction, and to show its members capable of reconciliation, it would be all over either with the possibility of experiential knowledge or with the basis of ethics and religion. Without unbroken causal connection, no nature; without freedom, no morality; and without a Deity, no religion. Of special interest is the solution of the third antinomy, which is accomplished by means of the valuable (though in the form in which it is given by Kant, untenable) conception of the intelligible character.[1] Man is a citizen of two worlds. As a being of the senses (phenomenon) he is subject in his volition and action to the control of natural necessity, while as a being of reason (thing in itself) he is free. For science his acts are the inevitable results of precedent phenomena, which, in turn, are themselves empirically caused; nevertheless moral judgment holds him responsible for his acts. In the one case, they are referred to his empirical character, in the other, to his intelligible character. Man cannot act otherwise than he does act, if he be what he is, but he need not be as he is; the moral constitution of the intelligible character, which reflects itself in the empirical character, is his own work, and its radical transformation (moral regeneration) his duty, the fulfillment of which is demanded, and, hence, of necessity possible.

[Footnote 1: On the difficulties in the way of this theory and the possibility of their removal cf. R. Falckenberg, Ueber den intelligiblen Character, zur Kritik der Kantischen Freiheitslehre (from the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. lxxv.), Halle, 1879.]

(3) Speculative Theology. The principle of complete determination, according to which of all the possible predicates of things, as compared with their opposites, one must belong to each thing, relates the thing to be determined to the sum of all possible predicates or the Idea of an ens realissimum, which, since it is the representation of a single being, may be called the Ideal of pure reason. From this prototype things, as its imperfect copies, derive the material of their possibility; all their manifold determinations are simply so many modes of limiting the concept of the highest reality, which is their common substratum, just as all figures are possible only as different ways of limiting infinite space. Or better: the derivative beings are not related to the ideal of the original Being as limitations to the sum of the highest reality (on which view the Supreme Being would be conceived as an aggregate consisting of the derivative beings, whereas these presuppose it, and hence cannot constitute it), but as consequences to a ground. But reason does not remain content with this entirely legitimate thought of the dependence of finite things on the ideal of the Being of all beings, as a relation of concepts to the Idea, but, dazzled by an irresistible illusion, proceeds to realize, to hypostatize, and to personify this ideal, and, since she herself is dimly conscious of the illegitimacy of such a transformation of the mere Idea into a given object, devises arguments for the existence of God. Reason, moreover, would scarcely be induced to regard a mere creation of its thought as a real being, if it were not compelled from another direction to seek a resting place somewhere in the regress of conditions, and to think the empirical reality of the contingent world as founded upon the rock of something absolutely necessary. There is no being, however, which appears more fit for the prerogative of absolute necessity than that one the concept of which contains the therefore to every wherefore, and is in no respect defective; in other words, rational theology joins the rational ideal of the most perfect Being with the fourth cosmological Idea of the absolutely necessary Being.

The proof of the existence of God may be attempted in three ways: we may argue the existence of a supreme cause either by starting from a definite experience (the special constitution and order of the sense-world, that is, its purposiveness), or from an indefinite experience (any existence whatever), or, finally, abstracting from all experience, from mere concepts a priori. But neither the empirical nor the transcendent nor the intermediate line of thought leads to the goal. The most impressive and popular of the proofs is the physico-theological argument. But even if we gratuitously admit the analogy of natural products with the works of human art (for the argument is not able to prove that the purposive arrangement of the things in the world, which we observe with admiration, is contingent, and could only have been produced by an ordering, rational principle, not self-produced by their own nature according to general mechanical laws), this can yield an inference only to an intelligent author of the purposive form of the world, and not to an author of its matter, only, therefore, to a world-architect, not to a world-creator. Further, since the cause must be proportionate to the effect, this argument can prove only a very wise and wonderfully powerful, but not an omniscient and omnipotent, designer, and so cannot give any definite concept of the supreme cause of the world. In leaping from the contingency of the purposive order of the world to the existence of something absolutely necessary and thence to an all-comprehensive reality, the teleological argument abandons the ground of experience and passes over into the cosmological argument, which in its turn is merely a concealed ontological argument (these two differ only in the fact that the cosmological proof argues from the antecedently given absolute necessity of a being to its unlimited reality, and the ontological, conversely, from supreme reality to necessary existence). The weaknesses of the cosmological argument in its first half consist in the fact that, in the inference from the contingent to a cause for it, it oversteps the boundary of the sense-world, and, in the inference from the impossibility of an infinite series of conditions to a first cause, it employs the subjective principle of investigation-to assume hypothetically a necessary ultimate ground in behalf of the systematic unity of knowledge-as an objective principle applying to things in themselves. The ontological argument, finally, which the two nominally empirical arguments hoped to avoid, but in which in the end they were forced to take refuge, goes to wreck on the impossibility of dragging out of an idea the existence of the object corresponding to it. Existence denotes nothing further than the position of the subject with all the marks which are thought in its concept-that is, its relation to our knowledge, but does not itself belong to the predicates of the concept, and hence cannot be analytically derived from the latter. The content of the concept is not enriched by the addition of being; a hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred conceived dollars. All existential propositions are synthetic; hence the existence of God cannot be demonstrated from the concept of God. It is a contradiction, to be sure, to say that God is not almighty, just as it is a contradiction to deny that a triangle has three angles: if posit the concept I must not remove the predicate which necessarily belongs to it. If I remove the subject, however, together with its predicate (the almighty God is not), no contradiction arises, for in that case nothing remains to be contradicted.

Thus all the proofs for the existence of a necessary being are shown to be illusory, and the basis of speculative theology uncertain. Nevertheless the idea of God retains its validity, and the perception of the inability of reason to demonstrate its objective reality on theoretical grounds has great value. For though the existence of God cannot be proved, it is true, by way of recompense, that it cannot be disproved; the same grounds which show us that the assertion of his existence is based on a weak foundation suffice also to prove every contrary assertion unfounded. And should practical motives present themselves to turn the scale in favor of the assumption of a supreme and all-sufficient Being, reason would be obliged to take sides and to follow these grounds, which, it is true, are not objectively sufficient,[1] but still preponderant, and than which we know none better. After, however, the objective reality of the idea of God is guaranteed from the standpoint of ethics, there remains for transcendental theology the important negative duty ("censorship," Censor) of exactly determining the concept of the most perfect Being (as a being which through understanding and freedom contains the first ground of all other things), of removing from it all impure elements, and of putting an end to all opposite assertions, whether atheistic, deistic (deism maintains the possibility of knowing the existence of an original being, but declares all further determination of this being impossible), or (in the dogmatic sense) anthropomorphic. Theism is entirely possible apart from a mistaken anthropomorphism, in so far as through the predicates which we take from inner experience (understanding and will) we do not determine the concept of God as he is in himself, but only analogically[2] in his relation to the world. That concept serves only to aid us in our contemplation of the world,[3] not as a means of knowing the Supreme Being himself. For speculative purposes it remains a mere ideal, yet a perfectly faultless one, which completes and crowns the whole of human knowledge.

[Footnote 1: "They need favor to supply their lack of legitimate claims." Of themselves alone, therefore, they are unable to yield any theological knowledge, but they are fitted to prepare the understanding for it, and to give emphasis to other possible (moral) proofs.]

[Footnote 2: We halt at the boundary of the legitimate use of reason, without overstepping it, when we limit our judgment to the relation of the world to the Supreme Being, and in this allow ourselves a symbolical anthropomorphism only, which in reality has reference to our language alone and not to the object.]

[Footnote 3: We are compelled to look on the world as if it were the work of a supreme intelligence and will. "We may confidently derive the phenomena of the world and their existence from other (phenomena), as if no necessary being existed, and yet unceasingly strive after completeness in the derivation, as though such a being were presupposed as a supreme ground." In short, physical (mechanical) explanation, and a theistic point of view or teleological judgment.]

Thus the value of the Ideas is twofold. By showing the untenable ness of atheism, fatalism, and naturalism, they I clear the way for the objects of faith. By providing natural science with the standpoint of a systematical unity through teleological connection, they make an extension of the use of the understanding possible within the realm of experience,[1] though not beyond it. The systematic development of the Kantian teleology, which is here indicated in general outlines only, is found in the second part of the Critique of Judgment; while the practical philosophy, which furnishes the only possible proof, the moral proof, for the reality of the Ideas, erects on the site left free by the removal of the airy summer-houses of dogmatic metaphysics the solid mansion of critical metaphysics, that is, the metaphysics of duties and of hopes. "I was obliged to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith." The transition from the impossible theoretical or speculative knowledge of things in themselves to the possible "practical knowledge" of them (the belief that there is a God and a future world) is given in the Doctrine of Method, which is divided into four parts (the Discipline, the Canon, the Architectonic, and the History of Pure Reason), in its second chapter. There, in the ideal of the Summum Bonum, the proof is brought forward for the validity of the Ideas God, freedom, and immortality, as postulates inseparable from moral obligation; and by a cautious investigation of the three stages of assent (opinion, knowledge, and belief) both doctrinal and moral belief are assigned their places in the system of the kinds of knowledge.

[Footnote 1: The principle to regard all order in the world (e.g., the shape of the earth, mountains, and seas, the members of animal bodies) as if it proceeded from the design of a supreme reason leads the investigator on to various discoveries.]

We may now sum up the results of the three parts of Kant's theoretical philosophy. The pure intuitions, the categories, and the Ideas are functions of the spirit, and afford non-empirical (erfahrungsfreie) knowledge concerning the objects of possible experience (and concerning the possibility of knowledge). The first make universal and necessary knowledge possible in relation to the forms under which objects can be given to us; the second make a similarly apodictic knowledge possible in relation to the forms under which phenomena must be thought; the third make possible a judgment of phenomena differing from this knowledge, yet not in conflict with it. The categories and the Ideas, moreover, yield problematical concepts of objects which are not given to us in intuition, but which may exist outside of space and time: things in themselves cannot be known, it is true, but they can be thought, a fact of importance in case we should be assured of their existence in some other way than by sensuous intuition.

The determination of the limits of speculative reason is finished. All knowing and all demonstration is limited to phenomena or possible experience. But the boundary of that which can be experienced is not the boundary of that which is, still less of that which ought to be; the boundary of theoretical reason is not the boundary of practical reason. We ought to act morally; in order to be able to do this we must ascribe to ourselves the power to initiate a series of events; and, in general, we are warranted in assuming everything the non-assumption of which makes moral action impossible. If we were merely theoretical, merely experiential beings, we should lack all occasion to suppose a second, intelligible world behind and above the world of phenomena; but we are volitional and active beings under laws of reason, and though we are unable to know things in themselves, yet we may and must postulate them-our freedom, God, and immortality. For not only that which is a condition of experience is true and necessary, but that, also, which is a condition of morality. The discovery of the laws and conditions of morality is the mission of practical philosophy.

%2. Theory of Ethics.%

The investigation now turns from the laws of nature, which express a "must," to the laws of will, in which an "ought" is expressed, and by which certain actions are not compelled, but prescribed. (If we were merely rational, and not at the same time sensuous beings, the moral law would determine the will in the form of a natural law; since, however, the constant possibility of deviation is given in the sensibility, or, rather, the moral standpoint can only be attained by conquering the sensuous impulses, therefore the moral law speaks to us in the form of an "ought," of an imperative.) Among the laws of the will or imperatives, also, there are some which possess the character of absolute necessity and universality, and which, consequently, are a priori. As the understanding dictates laws to the phenomenal world, so practical reason gives a law to itself, is autonomous; and as the a priori laws of nature relate only to the form of the objects of experience, so the moral law determines not the content, but only the form of volition: "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." The law of practical reason is a "categorical imperative." What does this designation mean, and what is the basis of the formula of the moral law which has just been given?

Practical principles are either subjectively valid, in which case they are termed maxims (volitional principles of the individual), or objectively valid, when they are called imperatives or precepts. The latter are either valid under certain conditions (If you wish to become a clergyman you must study theology; he who would prosper as a merchant must not cheat his customers), or unconditionally valid (Thou shalt not lie). All prudential or technical rules are hypothetical imperatives, the moral law is a categorical imperative. The injunction to be truthful is not connected with the condition that we intend to act morally, but this general purpose, together with all the special purposes belonging to it, to avoid lying, etc., is demanded unconditionally and of everyone-as surely as we are rational beings we are under moral obligation, not in order to reputation here below and happiness above, but without all "ifs" and "in order to's." Thou shalt unconditionally, whatever be the outcome. And as the moral law is independent of every end to be attained, so it suffers neither increase nor diminution in its binding force, whether men obey it or not. It has absolute authority, no matter whether it is fulfilled frequently or seldom, nay, whether it is fulfilled anywhere or at any time whatsoever in the world!

There is an important difference between the good which we are under obligation to do and the evil which we are under obligation not to do, and the goods and ills which we seek and avoid. The goods are always relatively good only, good for something-as means to ends-and a bad use can be made of all that nature and fortune give us as well as a good one. That which duty commands is an end in itself, in itself good, absolutely worthful, and no misuse of it is possible. It might be supposed that pleasure, that happiness is an ultimate end. But men have very different opinions in regard to what is pleasant, one holding one thing pleasurable and another another. It is impossible to discover by empirical methods what duty demands of all men alike and under all circumstances; the appeal is to our reason, not to our sensibility. If happiness were the end of rational beings, then nature had endowed us but poorly for it, since instead of an unfailing instinct she has given us the weak and deceitful reason as a guide, which, with its train, culture, science, art, and luxury, has brought more trouble than satisfaction to mankind. Man has a destiny other than well-being, and a higher one-the formation of good dispositions: here we have the only thing in the whole world that can never be used for evil, the only thing that does not borrow its value from a higher end, but itself originally and inalienably contains it, and that gives value to all else that merits esteem. "Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will." Understanding, courage, moderation, and whatever other mental gifts or praiseworthy qualities of temperament may be cited, as also the gifts of fortune, "are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects, but they may also become extremely evil and mischievous, if the will which is to make use of them is not good." These are the classic words with which Kant commences the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Ethics.

When does the will deserve the predicate "good"? Let us listen to the popular moral consciousness, which distinguishes three grades of moral recognition. He who refrains from that which is contrary to duty, no matter from what motives-as, for example, the shopkeeper who does not cheat because he knows that honesty is the best policy-receives moderate praise for irreproachable outward behavior. We bestow warmer praise and encouragement on him whom ambition impels to industry, kind feeling to beneficence, and pity to render assistance. But he alone earns our esteem who does his duty for duty's sake. Only in this third case, where not merely the external action, nor merely the impulse of a happy disposition, but the will itself, the maxim, is in harmony with the moral law, where the good is done for the sake of the good, do we find true morality, that unconditioned, self-grounded worth. The man who does that which is in accordance with duty out of reflection on its advantages, and he who does it from immediate-always unreliable-inclination, acts legally; he alone acts morally who, without listening to advantage and inclination, takes up the law into his disposition, and does his duty because it is duty. The sole moral motive is the consciousness of duty, respect for the moral lazy[1]

[Footnote 1: The respect or reverence which the law, and, derivatively, the person in whom it is realized, compel from us, is, as self-produced through a concept of reason and as the only feeling which can be known a priori, specifically different from all feelings of inclination or fear awakened by sensuous influences. As it strengthens and raises our rational nature, the consciousness of our freedom and of our high destination, but, at the same time, humbles our sensibility, there is mingled with the joy of exaltation a certain pain, which permits no intimate affection for the stern and sublime law. It is not quite willingly that we pay our respect-just because of the depressing effect which this feeling exerts on our self-love.]

Here Kant is threatened by a danger which he does not succeed in escaping. The moral law demands perfect purity in our maxims; only the idea of duty, not an inclination, is to determine the will. Quite right. Further, the one judging is himself never absolutely certain, even when his own volition is concerned, that no motives of pleasure have mingled with the feeling of duty in contributing to the right action, unless that which was morally demanded has been contrary to all his inclinations. When a person who is not in need and who is free from cupidity leaves the money-box intrusted to his care untouched, or when a man who loves life overcomes thoughts of suicide, I may assume that the former was sufficiently protected against the temptation by his moderation, and the other by his cheerful disposition, and I rate their behavior as merely legal. When, on the other hand, an official inclined to extravagance faithfully manages the funds intrusted to him, or one who is oppressed by hopeless misery preserves his life, although he does not love it, then I may ascribe the abstinence from wrongdoing to moral principles. This, too, may be admitted. We are certain of the morality of a resolution only when it can be shown that no inclination was involved along with the maxim. The cases where the right action is performed in opposition to inclination are the only ones in which we may be certain that the moral quality of the action is unmixed-are they, then, the only ones in which a moral disposition is present? Kant rightly maintains that the admixture of egoistic motives beclouds the purity of the disposition, and consequently diminishes its moral worth. With equal correctness he draws attention to the possibility that, even when we believe that we are acting from pure principles, a hidden sensuous impulse may be involved. But he leaves unconsidered the possibility that, even when the inclinations are favorable to right action, the action may be performed, not from inclination, but because of the consciousness of duty. Given that a man is naturally industrious, does this happy predisposition protect him from fits of idleness? And if he resists them, must it always be his inclination to activity and never moral principle which overcomes the temptation? In yielding to the danger of confounding the limits of our certain knowledge of the purity of motives with the limits of moral action, and in admitting true morality only where action proceeds from principle in opposition to the inclinations, Kant really deserves the reproach of rigorism or exaggerated purism-sometimes groundlessly extended to the justifiable strictness of his views-and the ridicule of the well-known lines of Schiller ("Scruples of Conscience" and "Decision" at the conclusion of his distich-group "The Philosophers"):

"The friends whom I love I gladly would serve, but to this inclination

incites me;

And so I am forced from virtue to swerve since my act, through affection,

delights me.

The friends whom thou lovest thou must first seek to scorn, for to no

other way can I guide thee;

'Tis alone with disgust thou canst rightly perform the acts to which

duty would lead thee."

If we return from this necessary limitation of a groundless inference (that true morality is present only when duty is performed against our inclinations, when it is difficult for us, when a conflict with sensuous motives has preceded), to the development of the fundamental ethical conceptions, we find that important conclusions concerning the origin and content of the moral law result from the principle obtained by the analysis of moral judgment: this law commands with unconditional authority-for every rational being and under all circumstances-what has unconditioned worth-the disposition which corresponds to it. The universality and necessity (unconditionalness) of the categorical imperative proves that it springs from no other source than reason itself. Those who derive the moral law from the will of God subject it to a condition, viz., the immutability of the divine will. Those who find the source of moral legislation in the pursuit of happiness make rational will dependent on a natural law of the sensibility; it would be folly to enjoin by a moral law that which everyone does of himself, and does superabundantly. Moreover, the theories of the social inclinations and of moral sense fail of their purpose, since they base morality on the uncertain ground of feeling. Even the principle of perfection proves insufficient, inasmuch as it limits the individual to himself, and, in the end, like those which have preceded, amounts to a refined self-love. Theonomic ethics, egoistic ethics, the ethics of sympathy, and the ethics of perfection are all eudemonistic, and hence heteronomic. The practical reason[1] receives the law neither from the will of God nor from natural impulse, but draws it out of its own depths; it binds itself.

[Footnote 1: Will and practical reason are identical. The definition runs: Will is the faculty of acting in accordance with the representation of laws.]

The grounds which establish the derivation of the moral law from the will or reason itself exclude at the same time every material determination of it. If the categorical imperative posited definite ends for the will, if it prescribed a direction to definite objects, it could neither be known a priori nor be valid for all rational beings: its apodictic character forbids the admission of empirical elements of every sort.[1] If we think away all content from the law we retain the form of universal legality,[2] and gain the formula: "Act so that the maxim of thy will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation." The possibility of conceiving the principle of volition as a universal law of nature is the criterion of morality. If you are in doubt concerning the moral character of an action or motive simply ask yourself the question, What would become of humanity if everyone were to act according to the same principle? If no one could trust the word of another, or count on aid from others, or be sure of his property and his life, then no social life would be possible. Even a band of robbers cannot exist unless certain laws are respected as inviolable duties.

[Footnote 1: The moral law, therefore, is independent of all experience in three respects, as to its origin, its content, and its validity. It springs from reason, it contains a formal precept only, and its validity is not concerned, whether it meets with obedience or not. It declares what ought to be done, even though this never should be done.]

[Footnote 2: The "formal principle" of the Kantian ethics has met very varied criticism. Among others Edmund Pfleiderer (Kantischer Kritizismus und Englische Philosophie, 1881) and Zeller express themselves unfavorably, Fortlage and Liebmann (Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, 2d ed., 1880, p. 671) favorably.]

It was indispensable to free the supreme formula of the moral law from all material determinations, i.e., limitations. This does not prevent us, however, from afterward giving the abstract outline a more concrete coloring. First of all, the concept of the dignity of persons in contrast to the utility of things offers itself as an aid to explanation and specialization. Things are means whose worth is always relative, consisting in the useful or pleasant effects which they exercise, in the satisfaction of a need or of the taste, they can be replaced by other means, which fulfill the same purpose, and they have a (market or fancy) value; while that which is above all value and admits of no equivalent has an ultimate worth or dignity, and is an object of respect. The legislation which determines all worth, and with this the disposition which corresponds to it, has a dignity, an unconditioned, incomparable worth, and lends its subjects, rational beings framed for morality, the advantage of being ends in themselves. "Therefore morality, and humanity so far as it is capable of morality, is that which alone possesses dignity." Accordingly the following formulation of the moral law may be held equivalent to the first: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, never as a means only."

A further addition to the abstract formula of the categorical imperative results from the discussion of the question, What universal ends admit of subsumption under it, i.e., stand the test of fitness to be principles of a universal legislation? Here again Kant stands forth as an arbiter between the contending parties, and, with a firm grasp, combines the useful elements from both sides after winnowing them out from the worthless principles. The majority of the eudemonistic systems, along with the promotion of private welfare, prescribe the furtherance of universal good without being able to indicate at what point the pursuit of personal welfare should give way to regard for the good of others, while in the perfectionist systems the social element is wanting or retreats unduly into the background. The principle of happiness represents moral empiricism, the principle of perfection moral rationalism. Kant resolves the antithesis by restricting the theses of the respective parties within their proper limits: "Make thine own perfection and the happiness of others the end of thy actions;" these are the only ends which are at the same time duties. The perfection of others is excluded by the fact that I cannot impart to anyone a good disposition, for everyone must acquire it for himself; personal happiness by the fact that everyone seeks it naturally.

This antithesis (which is crossed by the further distinction between perfect, i.e., indispensable, and imperfect duties) serves as a basis for the division of moral duties into duties toward ourselves and duties toward other men.[1] The former enjoin the preservation and development of our natural and moral powers, the latter are duties of obligation (of respect) or of merit (of love). Since no one can obligate me to feel, we are to understand by love not the pathological love of complacency, but only the active love of benevolence or practical sympathy. Since it is just as impossible that the increase of the evils in the world should be a duty, the enervating and useless excitation of pity, which adds to the pain of the sufferer the sympathetic pain of the spectator, is to be struck off the list of virtues, and active readiness to aid put in its place. In friendship love and respect unite in exact equipoise. Veracity is one of the duties toward self; lying is an abandonment of human dignity and under no conditions allowable, not even if life depends on it.

[Footnote 1: All duties are toward men, not toward supra-human or infra-human beings. That which we commonly term duties toward animals, likewise the so-called duties toward God, are in reality duties toward ourselves. Cruelty to animals is immoral, because our sympathies are blunted by it. To have religion is a duty to ourselves, because the view of moral laws as laws of God is an aid to morality.]

After it has been settled what the categorical imperative enjoins, the further problem awaits us of explaining how it is possible. The categorical imperative is possible only on I the presupposition of our freedom. Only a free being gives laws to itself, just as an autonomous being alone is free. In theoretical philosophy the pure self-consciousness, the "I think," denoted a point where the thing in itself manifests to us not its nature, indeed, but its existence. The same holds true in practical philosophy of the moral law. The incontestable fact of the moral law empowers me to rank myself in a higher order of things than the merely phenomenal order, and in another causal relation than that of the merely necessary (mechanical) causation of nature, to regard myself as a legislative member of an intelligible world, and one independent of sensuous impulses-in short, to regard myself as free. Freedom is the ratio essendi of the self-given moral law, the latter the ratio cognoscendi of freedom. The law would have no meaning if we did not possess the power to obey it: I can because I ought. It is true that freedom is a mere Idea, whose object can never be given to me in an experience, and whose reality, consequently, cannot be objectively known and proved, but nevertheless, is required with satisfactory subjective necessity as the condition of the moral law and of the possibility of its fulfillment. I may not say it is certain, but, with safety, I am certain that I am free. Freedom is not a dogmatic proposition of theoretical reason, but a postulate of practical reason; and the latter holds the primacy over the former to this extent, that it can require the former to show that certain transcendent Ideas of the suprasensible, which are most intimately connected with moral obligation, are compatible with the principles of the understanding. It was just in view of the practical interests involved in the rational concepts God, freedom, immortality, that it was so important to establish, at least, their possibility (their conceivability without contradiction). That, therefore, which the Dialectic recognized as possible is in the Ethics shown to be real: Whoever seeks to fulfill his moral destiny-and this is the duty of every man-must not doubt concerning the conditions of its possible fulfillment, must, in spite of their incomprehensibility, believe in freedom and a suprasensible world. They are both postulates of practical reason, i.e., assumptions concerning that which is in behalf of that which ought to be. Naturally the interests of the understanding must not be infringed upon by those of the will. The principle of the complete causal determination of events retains its validity unimpeached for the sphere of the knowledge of the understanding, that is, for the realm of phenomena; while, on the other hand, it remains permissible for us to postulate another kind of causality for the realm of things in themselves, although we can have no idea of its how, and to ascribe to ourselves a free intelligible character.

While the Idea of freedom can be derived directly from the moral law as a postulate thereof, the proof of the reality of the two other Ideas is effected indirectly by means of the concept of the "highest good," in which reason conceives a union of perfect virtue and perfect happiness. The moral law requires absolute correspondence between the disposition and the commands of reason, or holiness of will. But besides this supreme good (bonum supremum) of completed morality, the highest good (bonum consummatum) further contains a degree of happiness corresponding to the degree of virtue. Everyone agrees in the judgment that, by rights, things should go well with the virtuous and ill with the wicked, though this must not imply any deduction from the principle previously announced that the least impulse of self-interest causes the maxim to forfeit its worth: the motive of the will must never be happiness, but always the being worthy of happiness. The first element in the highest good yields the argument for immortality, and the second the argument for the existence of God. (1) Perfect correspondence between the will and the law never occurs in this life, because the sensibility never allows us to attain a permanently good disposition, armed against every temptation; our will can never be holy, but at best virtuous, and our lawful disposition never escape the consciousness of a constant tendency to transgression, or at least of impurity. Since, nevertheless, the demands of the (Christian) moral law continue in their unrelenting stringency to be the standard, we are justified in the hope of an unlimited continuation of our existence, in order that by constant progress in goodness we may draw nearer in infinitum to the ideal of holiness. (2) The establishment of a rational proportion between happiness and virtue is also not to be expected until the future life, for too often on earth it is the evil man who prospers, while the good man suffers. A justly proportioned distribution of rewards and punishment can only be expected from an infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, which rules the moral world even as it has created the natural world. Deity alone is able to bring the physical and moral realms into harmony, and to establish the due relation between well-being and right action. This, the moral argument, is the only possible proof for the existence of God. Theology is not possible as speculative, but only as moral theology. The certitude of faith, moreover, is only different from, not less than, the certainty of knowledge, in so far as it brings with it not an objective, but a subjective, although universally valid, necessity. Hence it is better to speak of belief in God as a need of the reason than as a duty; while a logical error, not a moral one, should be charged against the atheist. The atheist is blind to the intimate connection which exists between the highest good and the Ideas of the reason; he does not see that God, freedom, and immortality are the indispensable conditions of the realization of this ideal.

Thus faith is based upon duty without being itself duty: ethics is the basis of religion, which consists in our regarding moral laws as (instar, as if they were) divine commands. They are not valid or obligatory because God has given them (this would be heteronomy), but they should be regarded as divine because they are necessary laws of reason. Religion differs from ethics only in its form, not in its content, in that it adds to the conception of duty the idea of God as a moral lawgiver, and thus increases the influence of this conception on the will; it is simply a means for the promotion of morality. Since, however, besides natural religion or the pure faith of reason (the moral law and the moral postulates), the historical religions contain statutory determinations or a doctrinal faith, it becomes the duty of the critical philosopher to inquire how much of this positive admixture can be justified at the bar of reason. In this investigation the question of the divine revelation of dogma and ceremonial laws is neither supra-rationalistically affirmed nor naturalistically derived, but rationalistically treated as an open question.

The four essays combined under the title Religion within the Limits of

Reason Only treat of the Radical Evil in Human Nature, the Conflict of the

Good Principle with the Evil for the Mastery over Man, the Victory of the

Good Principle over the Evil and the Founding of a Kingdom of God upon

Earth, and, finally, Service and False Service under the Dominion of the

Good Principle, or Religion and Priestcraft; or more briefly, the fall, the

atonement (the Christ-idea), the Church, and true and false service of God.

(1) The individual evil deeds of the empirical character point to an original fault of the intelligible character, a propensity to evil dwelling in man and not further deducible. This, although it is self-incurred, may be called natural and innate, and consists (not in the sensibility merely, but) in a freely chosen reversal of the moral order of our maxims, in virtue of which the maxim of duty or morality is subordinated to that of well-being or self-love instead of being placed above it, and that which should be the supreme condition of all satisfaction is degraded into a mere means thereto. Morality is therefore a conversion from the evil to the good, and requires a complete revolution in the disposition, the putting on of a new man, a "new birth," which, an act out of time, can manifest itself in the temporal world of phenomena only as a gradual transformation in conduct, as a continuous advance, but which, we may hope, is judged by him who knows the heart, who regards the disposition instead of particular imperfect actions, as a completed unity.

(2) By the eternal Son of God, for whose sake God created all things, we are to understand the ideal of the perfect man, which in truth forms the end of creation, and is come down from heaven, etc. To believe in Christ means to resolve to realize in one's self the ideal of human nature which is well pleasing to God, or to make the divine disposition of the Son of God our own, not to believe that this ideal has appeared on earth as an actual man, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The only saving faith is the belief of reason in the ideal which Christ represents, and not the historical belief in his person. The vicarious atonement of the ideal man for those who believe on him is to be interpreted to mean that the sufferings and sacrifices (crucifixion of the flesh) imposed by moral conversion, which are due to the sinful man as punishment, are assumed by the regenerate man: the new Adam bears the sufferings of the old. In the same way as that in which Kant handles the history of Christ and the doctrine of justification, all biblical narratives and ecclesiastical doctrines are in public instruction (from the pulpit) to be interpreted morally, even where the authors themselves had no such meaning in mind.

(3) The Church is a society based upon the laws of virtue, an ethical community or a people of God, whose members confirm each other in the performance of duty by example and by the profession of a common moral conviction; we are all brothers, the children of one father. Ideally there is only one (the universal, invisible) Church, and its foundation the pure faith of reason; but in consequence of a weakness peculiar to human nature the foundation of an actual church required the addition of a statutory historical faith, with claims to a divine origin, from which a multitude of visible churches and the antithesis of orthodox and heretics have sprung. The history of the Church since the establishment of Christianity represents the conflict between the historical faith and the faith of reason; its goal is the submission of the former to the latter, as, indeed, we have already begun to perceive that God does not require a special service beyond the practice of virtue.

(4) The true service of God consists in a moral disposition and its manifestation: "All that man supposes himself able to do in order to please God, beyond living a good life, is false service" False service is the false subordination of the pure faith of reason to the statutory faith, by which the attainment of the goal of religious development is hindered and the laity are brought into dangerous dependence upon the clergy. Priestcraft, hypocrisy, and fanaticism enter in the train of fetich service. The church-faith is destined little by little to make itself superfluous. It has been necessary as a vehicle, as a means for the introduction and extension of the pure religion of morality, and it still remains useful for a time, until humanity shall become of age; with man's entrance on the period of youth and manhood, however, the leading-string of holy traditions, which in its time did good service, becomes unnecessary, nay, finally, a fetter. (This relative appreciation of the positive element in religion, in antithesis to the unthinking rejection of it by the Illumination, resembles the view of Lessing; cf. pp. 306-309.) Moreover, since it is a duty to be a co-worker in the transition from the historical to the pure religious faith, the clergy must be free as scientific theologians, as scholars and authors to examine the doctrines of faith and to give expression to dissenting opinions, while, as preachers in the pulpit, speaking under commission, they are bound to the creeds. To decide the articles of belief unalterable would be a crime against human nature, whose primal destination is just this-to progress. To renounce illumination means to trample upon the divine rights of reason.

The "General Observations" appended to each division add to the four principle discussions as many collateral inquiries concerning Operations of Grace, Miracles, Mysteries, and Means of Grace, objects of transcendent ideas, which do not properly belong in the sphere of religion within pure reason itself, but which yet border on it. (1) We are entirely incapable of calling forth works of grace, nay, even of indicating the marks by which actual divine illuminations are distinguished from imaginary ones; the supposed experience of heavenly influences belongs in the region of superstitious religious illusion. But their impossibility is just as little susceptible of proof as their reality. Nothing further can be said on the question, save that works of grace may exist, and perhaps must exist in order to supplement our imperfect efforts after virtue; and that everyone, instead of waiting for divine assistance, should do for his own amendment all that is in his power. (2) Kant judges more sharply in regard to the belief in miracles, which contradict the laws of experience without in the least furthering the performance of our duties. In practical life no one regards miracles as possible; and their limitation to the past and to rare instances does not make them more credible. (3) In so far as the Christian mysteries actually represent impenetrable secrets they have no bearing on moral conduct; so far as they are morally valuable they admit of rational interpretation and thus cease to be mysteries. The Trinity signifies the three moral qualities or powers united in the head of the moral state: the one God as holy lawgiver, gracious governor, and just judge. (4) The services of the Church have worth as ethical ceremonies, as emblems of the moral disposition (prayer) and of moral fellowship (church attendance, baptism, and the Lord's Supper); but to find in these symbolic ceremonies means of grace and to seek to purchase the favor of God by them, is an error of the same kind as sorcery and fetichism. The right way leads from virtue to grace, not in the opposite direction; piety without morality is worthless.

The Kantian theory of religion is rationalistic and moralistic. The fact that religion is based on morality should never be assailed. But the foundation is not the building, the origin not the content and essence of the thing itself. As far as the nature of religion is concerned, the Kantian view does not exclude completion in the direction of Schleiermacher's theory of feeling, just as by its speculative interpretation of the Christian dogmas and its appreciation of the history of religion as a gradual transformation of historical faith into a faith of reason, it points out the path afterward followed by Hegel. The philosophy of religion of the future must be, as some recent attempts aim to be (O. Pfleiderer, Biedermann, Lipsius), a synthesis of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.

While the moral law requires rightness not only of the action, but also of the disposition, the law of right is satisfied when the act enjoined is performed, no matter from what motives. Legal right, as the sum of the conditions under which the will of the one can consist with the will of others according to a universal law, relates only to enforceable actions, without concerning itself about motives. Private right includes right in things or property, personal right or right of contract, and real-personal right (marriage right); public right is divided into the right of states, of nations, and of citizens of the world. Kant's theory of punishment is original and important. He bases it not upon prudential regard for the protection of society, or the deterrence or reformation of the criminal, but upon the exalted idea of retaliation (jus talionis), which demands that everyone should meet with what his deeds deserve: Eye for eye, life for life. In politics Kant favors democratic theories, though less decidedly than Rousseau and Fichte. As he followed with interest the efforts after freedom manifested in the American and French Revolutions, so he opposed an hereditary nobility as a hindrance to the natural equality of rights, and demanded freedom for the public expression of opinion as the surest means of guarding against revolutions. The only legitimate form of the state is the republican, i.e., that in which the executive power is separated from the legislative power, in contrast to despotism, where they are united in one hand. The best guaranty for just government and civil liberty is offered by constitutional monarchy, in which the people through its representatives exercises the legislative power, the sovereign the executive power, and judges chosen by the people the judicial power. The contract from which we may conceive the state to have arisen is not to be regarded as an historical fact, but as a rational idea or rule, by which we may judge whether the laws are just or not: that which the people as a whole cannot prescribe for itself, this cannot be prescribed for it by the ruler (cf. p. 235). That there is a constant progress-not only of individuals, but-of the race, not merely in technical and intellectual, but also in moral respects, is supported both by rational grounds (without faith in such progress we could not fulfill our duty as co-laborers in it) and by experiential grounds (above all, the unselfish sympathy which all the world gave to the French Revolution); and the never-ending complaint that the times are growing worse proves only that mankind is continually setting up stricter standards for itself. The beginning of history is to be placed at the point where man passes out of the condition of innocence, in which instinct rules, and begins to subdue nature, which hitherto he has obeyed. The goal of history, again, is the establishment of the perfect form of the state. Nature itself co-operates with freedom in the gradual transformation of the state based on necessity (Notstaat) into a rational state, inasmuch as selfish competition and the commercial spirit require peace, order, and justice for their own security and help to bring them about. And so, further, we need not doubt that humanity will constantly draw nearer to the ideal condition of everlasting peace among the nations (guaranteed by a league of states which shall as a mediator settle disputes between individual states), however impracticable the idea may at present appear.

If the bold declaration of Fortlage, that in Kant the system of absolute truth appeared, is true of any one part of his philosophy, it is true of the practical part, in which Christian morality has found its scientific expression. If we may justly complain that on the basis of his sharp distinction between legality and morality, between legal duty and virtue-duty, Kant took into account only the legal side of the institutions of marriage and of the state, overlooking the fact that besides these they have a moral importance and purpose, if we may demand a social ethic as a supplement to his ethics, which is directed to the duties of the individual alone, yet these and other well-founded desiderata may be attained by slight corrections and by the addition of another story to the Kantian edifice, while the foundations are still retained. The bases are immovable. Autonomy, absolute oughtness, the formal character of the law of reason, and the incomparable worth of the pure, disinterested disposition-these are the corner stones of the Kantian, nay, of all morals.

%3. Theory of the Beautiful and of Ends in Nature.%

We now know the laws which the understanding imposes upon nature and those which reason imposes upon the will. If there is a field in which to be (Sein) and ought to be (Sollen), nature and freedom, which we have thus far been forced to consider antithetical, are reconciled-and that there is such a field is already deducible from the doctrine of the religious postulates (as practical truths or assumptions concerning what is, in behalf of what ought to be), and from the hints concerning a progress in history (in which both powers co-operate toward a common goal)-then the source of its laws is evidently to be sought in that faculty which mediates alike between understanding and reason and between knowing and feeling: in Judgment, as the higher faculty of feeling. Judgment, in the general sense, is the faculty of thinking a particular as contained in a universal, and exercises a twofold function: as "determinant" judgment it subsumes the particular under a given universal (a law), as "reflective" it seeks the universal for a given particular. Since the former coincides with the understanding, we are here concerned only with the reflective judgment, judgment in the narrower sense, which does not cognize objects, but judges them, and this according to the principle of purposiveness.[1]

[Footnote 1: The universal laws springing from the understanding, to which every nature must conform to become an object of experience for us, determine nothing concerning the particular form of the given reality; we cannot deduce the special laws of nature from them. Nevertheless the nature of our cognitive faculty does not allow us to accept the empirical manifoldness of our world as contingent, but impels us to regard it as purposive or adapted to our knowledge, and to look upon these special laws as if an intelligence had given them in order to make a system of experience possible.]

This, in turn, is of two kinds. An object is really or objectively purposive (perfect) when it corresponds to its nature or its determination, formally or subjectively purposive (beautiful) when it is conformed to the nature of our cognitive faculty. The perception of purpose is always accompanied by a feeling of pleasure; in the first case, where the pleasure is based on a concept of the object, it is a logical satisfaction, in the second, where it springs only from the harmony of the object with our cognitive powers, aesthetic satisfaction. The objects of the teleological and the aesthetic judgment, the purposive and the beautiful products of nature and art, constitute the desired intermediate field between nature and freedom; and here again the critical question comes up, How, in relation to these, synthetic judgments a priori are possible?

%(a) Esthetic Judgment.%-The formula holds of Kant's aesthetics as well as of his theoretical and practical philosophy, that his aim is to overcome the opposition between the empirical and the rationalistic theories, and to find a middle course of his own between the two extremes. Neither Burke nor Baumgarten satisfied him. The English aesthetics was sensational, the German, i.e., that of the Wolffian school, rationalistic. The former identified the beautiful with the agreeable, the latter identified it with the perfect or with the conformity of the object to its concept; in the one case, aesthetic appreciation is treated as sensuous pleasure, in the other, it is treated as a lower, confused kind of knowledge, its peculiar nature being in both cases overlooked. In opposition to the sensualization of aesthetic appreciation, its character as judgment must be maintained; and in opposition to its rationalization, its character as feeling. This relation of the Kantian aesthetics to that of his predecessors explains both its fundamental tendency and the elements in it which appear defective and erroneous. In any case, Kant shows himself in this field also an unapproachable master of careful analysis.

The first task of aesthetics is the careful distinction of its object from related phenomena. The beautiful has points of contact with the agreeable, the good, the perfect, the useful, and the true. It is distinguished from the true by the fact that it is not an object of knowledge, but of satisfaction. If we inquire further into the difference between the satisfaction in the beautiful and the satisfaction in the agreeable, in the good (in itself), and in the (good for something, as a means, or in the) useful, which latter three have this in common, that they are objects of appetition-of sensuous want, of moral will, of prudential desire-it becomes evident that the beautiful pleases through its mere representation (that is, independently of the real existence of the object), and that the delight in the beautiful is a contemplative pleasure. It is for contemplation only, not to be sensuously enjoyed nor put to practical use; and, further, its production is not a universal duty. Sensuous, prudential, or moral appetition has always an "interest" in the actual existence of the object; the beautiful, on the other hand, calls forth a disinterested satisfaction.

According to quality the beautiful is the object of a disinterested, free (bound by no interest), and sportive satisfaction. According to quantity and modality the judgment of taste claims universal and necessary validity, without this being based upon concepts. This posits further differences between the beautiful and the agreeable and the good. The good also pleases universally, but it pleases through concepts; the agreeable as well as the beautiful pleases without a concept, but it does not please universally.

That which pleases the reason through the concept is good; that which pleases the senses in sensation is agreeable. That which pleases universally and necessarily without a concept is beautiful. Moral judgment demands the assent of all, and its universal validity is demonstrable. The judgment concerning the agreeable is not capable of demonstration, but neither does it pretend to possess universal validity; we readily acknowledge that what is pleasant to one need not be so to every other man. In regard to the beautiful, on the contrary, we do not content ourselves with saying that tastes differ, but we expect it to please all. We expect everyone to assent to our judgment of taste, although it is able to support itself by no proofs.

Here there is a difficulty: since the judgment of taste does not express a characteristic of the object, but a state of mind in the observer, a feeling, a satisfaction, it is purely subjective; and yet it puts forth a claim to be universally communicable. The difficulty can be removed only on the assumption of a common aesthetic sense, of a corresponding organization of the powers of representation in all men, which yields the common standard for the pleasurableness of the impression. The agreeable appeals to that in man which is different in different individuals, the beautiful to that which functions alike in all; the former addresses itself to the passive sensibility, the latter to the active judgment. The agreeable-because of the non-calculable differences in our sensuous inclinations, which are in part conditioned by bodily states-possesses no universality whatever, the good possesses an objective, and the beautiful a subjective universality. The judgment concerning the agreeable has an empirical, that concerning the beautiful an a priori, determining ground: in the former case, the judgment follows the feeling, in the latter, it precedes it.

An object is considered beautiful (for, strictly speaking, we may say only this, not that it is beautiful) when its form puts the powers of the human mind in a state of harmony, brings the intuitive and rational faculties into concordant activity, and produces an agreeable proportion between the imagination and the understanding. In giving the occasion for an harmonious play of the cognitive activities (that is, for an easy combination of the manifold into unity) the beautiful object is purposive for us, for our function of apprehension; it is-here we obtain a determination of the judgment of taste from the standpoint of relation-purposive without a definite purpose. We know perfectly well that a landscape which attracts us has not been specially arranged for the purpose of delighting us, and we do not wish to find in a work of art anything of an intention to please. An object is perfect when it is purposive for itself (corresponds to its concept); useful when it is purposive for our desire (corresponds to a practical intention of man); beautiful when the arrangement of its parts is purposive for the relation between the fancy and understanding of the beholder (corresponds in an unusual degree to the conditions of our apprehension). Perfection is internal (real, objective) purposiveness, and utility is external purposiveness, both for a definite purpose; beauty, on the other hand, is purposiveness without a purpose, formal, subjective purposiveness. The beautiful pleases by its mere form. The satisfaction in the perfect is of a conceptual or intellectual kind, the satisfaction in the beautiful, emotional or aesthetic in character.

The combination of these four determinations yields an exhaustive definition of the beautiful: The beautiful is that which universally and necessarily arouses disinterested satisfaction by its mere form (purposiveness without the representation of a purpose).

Since the pleasurableness of the beautiful rests on the fact that it establishes a pleasing harmony between the imagination and the understanding, hence between sensuous and intellectual apprehension, the aesthetic attitude is possible only in sensuous-rational beings. The agreeable exists for the animal as well, and the good is an object of approval for pure spirits; but the beautiful exists for humanity alone. Kant succeeded in giving very delicate and felicitous verbal expression to these distinctions: the agreeable gratifies (vergnügt) and excites inclination (Neigung); the good is approved (gebilligt) and arouses respect (Achtung); the beautiful "pleases" (gef?llt) and finds "favor" (Gunst).

In the progress of the investigation the principle that beauty depends on the form alone, and that the concept, the purpose, the nature of the object is not taken into account at all in aesthetic judgment, experiences limitation. In its full strictness this applies only to a definite and, in fact, a subordinate division of the beautiful, which Kant marks off under the name of pure or free beauty. With this he contrasts adherent beauty, as that which presupposes a generic concept to which its form must correspond and which it must adequately present. Too much a purist not to mark the coming in of an intellectual pleasure as a beclouding of the "purity" of the aesthetic satisfaction, he is still just enough to admit the higher worth of adherent beauty. For almost the whole of artificial beauty and a considerable part of natural beauty belong to this latter division, which we to-day term ideal and characteristic beauty. Examples of free or purely formal beauty are tapestry patterns, arabesques, fountains, flowers, and landscapes, the pleasurableness of which rests simply on the proportion of their form and relations, and not upon their conformity to a presupposed significance and determination of the thing. A building, on the contrary-a dwelling, a summer-house, a temple-is considered beautiful only when we perceive in it not merely harmonious relations of the parts one to another, but also an agreement between the form and the purpose or generic concept: a church must not look like a chalet. Here the external form is compared with an inner nature, and harmony is required between form and content. Adherent beauty is significant and expressive beauty, which, although the satisfaction in it is not "purely" aesthetic, nevertheless stands higher than pure beauty, because it gives to the understanding also something to think, and hence busies the whole spirit.

The analytical investigations concerning the nature of the beautiful receive a valuable supplement in the classical definition of genius. Kant gives two definitions of productive talent, one formal and one genetic.

Natural beauty is a beautiful thing; artificial beauty, a beautiful representation of a thing. The gift of agreeably presenting a thing which in itself, perhaps, is ugly, is called taste. To judge of the beautiful it is sufficient to possess taste, but for its production there is still another talent needed, spirit or genius. For an art product can fulfill the demands of taste and yet not aesthetically satisfy; while formally faultless, it may be spiritless.

While beautiful nature looks as though it were art (as though it were calculated for our enjoyment), beautiful art should resemble nature, must not appear to be intentional though, no doubt, it is so, must show a careful but not an overnice adherence to rules (i.e., not one which fetters the powers of the artist). This is the case when the artist bears the rule in himself, that is, when he is gifted. Genius is the innate disposition (through) which (nature) gives rules to art; its characteristics are originality, exemplariness, and unreflectiveness. It does not produce according to definite rules which can be learned, but it is a law in itself, it is original. It creates instinctively without consciousness of the rule, and cannot describe how it produces its results. It creates typical works which impel others to follow, not to imitate. It is only in art that there are geniuses, i.e., spirits who produce that which absolutely cannot be learned, while the great men of science differ only in degree, not in kind, from their imitators and pupils, and that which they discover can be learned by rule.

This establishes the criteria by which genius may be recognized. If we ask by what psychological factors it is produced the answer is as follows: Genius presupposes a certain favorable relation between imagination and reason. Genius is the faculty of aesthetic Ideas, but an aesthetic Idea is a representation of the imagination which animates the mind, which adds to a concept of the understanding much of ineffable thought, much that belongs to the concept but which cannot be comprehended in a definite concept. With the aid of this idea Kant solves the antinomy of the aesthetic judgment. The thesis is: The judgment of taste is not based upon concepts; for otherwise it would admit of controversy (would be determinable by proofs). The antithesis is: It is based upon concepts; for otherwise we could not contend about it (endeavor to obtain assent). The two principles are reconcilable, for "concept" is understood differently in the two cases. That which the thesis rightly seeks to exclude from the judgment of beauty is the determinate concept of the understanding; that which the antithesis with equal justice pronounces indispensable is the indeterminate concept, the aesthetic Idea.

The freest play is afforded the imagination by poetry, the highest of all arts, which, with rhetoric ("insidious," on account of its earnest intention to deceive), forms the group termed arts of speech. To the class of formative arts belong architecture, sculpture, and painting as the art of design. A third group, the art of the beautiful play of sensations, includes painting as the art of color, and music, which as a "fine" art is placed immediately after poetry, as an "agreeable" art at the very foot of the list, and as the play of tone in the vicinity of the entertaining play of fortune [games of chance] and the witty play of thought. The explanation of the comic (the ludicrous is based, according to Kant, on a sudden transformation of strained expectation into nothing) lays great (indeed exaggerated) weight on the resulting physiological phenomena, the bodily shock which heightens vital feeling and favors health, and which accompanies the alternating tension and relaxation of the mind.

Besides free and adherent beauty, there is still a third kind of aesthetic effect, the Sublime. The beautiful pleases by its bounded form. But also the boundless and formless can exert aesthetic effect: that which is great beyond all comparison we judge sublime. Now this magnitude is either extensive in space and time or intensive greatness of force or power; accordingly there are two forms of the sublime. That phenomenon which mocks the power of comprehension possessed by the human imagination or surpasses every measure of our intuition, as the ocean and the starry heavens, is mathematically sublime. That which overcomes all conceivable resistance, as the terrible forces of nature, conflagrations, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, thunderstorms, is dynamically sublime or mighty. The former is relative to the cognitive, the latter to the appetitive faculty. The beautiful brings the imagination and the understanding into accord; by the sublime the fancy is brought into a certain favorable relation, not directly to be termed harmony, with reason. In the one case there arose a restful, positively pleasurable mood; here a shock is produced, an indirect and negative pleasure proceeding from pain. Since the sublime exceeds the functional capability of our sensuous representations and does violence to the imagination, we first feel small at the sight of the absolutely great, and incapable of compassing it with our sensuous glance. The sensibility is not equal to the impression; this at first seems contrary to purpose and violent. This humiliating impression, however, is quickly followed by a reaction, and the vital forces, which were at first checked, are stimulated to the more lively activity. Moreover, it is the sensuous part of man which is humbled and the spiritual part that is exalted: the overthrow of sensibility becomes a triumph for reason. The sight of the sublime, that is, awakens the Idea of the unconditioned, of the infinite. This Idea can never be adequately presented by an intuition, but can be aroused only by the inadequacy of all that is sensuous to present it; the infinite is presented through the impossibility of presenting it. We cannot intuit the infinite, but we can think it. In comparison with reason (as the faculty of Ideas, the faculty of thinking the infinite) even the greatest thing that can be given in the sense-world appears small; reason is the absolutely great. "That is sublime the mere ability to think which proves a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense." "That is sublime which pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of the senses." The conflict between phantasy and reason, the insufficiency of the former for the attainment of the rational Idea, makes us conscious of the superiority of reason. Just because we feel small as sensuous beings we feel great as rational beings. The pleasure (related to the moral feeling of respect and, like this, mingled with a certain pain) which accompanies this consciousness of inner greatness is explained by the fact that the imagination, in acknowledging reason superior, places itself in the appropriate and purposive relation of subordination. It is evident from the foregoing that the truly sublime is reason, the moral nature of man, his predisposition and destination, which point beyond the present world. Schiller declares that "in space the sublime does not dwell," and Kant says, "Sublimity is contained in none of the things of nature, but only in our mind, in so far as we are conscious of being superior to nature within us and without us." Nevertheless, since in this contemplation we fix our thoughts entirely on the object without reflecting on ourselves, we transfer the admiration of right due to the reason and its Idea of the infinite by subreption to the object by which the Idea is occasioned, and call the object itself sublime, instead of the mood which it wakes in us.

If the sublime marks the point where the aesthetic touches on the boundary of the moral, the beautiful is also not without some relation to the good. By showing the agreement of sensibility and reason, which is demanded by the moral law, realized in aesthetic intuition (as a voluntary yielding of the imagination to the legitimacy of the understanding), it gives us the inspiring consciousness that the antithesis is reconcilable, that the rational can be presented in the sensuous, and so becomes a "symbol of the good."

%(b) Teleological Judgment.%-Teleological judgment is not knowledge, but a way of looking at things which comes into play where the causal or mechanical explanation fails us. This is not the case if the purposiveness is external, relative to its utility for something else. The fact that the sand of the sea-shore furnishes a good soil for the pine neither furthers nor prevents a causal knowledge of it. Only inner purposiveness, as it is manifested in the products of organic nature, brings the mechanical explanation to a halt. Organisms are distinguished above inorganic forms by the fact that of themselves they are at once cause and effect, that they are self-productive and this both as a species (the oak springs from the acorn, and in its turn bears acorns) and as individuals (self-preservation, growth, and the replacement of dying parts by new ones), and also by the fact that the reciprocally productive parts are in their form and their existence all conditioned by the whole. This latter fact, that the whole is the determining ground for the parts, is perfectly obvious in the products of human art. For here it is the representation of the whole (the idea of the work desired) which as the ground precedes the existence and the form of the parts (of the machine). But where is the subject to construct organisms according to its representations of ends? We may neither conceive nature itself as endowed with forces acting in view of ends, nor a praetermundane intelligence interfering in the course of nature. Either of these suppositions would be the death of natural philosophy: the hylozoist endows matter with a property which conflicts with its nature, and the theist oversteps the boundary of possible experience. Above all, the analogy of the products of organic nature with the products of human technique is destroyed by the fact that machines do not reproduce themselves and their parts cannot produce one another, while the organism organizes itself.

For our discursive understanding an interaction between the whole and the parts is completely incomprehensible. We understand when the parts precede the whole (mechanically) or the representation of the whole precedes the parts (teleologically); but to think the whole itself (not the Idea thereof) as the ground of the parts, which is demanded by organic life, is impossible for us. It would have been otherwise if an intuitive understanding had been bestowed upon us. For a being possessing intellectual intuition the antithesis between possibility and actuality, between necessity and contingency, between mechanism and teleology, would disappear along with that between thought and intuition. For such a being everything possible (all that it thinks) would be at the same time actual (present for intuition), and all that appears to us contingent-intentionally selected from several possibilities and in order to an end-would be necessary as well; with the whole would be given the parts corresponding thereto, and consequently natural mechanism and purposive connection would be identical, while for us, to whom the intuitive understanding is denied, the two divide. Hence the teleological view is a mere form of human representation, a subjective principle. We may not say that a mechanical origin of living beings is impossible, but only that we are unable to understand it. If we knew how a blade of grass or a frog sprang from mechanical forces, we would also be in a position to produce them.

The antinomy of the teleological judgment-thesis: all production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws; antithesis: some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws, but to judge them requires the causality of final causes-is insoluble so long as both propositions are taken for constitutive principles; but it is soluble when they are taken as regulative principles or standpoints for judgment. For it is in no wise contradictory, on the one hand, to continue the search for mechanical causes as far as this is in any way possible, and, on the other, clearly to recognize that, at last, this will still leave a remainder which we cannot make intelligible without calling to our aid the concept of ends. Assuming that it were possible to carry the explanation of life from life, from ancestral organisms (for the generatio aequivoca is an absurd theory) so far that the whole organic world should represent one great family descended from one primitive form as the common mother, even then the concept of final causes would only be pushed further back, not eliminated: the origin of the first organization will always resist mechanical explanation. Besides this mission of putting limits to causal derivation and of filling the gap in knowledge by a necessary, although subjective, way of looking at things, the Idea of ends has still another, the direct promotion of knowledge from efficient causes through the discovery of new causal problems. Thus, for example, physiology owes the impulse to the discovery of previously unnoticed mechanical connections (cf. also p. 382 note) to the question concerning the purpose of organs. As doctrines mechanism and teleology are irreconcilable and impossible; as rules or maxims of inquiry they are compatible, and the one as indispensable as the other.

After the problem of life, which is insoluble by means of the mechanical explanation, has necessitated the application of the concept of ends, the teleological principle must, at least by way of experiment, be extended to the whole of nature. This consideration culminates in the position that man, as the subject of morality, must be held to be the final aim of the world, for it is only in regard to a moral being that no further inquiry can be raised as to the purpose of its existence. It also repeats the moral argument for the existence of a supreme reason, thus supplementing physico-theology, which is inadequate to the demonstration of one absolutely perfect Deity; so that the third Critique, like the two preceding, concludes with the Idea of God as an object of practical faith.

* * * * *

There are three original and pregnant pairs of thoughts which cause Kant's name to shine in the philosophical sky as a star of the first magnitude: the demand for a critique of knowledge and the proof of a priori forms of knowledge; the moral autonomy and the categorical imperative; the regulative validity of the Ideas of reason and the practical knowledge of the transcendent world. No philosophical theory, no scientific hypothesis can henceforth avoid the duty of examining the value and legitimacy of its conclusions, as to whether they keep within the limits of the competency of human reason; whether Kant's determination of the origin and the limits of knowledge may count on continued favor or not, the fundamental critical idea, that reflection upon the nature and range of our cognitive faculty is indispensable, retains its validity for all cases and makes an end of all philosophizing at random.[1] No ethical system will with impunity pass by the autonomous legislation of reason and the unconditional imperative (the admonition of conscience translated into conceptual language): the nature and worth of moral will will be everywhere sought in vain if they are not recognized where Kant has found them-in the unselfish disposition, in that maxim which is fitted to become a general law for all rational beings. The doctrine of the Ideas, finally, reveals to us, beyond the daylight of phenomenal knowledge, the starlit landscape of another mode of looking at things,[2] in which satisfaction is afforded for the hitherto unmet wishes of the heart and demands of the reason.

[Footnote 1: "Reason consists just in this, that we are able to give account of all our concepts, opinions, and assertions, either on objective or subjective grounds."]

[Footnote 2: Those who regard all future metaphysics as refuted by the Critique of Reason are to be referred to the positive side of the Kantian doctrine of Ideas. Kant admits that the mechanical explanation does not satisfy reason, and that, besides it, a judgment according to Ideas is legitimate. When, therefore, the speculation of the constructive school gives an ideal interpretation of the world, it may be regarded as an extended application of "regulative principles," which exceeds its authority only when it professes to be "objective knowledge."]

The effect of the three Critiques upon the public was very varied. The first great work excited alarm by the sharpness of its negations and its destruction of dogmatic metaphysics, which to its earliest readers appeared to be the core of the matter; Kant was for them the universal destroyer. Then the Science of Knowledge brought into prominence the positive, boldly conquering side, the investigation of the conditions of empirical knowledge. In later times the endeavor has been made to do justice to both sides, but, in opposition to the overbold procedure of the constructive thinkers, who had fallen into a revived dogmatism, more in the spirit of caution and resignation. The second great work aroused glowing enthusiasm: "Kant is no mundane luminary," writes Jean Paul in regard to the Critique of Practical Reason, "but a whole solar system shining at once." The third, because of its subject and by its purpose of synthetic reconciliation between fields heretofore sharply separated, gained the sympathy of our poet-heroes Schiller and Goethe, and awakened in a young, speculative spirit Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Schelling reclaimed the intuitive understanding, which Kant had problematically attributed to the primal spirit, as the property of the philosopher, after Fichte had drawn attention to the fact that the consciousness of the categorical imperative, which Kant had not thoroughly investigated, could be nothing else than intellectual intuition, because in it knowing and doing coincide. Fichte, however, does not derive the material for his system from the Critique of Judgment, though he also had a high appreciation of it, but from the two earlier Critiques, the fundamental conceptions of which he-following the hint that practical and theoretical reason are only different applications of one and the same reason-brings into the closest connection. He unites the central idea of the practical philosophy, the freedom and autonomous legislation of the will, with the leading principle of the theoretical philosophy, the spontaneity of the understanding, under the original synthesis of the pure ego, in order to deduce from the activity of the ego not only the a priori forms of knowledge, but also, rejecting the thing in itself, the whole content of empirical consciousness. The thought which intervenes between the Kantian Critique of Reason and the development of thoroughgoing idealism by Fichte, with its criticisms of and additions to the former and its preparation for the latter, may be glanced at in a few supplementary pages.

%4. From Kant to Fichte.%

To begin with the works which aided in the extension and recognition of the Kantian philosophy, besides Kant's Prolegomena, the following stand in the front rank: Exposition of the Critique of Pure Reason, by the K?nigsberg court preacher, Johannes Schulz, 1784; the flowing Letters concerning the Kantian Philosophy, by K.L. Reinhold in Wieland's Deutscher Merkur, 1786-87; and the Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung, in Jena, founded in 1785, and edited by the philologist Schütz and the jurist Hufeland, which offered itself as the organ of the new doctrine. Jena became the home and principal stronghold of Kantianism; while by the beginning of the nineteenth century almost all German chairs belonged to it, and the non-philosophical sciences as well received from it stimulation and guiding ideas.

In the camp of the enemy there was no less of activity. The Wolffian, Eberhard of Halle, founded a special journal for the purpose of opposing the Kantian philosophy: the Philosophisches Magazin, 1789, continued from 1792 as the Philosophisches Archiv. The Illumination collected its forces in the Philosophische Bibliothek, edited by Feder and Meiners. Nicolai waved the banner of common sense in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, and in satirical romances, and was handled as he deserved by the heroes of poetry and philosophy (cf. the Xenien of Goethe and Schiller, Kant's Letter on Bookmaking, and Fichte's cutting disposal of him, Nicolai's Life and Peculiar Opinions). The attacks of the faith-philosophers have been already noticed (pp. 310-314).

The advance from Kant to Fichte was preparing alike among friends and enemies, and this in two points. The demand was in part for a formal complement (a first principle from which the Kantian results could be deduced, and by which the dualism of sense and understanding could be overcome), in part for material correction (the removal of the thing in itself) and development (to radical idealism). Karl Leonhard Reinhold (born at Vienna in 1758; fled from a college of the St. Barnabite order, 1783; in 1787-94 professor in Jena, and then as the successor of Tetens in Kiel, where he died in 1823) undertook the former task in his Attempt at a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation, 1789. Kant's classical theory of the faculty of cognition requires for its foundation a theory of the faculty of representation, or an elementary philosophy, which shall take for its object the deduction of the several functions of reason (intuition, concept, Idea) from the original activity of representation. The Kantian philosophy lacks a first principle, which, as first, cannot be demonstrable, but only a fact immediately evident and admitted by everyone. The primal fact, which we seek, is consciousness. No one can dispute that every representation contains three things: the subject, the object, and, between the two, the activity of representation. Accordingly the principle of consciousness runs: "The representation is distinguished in consciousness from the represented [object] and the representing [subject], and is referred to both." From this first principle Reinhold endeavors to deduce the well-known principles of the material manifold given by the action of objects, and the forms of representation spontaneously produced by the subject, which combine this manifold into unity. When, a few years later, Fichte's Science of Knowledge brilliantly succeeded in bridging the gap between sense and understanding by means of a first principle, thus accomplishing what Reinhold had attempted, the latter became one of his adherents, only to attach himself subsequently to Jacobi, and then to Bardili (Outlines of Logic, 1800), and to end with a verbal philosophy lacking both in influence and permanence.

In Reinhold's elementary philosophy the thing in itself was changed from a problematical, negative, merely limiting concept into a positive element of doctrine. Objections were raised against Kantianism, as thus dogmatically modified in the direction of realism, by Schulze, Maimon, and Beck-by the first for purposes of attack, by the second in order to further development, and by the third with an exegetical purpose. Gottlob Ernst Schulze, professor in Helmst?dt, and from 1810 in G?ttingen, in his Aenesidemus (1792, published anonymously), which was followed later by psychological works, defended the skeptical position in opposition to the Critique of Reason. Hume's skepticism remains unrefuted by Kant and Reinhold. The thing in itself, which is to produce the material of representation by affecting the senses, is a self-contradictory idea. The application of the category of cause to things in themselves violates the doctrine that the latter are unknowable and that the use of the pure concepts of the understanding beyond the sphere of experience is inadmissible. The transcendental philosophy has never proved that the ground of the material of representation cannot, just as the form thereof, reside in the subject itself.

Side by side with the anti-critical skepticism of Aenesidemus-Schulze, Salomon Maimon (died 1800; cf. Witte, 1876), who was highly esteemed by the greatest philosophers of his time, represents critical skepticism. With Reinhold he holds consciousness (as the combination of a manifold into objective unity) to be the common root of sensibility and understanding, and with Schulze, the concept of the thing in itself to be an imaginary or irrational quantity, a thought that cannot be carried out; it is not only unknowable, but unthinkable. That alone is knowable which we ourselves produce, hence only the form of representation. The matter of representation is "given," but this does not mean that it arises from the action of the thing in itself, but only that we do not know its origin. Understanding and sense, or spontaneity and receptivity, do not differ generically, but only in degree, viz., as complete and incomplete consciousness. Sensation is an incomplete consciousness, because we do not know how its object arises.

By the removal of the thing in itself Aenesidemus-Schulze sought to refute the Kantian theory and Maimon to improve it. Sigismund Beck (1761-1840), in his Only Possible Standpoint from which the Critical Philosophy must be Judged, 1796,[1] seeks by it to elucidate the Kantian theory, holding up idealism as its true meaning. In opposition to the usual opinion that a representation is true when it agrees with its object, he points to the impossibility of comparing the one with the other. Of objects out of consciousness we can know nothing; after the removal of all that is subjective there is nothing positive left of the representation. Everything in it is produced by us; the matter arises together with the form through the "original synthesis."

[Footnote 1: This book forms the third volume of his Expository Abridgment of the Critical Writings of Professor Kant; in the same year appeared the Outlines of the Critical Philosophy. Cf. on Beck, Dilthey in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. ii., 1889, pp. 592-650.]

The last mentioned attempts to develop the Kantian philosophy were so far surpassed by Fichte's great achievement that they have received from their own age and from posterity a less grateful appreciation and remembrance than was essentially their due. A phenomenon of a different sort, which is also to be placed at the threshold between Kant and Fichte, but which forms rather a supplement to the no?tics and ethics of the latter than a link in the transition to them, has, on the contrary, gained an honorable position in the memory of the German people, viz., Schiller's aesthetics.[1] In its center stand the Kantian antithesis of sensibility and reason and the reconciliation of the two sides of human nature brought about by its occupation with the beautiful. Artistic activity or the play-impulse mediates between the lower, sensuous matter-impulse and the higher, rational form-impulse, and unites the, two in harmonious co-operation. Where appetite seeks after satisfaction, and where the strict idea of duty rules, there only half the man is occupied; neither lust nor moral worth is beautiful. In order that beauty and grace may arise, the matter-impulse and the form-impulse, or sensibility and reason, must manifest themselves uniformly and in harmony. Only when he "plays" is man wholly and entirely man; only through art is the development of humanity possible. The discernment of the fact that the beautiful brings into equilibrium the two fundamental impulses, one or the other of which preponderates in sensuous desire and in moral volition, does not of itself decide the relative rank of artistic and moral activity. The recognition of this mediating position of art may be connected with the view that it forms a transitional stage toward and a means of education for morality, as well as with the other, that in it human nature attains its completion. Evidence of both views can be found in Schiller's writings. At first he favors the Kantian moralism, which admits nothing higher than the good will, and sets art the task of educating men up to morality by ennobling their natural impulses. Gradually, however, aesthetic activity changes in his view from a preparation for morality into the ultimate goal of human endeavor. Peaceful reconciliation is of more worth than the spirit's hardly gained victory in the conflict with the sensibility; fine feeling is more than rational volition; the highest ideal is the beautiful soul, in which inclination not merely obeys the command of duty, but anticipates it.

[Footnote 1: The most important of Schiller's aesthetic essays are those On Grace and Dignity, 1793; On Na?ve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795-96; and the Letters on Aesthetic Education, intermediate between them. Cf. Kuno Fischer, Schiller als Philosoph, 1858, 2d ed. (Schillerschriften, iii., iv.) 1891-92.]

CHAPTER X.

FICHTE.

Fichte is a Kantian in about the same sense that Plato was a Socratic. Instead of taking up and developing particular critical problems he makes the vivifying kernel, the soul of criticism, his own. With the self-activity of reason (as a real force and as a problem) for his fundamental idea, he outlines with magnificent boldness a new view of the world, in which the idealism concealed in Kant's philosophy under the shell of cautious limitations was roused into vigorous life, and the great K?nigsberger's noble words on the freedom, the position, and the power of the spirit translated from the language of sober foresight into that of vigorous enthusiasm. The world can be understood only from the standpoint of spirit, the spirit only from the will. The ego is pure activity, and all reality its product. Fichte's system is all life and action: its aim is not to mediate knowledge, but to summon the hearer and reader to the production of a new and pregnant fundamental view, in which the will is as much a participant as the understanding; it begins not with a concept or a proposition, but with a demand for action (posit thyself; do consciously what thou hast done unconsciously so often as thou hast called thyself I; analyze, then, the act of self-consciousness, and cognize in their elements the forces from which all reality proceeds); its God is not a completed absolute substance, but a self-realizing world-order. This inner vivacity of the Fichtean principle, which recalls the pure actuality of Aristotle's [Greek: nous] and the ceaseless becoming of Heraclitus, finds its complete parallel in the fact that, although he was wanting neither in logical consecutiveness nor in the talent for luminous and popular exposition, Fichte felt continually driven to express his ideas in new forms, and, just when he seemed to have succeeded in saying what he meant with the greatest clearness, again unsatisfied, to seek still more exact and evident renderings for his fundamental position, which proved so difficult to formulate.

The author of the Wissenschaftslehre was the son of a poor ribbon maker, and was born at Rammenau in Lusatia in 1762. The talents of the boy induced the Freiherr von Miltiz to give him the advantage of a good education. Fichte attended school in Meissen and in Pforta, and was a student of theology at the universities of Jena and Leipsic. While a tutor in Zurich he made the acquaintance of Lavater and Pestalozzi, as well as of his future wife, Johanna Rahn, a niece of Klopstock. Returning to Leipsic, his whole mode of thought was revolutionized by the Kantian philosophy, in which it was his duty to instruct a pupil. This gives to the mind, as his letters confess, an inconceivable elevation above all earthly things. "I have adopted a nobler morality, and, instead of occupying myself with things without me, have been occupied more with myself." "I now believe with all my heart in human freedom, and am convinced that only on this supposition duty and virtue of any kind are possible." "I live in a new world since I have read the Critique of Practical Reason. Things which I believed never could be proved to me, e.g., the idea of an absolute freedom and duty, have been proved, and I feel the happier for it. It is inconceivable what reverence for humanity, what power this philosophy gives us, what a blessing it is for an age in which the citadels of morality had been destroyed, and the idea of duty blotted out from all the dictionaries!" A journey to Warsaw, whither he had been attracted by the expectation of securing a position as a private tutor, soon afforded him the opportunity of visiting at K?nigsberg the author of the system which had effected so radical a transformation in his convictions. His rapidly written treatise, Essay toward a Critique of All Revelation, attained the end to which its inception was due by gaining for its author a favorable reception from the honored master. Kant secured for Fichte a tutor's position in Dantzic, and a publisher for his maiden work. When this appeared, at Easter, 1792, the name of its author was by oversight omitted from the title page, together with the preface, which had been furnished after the rest of the book; and as the anonymous work was universally ascribed to Kant (whose religious philosophy was at this time eagerly looked for), the young writer became famous at a stroke as soon as the error was explained. A second edition was issued as early as the following year.

After his marriage in Zurich, where he had completed several political treatises (the address, Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, who have hitherto suppressed it, Heliopolis in the Last Year of the Old Darkness, and the two Hefte, Contributions toward the Correction of the Public Judgment on the French Revolution, 1793), Fichte accepted, in 1794, a call to Jena, in place of Reinhold, who had gone to Kiel, and whose popularity was soon exceeded by his own. The same year saw the birth of the Wissenschaftslehre. His stay in Jena was embittered by conflicts with the clergy, who took offense at his ethical lectures (On the Vocation of the Scholar) held on Sunday mornings (though not at an hour which interfered with church service), and with the students, who, after they had been untrue to their decision-which they had formed as a result of these lectures-to dissolve their societies or orders, gave vent to their spite by repeatedly smashing the windows of Fichte's residence. Accordingly he took leave of absence, and spent the summer of 1795 in Osmannst?dt. The years 1796-98, in which, besides the two Introductions to the Science of Knowledge, the Natural Right and the Science of Ethics (one of the most all important works in German philosophical literature) appeared, mark the culmination of Fichte's famous labors. The so-called atheistic controversy[1] resulted in Fichte's departure from Jena. The Philosophisches Journal, which since 1797 had been edited by Fichte in association with Niethammer, had published an article by Magister Forberg, rector at Saalfeld, entitled "The Development of the Concept of Religion," and as a conciliating introduction to this a short essay by Fichte, "On the Ground of our Belief in a Divine Government of the World."[2] For this it was confiscated by the Dresden government on the charge of containing atheistical matter, while other courts were summoned to take like action. In Weimar hopes were entertained of an amicable adjustment of the matter. But when Fichte, after publishing two vindications[3] couched in vehement language, had in a private letter uttered the threat that he would answer with his resignation any censure proceeding from the University Senate, not only was censure for indiscretion actually imposed, but his (threatened) resignation accepted.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Karl August Hase, Jenaisches Fichtebüchlein, 1856.]

[Footnote 2: It is a mistake, Fichte writes here, referring to the conclusion of Forberg's article ("Is there a God? It is and remains uncertain," etc.), to say that it is doubtful whether there is a God or not. That there is a moral order of the world, which assigns to each rational individual his determined place and counts on his work, is most certain, nay, it is the ground of all other certitude. The living and operative moral order (ordo ordinans) is itself God; we need no other God, and can conceive no other. There is no ground in reason for going beyond this world order to postulate a particular being as its cause. Whoever ascribes personality and consciousness to this particular being makes it finite; consciousness belongs only to the individual, limited ego. And it is allowable to state this frankly and to beat down the prattle of the schools, in order that the true religion of joyous well-doing may lift up its head.]

[Footnote 3: Appeal to the Public, and Formal Defense against the Charge of Atheism, 1799. The first of these maintains that Fichte's standpoint and that of his opponents are related as duty and advantage, sensible and suprasensible, and that the substantial God of his accusers, to be derived from the sensibility, is, as personified fate, as the distributer of all happiness and unhappiness to finite beings, a miserable fetich.]

Going to Berlin, Fichte found a friendly government, a numerous public for his lectures, and a stimulating circle of friends in the romanticists, the brothers Schlegel, Tieck, Schleiermacher, etc. In the first years of his Berlin residence there appeared The Vocation of Man. The Exclusive Commercial State, 1800; The Sun-clear Report to the Larger Public on the Essential Nature of the New Philosophy, and the Answer to Reinhold, 1801. Three works, which were the outcome of his lectures and were published in the year 1806 (Characteristics of the Present Age, The Nature of the Scholar, Way to the Blessed Life or Doctrine of Religion), form a connected whole. In the summer of 1805 Fichte filled a professorship at Erlangen, and later, after the outbreak of the war, he occupied for a short time a chair at K?nigsberg, finding a permanent university position at the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810. His glowing Addresses to the German Nation, 1808, which essentially aided in arousing the national spirit, have caused his name to live as one of the greatest of orators and most ardent of patriots in circles of the German people where his philosophical importance cannot be understood. His death in 1814 was also a result of unselfish labor in the service of the Fatherland. He succumbed to a nervous fever contracted from his wife, who, with self-sacrifice equal to his own, had shared in the care of the wounded, and who had brought the contagion back with her from the hospital. On his monument is inscribed the beautiful text, "The teachers shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars that shine forever and ever." Forberg in his journal records this estimate: The leading trait in Fichte's character is his absolute integrity. All his words are weighty and important. His principles are stern and little modified by affability. The spirit of his philosophy is proud and courageous, one which does not so much lead as possess us and carry us along. His philosophemes are inquiries in which we see the truth arise before our eyes, and which just for this reason lay the foundations of science and conviction.

The philosopher's son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte (his own name was Johann Gottlieb), wrote a biography of his father (1830; 2d ed., 1862), and supervised the publication of both the Posthumous Works (1834-35, 3 vols.) and the Collected Works (1845-46, 8 vols.). The simple and luminous Facts of Consciousness of 1811, or 1817 (not the lecture of 1813 with the same title), is especially valuable as an introduction to the system. Among the many redactions of the Wissenschaftslehre, the epoch-making Foundation of the whole Science of Knowledge, 1794, with the two Introductions to the Science of Knowledge, 1797, takes the first rank, while of the practical works the most important are the Foundation of Natural Right according to the Principles of the Science of Knowledge, 1796, and the System of the Science of Ethics according to the Principles of the Science of Knowledge, 1798, and next to these the Lectures on the Theory of the State, 1820 (delivered in 1813).[1]

[Footnote 1: At the same time as J.H. L?we's book Die Philosophie Fichtes, 1862, there appeared in celebration of the centenary of Fichte's birthyear, or birthday, a large number of minor essays and addresses by Friedrich Harms, A.L. Kym, Trendelenburg, Franz Hoffman, Karl Heyder, F.C. Lott, Karl K?stlin, J.B. Meyer, and others (cf. Reichlin-Meldegg in vol. xlii. of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie). Lasson has written, 1863, on Fichte's relation to Church and state, Zeller on Fichte as a political thinker (Vortr?ge und Abhandlungen, 1865), and F. Zimmer on his philosophy of religion. Among foreign works we may note Adamson's Fichte, 1881, and the English translations of several of Fichte's works by Kroeger [Science of Knowledge, 1868; Science of Rights, 1869-both also, 1889] and William Smith [Popular Writings, 4th ed., 1889; also Everett's Fichte's Science of Knowledge (Griggs's Philosophical Classics, 1884), and several translations in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, including one of The Facts of Consciousness.-TR.]]

%1. The Science of Knowledge.%

%(a) The Problem.%-In Fichte's judgment Kant did not succeed in carrying through the transformation in thought which it was his aim to effect, because the age did not understand the spirit of his philosophy. This spirit, and with it the great service of Kant, consists in transcendental idealism, which by the doctrine that objects conform themselves to representations, not representations to objects, draws philosophy away from external objects and leads it back into ourselves. We have followed the letter, he thinks, instead of the spirit of Kant, and because of a few passages with a dogmatic ring, whose references to a given matter, the thing in itself, and the like, were intended only as preliminary, have overlooked the numberless others in which the contrary is distinctly maintained. Thus the interpreters of Kant, using their own prejudices as a criterion, have read into him exactly that which he sought to refute, and have made the destroyer of all dogmatism himself a dogmatist; thus in the Kantianism of the Kantians there has sprung up a marvelous combination of crude dogmatism and uncompromising idealism. Though such an absurd mingling of entirely heterogeneous elements may be excused in the case of interpreters and successors, who have had to construct for themselves the guiding principle of the whole from their study of the critical writings, yet we cannot assume it in the author of the system, unless we believe the Critique of Pure Reason the result of the strangest chance, and not the work of intellect. Two men only, Beck, the teacher of the Standpoint, and Jacobi, the clearest mind of the century, are to be mentioned with respect as having risen above the confusion of the time to the perception that Kant teaches idealism, that, according to him, the object is not given, but made.

Besides the perspicuity which would have prevented these misunderstandings, Fichte misses something further in Kant's work. Considered as a system Kant's expositions were incomplete; and, on his own confession, his aim was not to furnish the science itself, but only the foundation and the materials for it. Therefore, although the Kantian philosophy is established as far as its inner content is concerned, there is still need of earnest work to systematize the fragments and results which he gives into a firmly connected and impregnable whole. The Wissenschaftslehre takes this completion of idealism for its mission. It cannot solve the problem by a commentary on the Kantian writings, nor by the correction and addition of particulars, but only by restoring the whole at a stroke. He alone finds the truth who new creates it in himself, independently and in his own way. Thus Fichte's system contains the same view of the matter as the critical system-the author is aware, runs the preface to the programme, On the Concept of the Science of Knowledge, 1794, "that he never will be able to say anything at which Kant has not hinted, immediately or mediately, more or less clearly, before him,"-but in his procedure he is entirely independent of the Kantian exposition. We shall first raise the question, What in the Kantian philosophy is in need of completion? and, secondly, What method must be adopted in completing it?

Kant discusses the laws of intelligence when they are already applied to objects, without enlightening us concerning the ground of these laws. He derived the pure concepts (the laws of substantiality, of causality, etc.) from (logic, and thus mediately from) experience instead of deducing them from the nature of intelligence; similarly he never furnished this deduction for the forms of intuition, space and time. In order to understand that intelligence, and why intelligence, must act in just this way (must think just by means of these categories), we must prove, and not merely, with Kant, assert, that these functions or forms are really laws of thought-or, what amounts to the same thing, that they are conditions of self-consciousness. Again, even if it be granted that Kant has explained the properties and relations of things (that they appear in space and time, and that their accidents must be referred to substances), the question still remains unanswered, Whence comes the matter which is taken up into these forms? So long as the whole object is not made to arise before the eyes of the thinker, dogmatism is not driven out of its last corner. The thing in itself is, like the rest, only a thought in the ego. If thus the antithesis between the form and the matter of cognition undergoes modification, so, further, the allied distinction between understanding and sensibility must, as Reinhold accurately recognized, be reduced to a common principle and receptivity be conceived as self-limiting spontaneity. In his practical philosophy also Kant left much unfinished. The categorical imperative is susceptible of further deduction, it is not the principle itself, but a conclusion from the true principle, from the injunction to absolute self-dependence on the part of reason; moreover, the nature of our consciousness of the moral law must be more thoroughly discussed, and in order to gain a real, instead of a merely formal, ethics the relation of this law to natural impulse. Finally, Kant never discussed the foundation of philosophy as a whole, but always separated its theoretical from its practical side, and Reinhold also did nothing to remove this dualism. In short, some things that Kant only asserted or presupposed can and must be proved, some that he kept distinct must be united. In what way are both to be accomplished?

Since correct inferences from correct premises yield correct results, and correct inference is easy to secure, everything depends on the correct point of departure. If we neglect this and consider only the process and the results of inference, there are two consistent systems: the dogmatic or realistic course of thought, which seeks to derive representations from things; and the idealistic, which, conversely, seeks to derive being from thought. Now, no matter how consistently dogmatism may proceed (and when it does so it becomes, like the system of Spinoza, materialism and fatalism or determinism, maintaining that all is nature, and all goes on mechanically; treats the spirit as a thing among others, and denies its metaphysical and moral independence, its immateriality and freedom), it may be shown to be false, because it starts from a false principle. Thought can never be derived from being, because it is not contained therein; from being only being can proceed, and never representation. Being, however, can be derived from thought, for consciousness is also being; nay, it is more than this, it is conscious being. And as consciousness contains both being and a knowledge of this being, idealism is superior to realism, because idealism includes the latter as a moment in itself, and hence can explain it, though it is not explicable by it. Dogmatism makes the mistake of going beyond consciousness or the ego, and working with empty, merely formal concepts. A concept is empty when nothing actual corresponds to it, or no intuition can be subsumed under it (here it is to be noted that, besides sensuous intuition, there is an intellectual intuition also; an example is found in the ego as a self-intuiting being). Philosophy, indeed, may abstract and must abstract, must rise above that which is given-for how could she explain life and particular knowledge if she assumed no higher standpoint than her object?-but true abstraction is nothing other than the separation of factors which in experience always present themselves together; it analyzes empirical consciousness in order to reconstruct it from its elements, it causes empirical consciousness to arise before our eyes, it is a pragmatic history of consciousness. Such abstraction, undertaken in order to a genetic consideration of the ego, does not go beyond experience, but penetrates into the depths of experience, is not transcendent, but transcendental, and, since it remains in close touch with that which is intuitable, yields a real philosophy in contrast to all merely formal philosophy.

These theoretical advantages of idealism are supplemented by momentous reasons of a practical kind, which determine the choice between the two systems, besides which none other is possible. The moral law says: Thou shalt be self-dependent. If I ought to be so I must be able to be so; but if I were matter I would not be able. Thus idealism proves itself to be the ethical mode of thought, while the opposite mode shows that those who favor it have not raised themselves to that independence of all that is external which is morally enjoined, for in order to be able to know ourselves free we must have made ourselves free.[1] Thus the philosophy which a man chooses depends on what sort of a man he is. If, on the other hand, the categorical imperative calls for belief in the reality of the external world and of other minds, this is nothing against idealism. For idealism does not deny the realism of life, but explains it as a necessary, though not a final, mode of intuition. The dogmatic mode of thought is merely an explanation from the standpoint of common consciousness, and for idealism, as the only view which is both scientifically and practically satisfactory, this explanation itself needs explaining. Realism and idealism, like natural impulse and moral will in the sphere of action, are both grounded in reason. But idealism is the true standpoint, because it is able to comprehend and explain the opposing theory, while the converse is not the case.

[Footnote 1: Cf. O. Liebmann (Ueber den individuellen Beweis für die Freiheit des Willens p, 131. 1866) "Here we discover the noteworthy point where theoretical and practical philosophy actually pass over into each other. For this principle results: In order to carry out the individual proof for the freedom of the will, I must do my duty."]

The nature, the goal, and the methods of the Science of Knowledge have now been determined. It is genuine, thoroughgoing idealism, which raises the Kantian philosophy to the rank of an evident science by deducing its premises from a first principle which is immediately certain, and by removing the twofold dualism of intuition and thought, of knowledge and volition, viz., by proving both contraries acts of one and the same ego. While Reinhold had sought a supreme truth as a fundamental principle of unity, without which the doctrine of knowledge would lack the systematic form essential to science, while Beck had interpreted the spirit of the Kantian philosophy in an idealistic sense, and Jacobi had demanded the elimination of the thing in itself, all these desires combined are fulfilled in Fichte's doctrine, and at the same time the results of the Critique of Reason are given that evidence which Aenesidemus-Schulze had missed in them. As an answer to the question, "How is knowledge brought about?" (as well the knowledge of common sense as that given in the particular sciences), "how is experience possible?", and as a construction of common consciousness as this manifests itself in life and in the particular sciences, Fichteanism adopts the name Science of Knowledge, being distinguished from the particular sciences by the fact that they discuss the voluntary, and it the necessary, representations or actions of the spirit. (The representation of a triangle or a circle is a free one, it may be omitted; the representation of space in general is a necessary one, from which it is impossible for us to abstract.) How does intelligence come to have sensations, to intuit space and time, and to form just such categories (thing and property, cause and effect, and not others quite different)? While Kant correctly described these functions of the intuiting and thinking spirit, and showed them actual, they must further be proven, be shown necessary or deduced. Deduced whence? From the "deed-acts" (Thathandlungen) of the ego which lie at the basis of all consciousness, and the highest of which are formulated in three principles.

%(b) The Three Principles.%-At the portal of the Science of Knowledge we are met not by an assertion, but by a summons-a summons to self-contemplation. Think anything whatever and observe what thou dost, and of necessity must do, in thinking. Thou wilt discover that thou dost never think an object without thinking thyself therewith, that it is absolutely impossible for thee to abstract from thine ego. And second, consider what thou dost when thou dost think thine "ego." This means to affirm or posit one's self, to be a subject-object. The nature of self-consciousness is the identity of the representing [subject] and the represented [object]. The pure ego is not a fact, but an original doing, the act of being for self (Fürsichsein), and the (philosophical, or-as seems to be the case according to some passages-even the common) consciousness of this doing an intellectual intuition; through this we become conscious of the deed-act which is ever (though unconsciously) performing. This is the meaning of the first of the principles: "The ego posits originally and absolutely its own being," or, more briefly: The ego posits itself; more briefly still: I am. The nature of the ego consists in positing itself as existing.[1] Since, besides this self-cogitation of the ego, an op-position is found among the facts of empirical consciousness (think only of the principle of contradiction), and yet, besides the ego, there is nothing which could be opposed, we must assume as a second principle: To the ego there is absolutely opposited a non-ego. These two principles must be united, and this can be accomplished only by positing the contraries (ego and non-ego), since they are both in the ego, as reciprocally limiting or partially sublating one another, that is, each as divisible (capable of quantitative determination). Accordingly the third principle runs: "The ego opposes in the ego a divisible non-ego to the divisible ego." From these principles Fichte deduces the three laws of thought, identity, contradiction, and sufficient reason, and the three categories of quality-reality, negation, and limitation or determination. Instead of following him in these labors, we may emphasize the significance of his view of the ego as pure activity without an underlying substratum, with which he carries dynamism over from the Kantian philosophy of nature to metaphysics. We must not conceive the ego as something which must exist before it can put forth its activities. Doing is not a property or consequence of being, but being is an accident and effect of doing. All substantiality is derivative, activity is primal; being arises from doing. The ego is nothing more than self-position; it exists not only for itself (für sich), but also through itself (durch sich).

[Footnote 1: The ego spoken of in the first of the principles, the ego as the object of intellectual intuition and as the ground and creator of all being, is, as the second Introduction to the Science of Knowledge clearly announces, not the individual, but the I-ness (Ichheit) (which is to be presupposed as the prius of the manifold of representation, and which is exalted above the opposition of subject and object), mentality in general, eternal reason, which is common to all and the same in all, which is present in all thinking and at the basis thereof, and to which particular persons stand related merely as accidents, as instruments, as special expressions, destined more and more to lose themselves in the universal form of reason. But, further still, a distinction must be made between the absolute ego as intuition (as the form of I-ness), from which the Science of Knowledge starts, and the ego as Idea (as the supreme goal of practical endeavor) with which it ends. In neither is the ego conceived as individual; in the former the I-ness is not yet determined to the point of individuality, in the latter individuality has disappeared, Fichte is right when he thinks it remarkable that "a system whose beginning and end and whole nature is aimed at forgetfulness of individuality in the theoretical sphere and denial of it in the practical sphere" should be "called egoism." And yet not only opponents, but even adherents of Fichte, as is shown by Friedrich Schlegel's philosophy of genius, have, by confusing the pure and the empirical ego, been guilty of the mistake thus censured. On the philosophy of the romanticists cf. Erdmann's History, vol. ii. §§ 314, 315; Zeller, p. 562 seq.; and R. Haym, Die Romantische Schule, 1870.]

The actions expressed in the three principles are never found pure in experience, nor do they represent isolated acts of the ego. Intelligence can think nothing without thinking itself therewith; it is equally impossible for it to think "I am" without at the same time thinking something else which is not itself; subject and object are inseparable. It is rather true that the acts of position described are one single, all-inclusive act, which forms only the first member in a connected system of pre-conscious actions, through which consciousness is produced, and the complete investigation of whose members constitutes the further business of the Science of Knowledge as a theory of the nature of reason. In this the Science of Knowledge employs a method which, by its rhythm of analysis and synthesis, development and reconciliation of opposites, became the model of Hegel's dialectic method. The synthesis described in the third principle, although it balances thesis and antithesis and unites them in itself, still contains contrary elements, in order to whose combination a new synthesis must be sought. In this, in turn, the analytic discovery and the synthetic adjustment of a contrariety is repeated, etc., etc. The original synthesis, moreover, prescribes a division of the inquiry into two parts, one theoretical and the other practical. For it contains the following principles: The ego posits itself as limited by the non-ego-it functions cognitively; and: The ego posits itself as determining the non-ego-it functions volitionally and actively.

%(c) The Theoretical Ego.%-In positing itself as determined by the non-ego, the ego is at once passive (affected by something other than itself) and active (it posits its own limitation). This is possible only as it posits reality in itself only in part, and transfers to the non-ego so much as it does not posit in itself. Passivity is diminished activity, negation of the totality of reality. From reflection on this relation between ego and non-ego spring the categories of reciprocal determination, of causality (the non-ego as the cause of the passion of the ego), and substantiality (this passion merely the self-limitation of the ego). The conflict between the causality of the non-ego (by which the ego is affected) and the substantiality of the ego (in which and the activity of which all reality is contained) is resolved only by the assumption of two activities (or, rather, of two opposite directions of one activity) in the ego, one of which (centrifugal, expansive) strives infinitely outward while the other (centripetal or contractile) sets a bound to the former, and drives the ego back into itself, whereupon another excursus follows, and a new limitation and return, etc. With every repetition of this double act of production and reflection a special class of representations arises. Through the first limitation of the in itself unlimited activity "sensation" arises (as a product of the "productive imagination"). Because the ego produces this unconsciously, it appears to be given, brought about by influence from without. The second stage, "intuition," is reached when the ego reflects on sensation, when it opposes to itself something foreign which limits it. Thirdly, by reflection on intuition an "image" of that which is intuited is constructed, and, as such, distinguished from a real thing to which the image corresponds; at this point the categories and the forms of intuition, space and time, appear, which thus arise along with the object.[1] The fourth stadium is "understanding," which steadies the fluctuating intuition into a concept, realizes the object, and looks upon it as the cause of the intuition. Fifthly, "judgment" makes its appearance as the faculty of free reflection and abstraction, or the power to consider a definite content or to abstract from it. As judgment is itself the condition of the bound reflection of the understanding, so it points in turn to its condition, to the sixth and highest stage of intelligence, "reason," by means of which we are able to abstract from all objects whatever, while reason itself, pure self-consciousness, is that from which abstraction is never possible. It is only in the highest stage that consciousness or a representation of representation takes place. And at the culmination of the theoretical ego the point of transition to the practical ego appears. Here the ego becomes aware that in positing itself as determined by the non-ego it has only limited itself, and therefore is itself the ground of the whole content of consciousness; here it apprehends itself as determining the non-ego or as acting, and recognizes as its chief mission to impress the form of the ego as far as possible on the non-ego, and ever to extend the boundary further.

[Footnote 1: The object is a product of the ego only for the observer, not for the observed ego itself, to which, from this standpoint of imagination, it appears rather as a thing in itself independent of the ego and affecting it. Further, it must so appear, because the ego, in its after reflection on its productive activity, and just by this reflection, transforms the productive action considered into a fixed and independent product found existing.]

The "deduction of representation" whose outline has just been given was the first example (often imitated in the school of Schelling and Hegel) of a constructive psychology, which, from the mission or the concept of the soul-in this case from the nature of self-consciousness-deduces the various psychical functions as a system of actions, each of which is in its place implied by the rest, as it in turn presupposes them. This is distinguished from the sensationalistic psychology, which is also genetic (cf. pp. 245-250), as well as from the mechanical or associational psychology, which likewise excludes the idea of an isolated coexistence of mental faculties, by the fact that it demands a new manifestation of the soul-ground in order to the ascent from one member of the series to the next higher. It is also distinguished from sensationalism by its teleological point of view. For no matter how much Fichte, too, may speak of the mechanism of consciousness, it is plain to the reader of the theoretical part of his system not only that he makes this mechanism work in the service of an end, but also that he finds its origin in purposive activity of the ego; while the practical part gives further and decisive confirmation of the fact. The danger and the defect of such a constructive treatment of psychology-as we may at once remark for all later attempts-lies in imagining that the task of mental science has been accomplished and all its problems solved when each particular activity of the ego has been assigned its mission and work for the whole, and its place in the system, without any indication of the means through which this destination can be fulfilled.

%(d) The Practical Ego.%-The deduction of representation has shown how (through what unconscious acts of the ego) the different stages of cognition, the three sensuous and the three intellectual functions of representation, come into being. It has proved incapable, however, of giving any account of the way in which the ego comes at one point to arrest its activity, which tends infinitely outward, and to turn it back upon itself. We know, indeed, that this first limitation, through which sensation arises, and on which as a basis the understanding, by continued reflection constructs the objective world, was necessary in order that consciousness and knowledge might arise. If the ego did not limit its infinite activity neither representation nor an objective world would exist. But why, then, are there such things as consciousness, representation, and a world? From the standpoint of the theoretical ego this problem, "Whence the original non-ego or opposition (Anstoss), which impels the ego back upon itself?" cannot be solved, since it is only through the opposition that it itself arises. The "deduction of the opposition," which the theoretical part of the Science of Knowledge did not furnish, is to be looked for from the practical part. The primacy of practical reason, already emphasized by Kant, gives us the answer: The ego limits itself and is theoretical, in order to be practical. The whole machinery of representation and the represented world exists only to furnish us the possibility of fulfilling our duty. We are intelligence in order that we may be able to be will.

Action, action-that is the end of our existence. Action is giving form to matter, it is the alteration or elaboration of an object, the conquest of an impediment, of a limitation. We cannot act unless we have something in, on, and against which to act. The world of sensation and intuition is nothing but a means for attaining our ethical destiny, it is "the material of our duty under the form of sense." The theoretical ego posits an object (Gegenstand) that the practical ego may experience resistance (Widerstand). No action is possible without a world as the object of action; no world is possible without a consciousness which represents it; no consciousness possible without reflection of the ego on itself; no reflection without limitation, without an opposition or non-ego. The Anstoss is deduced. The ego posits a limit (is theoretical) in order (as practical) to overcome it. Our duty is the only per se (Ansich) of the phenomenal world, the only truly real element in it: "Things are in themselves that which we ought to make of them." Objectivity exists only to be more and more sublated, that is, to be so worked up that the activity of the ego may in it become evident.-The same ground of explanation which reveals the necessity of an external nature enables us to understand why the one infinite ego (the universal life or the Deity, as Fichte puts it in his later works) divides into the many empirical egos or individuals, why it does not carry out its plan immediately, but through finite spirits as its organs. Action is possible only under the form of the individual, only in individuals are consciousness and morality possible. Without resistance, no action; without conflict, no morality. Individuality, it is true, is to be overcome and destroyed in moral endeavor; but in order to this it must have existed. Virtue is a conquest over external and internal nature.

A gradation of practical functions corresponding to the series of theoretical activities leads from feeling and striving (longing and desire) through the system of impulses (the impulse to representation or reflection, to production, to satisfaction) up to moral will or the impulse to harmony with self, which stands opposed to the natural impulses as the categorical imperative. The practical ego mediates between the theoretical and the absolute ego. The ego ought to be infinite and self-dependent, but finds itself finite and dependent on a non-ego-a contradiction which is resolved by the ego becoming practical, by the fact that in ever increasing measure it subdues nature to itself, and by such increasing extension of the boundary draws nearer and ever nearer to the realization of its destination, to become absolute ego.

%2. The Science of Ethics and of Right.%

The moral law demands the control of the sensuous impulse by the pure impulse. If the former aims at comfortable ease and enjoyment, the latter is directed toward satisfaction with one's self, to endeavor and self-dependence. (Enjoyment is inevitable, it is true, as satisfaction where any impulse whatever is carried out; only it must not form the end of action.) Morality is activity for its own sake, the radical evil-from which only a miracle can deliver us, but a miracle which we must ourselves perform-is inertness, lack of will to rise above the natural determinateness of the impulse of self-preservation to the clear consciousness of duty and of freedom. For the moral man there is no resting; each end attained becomes for him the impulse to renewed endeavor, each task fulfilled leads him to a fresh one. Become self-dependent, act autonomously, make thyself free; let every action have a place in a series, in the continuation of which the ego must become independent. To this formal and universal norm, again, there is added a special injunction for each individual. Each individual spirit has its definite mission assigned to it by the world-order: each ought to do that which it alone should and can do. Always fulfill thy moral vocation, thy special destination.[1] Or both in popular combination: Never act contrary to conscience.

[Footnote 1: Although Fichte was justly charged with surpassing even the abstractness of the Kantian ethics with his bald moral principle, the self-dependence of the ego, he deserves praise for having given ethics a concrete content of indisputable soundness and utility by his introduction of Jacobi's idea of purified individuality.]

The elevation to freedom is accomplished gradually. At first freedom consists only in the consciousness of the natural impulse, then follows a breaking away from this by means of maxims, which in the beginning are maxims of individual happiness. Later on a blind enthusiasm for self-dependence arises and produces an heroic spirit, which would rather be generous than just, which bestows sympathy more readily than respect; true morality, however, does not arise until, with constant attention to the law and continued watchfulness of self, duty is done for its own sake. No man is for a moment secure of his morality without continued endeavor. In order to deliverance from the original sin of inertness and its train, cowardice and falsity, men stand in need of examples, such as have been given them in the founders of religions, to construe for them the riddle of freedom. The necessary enlightenment concerning moral conviction is given by the Church, whose symbols are not to be looked upon as dogmatic propositions, but only as means for the proclamation of the eternal verities, and which, like the state (for both are institutions based on necessity), has for its object to make itself unnecessary as time goes on.

The system of duties distinguishes four classes of duties on the basis of the twofold opposition of universal (non-transferable) and particular (transferable) duties, and of unconditional duties (directed to the whole) and conditional duties (directed toward self). These four classes are the duties of self-preservation, of class, of non-interference with others, and of vocation. The lower calling includes the producers, artisans, and tradesmen, whose action terminates directly on nature; and the higher, the scholars, teachers of the people or clergy, artists, and government officials, who work directly on the community of rational beings. Fichte's thoughtful and sympathetically written discussion of marriage is in pleasant contrast to the bald, purely legal view of this relation adopted by Kant.

Natural right is for Fichte, as for Kant, whose theory of right, moreover, appeared later than Fichte's, entirely independent of ethics, and distinguished from the latter by its exclusive reference to external conduct instead of to the disposition and the will. The rule of right gains from the moral law, it is true, new sanction for conscience, but cannot be derived from the law.-The concept of right is to be deduced as a necessary act of the ego, i.e., to be shown a condition of self-consciousness. The ego must posit itself as an individual, and can accomplish this only by positing itself in a relation of right to other finite rational beings; without a thou, no I. A finite rational being cannot posit itself without ascribing to itself a free activity in an external sense-world; and it cannot effect this latter unless (1) it ascribes free activity to other beings as well, hence not without assuming other finite rational beings outside itself, and positing itself as standing in the relation of right to them; and unless (2) it ascribes to itself a material body and posits this as standing under the influence of a person outside it. But, further, Fichte considers it possible to deduce the particular constitution both of the external world and of the human body (as the sphere of all free actions possible to the person). In the former there must be present a tough, durable matter capable of resistance, and light and air in order to the possibility of intercourse between spirits; while the latter must be an organized, articulated nature-product, furnished with senses, capable of infinite determination, and adapted to all conceivable motions.

If a community of free beings, such as has been shown the condition of individual self-consciousness, is to be possible, the following must hold as the law of right: So limit thy freedom that others may be free along with thee. This law is conditioned on the lawful behavior of others. Where this is lacking, where my fellow does not recognize and treat me as a free, rational being, the right of coercion comes in; coercion, however, is not to be exercised by the individual himself-since then there would be no guaranty either for its successful exercise or for the non-violation of the legal limit-but devolves upon the state. The state takes its origin in the common will of all to unite for the safeguarding of their rights, and determines by positive laws (intermediate between the law of right and legal judgments) what shall be considered rights. Thus there result three subjects for natural right: original rights or the sum of that which pertains to freedom or personality (inviolability of the body and of property), the right of coercion, and political right. The aim of punishment is the reform of the evil doer and the deterrence of others. Fichte is in agreement with Kant concerning the principle of popular sovereignty (Rousseau) and the exercise of the political power through representatives; but not so concerning the guaranties against the violation of the fundamental law of the state. Instead of the division of powers recommended by Kant he demands supervision of the rulers of the state by ephors, who, themselves without any legislative or executive authority, shall suspend the rulers in case they violate the law, and call them to account before the community. Every constitution in which the rulers are not responsible is despotic. Fichte did not continue loyal to this principle, that the state is merely a legal institution. He not only demands a state organization of labor by which everyone shall be placed in a position to live from his work, in the Natural Right and the Exclusive Commercial State, but, in his posthumous Theory of Right, 1812, he makes it the chief duty of the state to lead men, by the moral and intellectual training of the people, to do from insight what they have hitherto done from traditional belief. Through the education of the people the empirical state is gradually to transform itself into the rational state.

%3. Fichte's Second Period: his View of History and his Theory of Religion.%

Fichte's transfer to Berlin brought him into more intimate contact with the world, and along with new experiences and new emotions gave him new problems. While a vigorously developing religious sentiment turned his speculation to the relation of the individual ego to the primal source of spiritual life, empirical reality also acquired greater significance for him, and the intellectual, moral, and political situation of the time especially attracted his attention. The last required philosophical interpretation, demanded at once inquiry into its historical conditions and a consideration of the means by which the glaring contradiction between the condition of the nation at the time and the ideals of reason could be diminished. The Addresses to the German Nation outlined a plan for a moral reformation of the world, to start with the education of the German people;[1] while the Characteristics of the Present Age, which had preceded the Addresses, defined the place of the age in the general development of humanity. The scheme of historical periods given in the Characteristics and similarly in the Theory of the State (innocence-sin-supremacy of reason, with intermediate stages between each two) is interesting as a forerunner of Hegel's undertaking.

[Footnote 1: "Among all nations you are the one in whom the germ of human perfection is most decidedly present." The spiritual regeneration of mankind must proceed from the German people, for they are the one original or primitive people of the new age, the only one which has preserved its living language-French is a dead tongue-and has raised itself to true creative poetry and free science. The ground of distinction between Germanism and the foreign spirit lies in the question, whether we believe in an original element in man, in the freedom, infinite perfectibility, and eternal progress of our race, or put no faith in all these.]

History is produced through the interaction of the two principles, faith and understanding, which are related to each other as law and freedom, and strives toward a condition in which these two shall be so reconciled that faith shall have entirely passed over into the form of understanding, shall have been transformed into insight, and understanding shall have taken up the content of faith into itself. History begins with the coming together of two original and primitive races, one of order or faith, and one of freedom or understanding, neither of which would attain to an historical development apart from the other. From the legal race the free race learns respect for the law, as in turn it arouses in the former the impulse toward freedom. The course of history divides into five periods. In the state of "innocence" or of rational instinct that which is rational is done unconsciously, out of natural impulse; in the state of "commencing sin" the instinct for the good changes into an external compulsory authority, the law of reason appears as a ruling power from without, which can be disobeyed as well as obeyed. We ourselves live in the period of "completed sinfulness," of absolute license and indifference to all truth, of unlimited caprice and selfishness. But however far removed from the moral ideal this age appears, in which the individual, freed from all restraints, heeds naught except his egoistic desire, and in his care for his own welfare forgets to labor for the universal, yet this ultimate goal, this doing from free insight that which in the beginning was done out of blind faith, cannot be attained unless authority shall have first been shaken off and the individual become self-dependent. A few signs already betoken the dawn of the fourth era, that of rational science or of "commencing justification," in which truth shall be acknowledged supreme, and the individual ego, at least as cognitive, shall submit itself to the generic reason. Finally, with the era of rational art, or the state of "completed justification and sanctification," wherein the will of the individual shall entirely merge in life for the race, the end of the life of humanity on earth-the free determination of all its relations according to reason-will be fulfilled.

In the Jena period the religious life of the ego simply coincided for Fichte with its practical life; piety coincided with moral conduct; the Deity with the absolute ego, with the moral law, with the moral order of the world. A change subsequently took place in his views on this point. He experienced feelings which, at least in quality, were distinct from readiness for moral action, no matter how intimately they are intertwined with this, and no matter how little they can actually be separated from it; religion is possible neither without a metaphysical belief in a suprasensible world, nor without obedience to the moral law, yet in itself it is not that belief nor this action, but the inner spirit which pervades and animates all our thought and action-it is life, love, blessedness. And as quiet blessedness is here distinguished from ceaseless action, so for our thinker the inactive Deity, the self-identical life of the absolute, separates from the active universal reason, which in its individual organs advances from task to task. The earlier undivided and unique principle, the absolute ego, divides into the Ichheit (moral law, world-order), and an absolute as the ground thereof. "The spirit (the ego, or, as Fichte now prefers to say, knowledge) an image of God, the world an image of the spirit." The active order of the world (the moral law which realizes itself in individuals) the immediate, and objective reality the mediate, revelation of the absolute!

Does this view of religion, which Fichte incorporates also in the later expositions of the Science of Knowledge, indicate an abandonment and denial of the earlier standpoint? The philosophy of Fichte's second period is a new system-so judge the majority of the historians of philosophy. It is not a transformation, but a completion of the earlier system; the doctrine promulgated in Berlin continues to be idealistic, as that advanced in Jena had itself been pantheistic-this is the opinion of Fortlage and Harms, in agreement with the philosopher himself and with his son. Kuno Fischer, also, who shows a constant advance in the development of Fichteanism, a gradual transition "without a break," may be counted among the minority who hold that throughout his life Fichte taught but one system. We believe it our duty to adhere to this latter view. The Science of Knowledge (the world a product of the ego) enters as it is into the later form of the Fichtean philosophy; the latter gives up none of the fundamental positions of the former, but only adds to it a culmination, by which the appearance of the building is altered, it is true, but not the edifice itself. In the discussion of the question the following three have been emphasized as the most important points of distinction between the two periods: In the earlier system God is made equivalent to the absolute ego and the moral order of the world, in the later he is separated from these and removed beyond them; in the former the nature of God is described as activity, in the latter, as being; in the one, action is designated as the highest mission of man, in the other, blessed devotion to God. All three variations of the later doctrine from the earlier may be admitted without giving up the position that the former is only an extension of the latter and not an essential modification of it (i.e., in its teachings concerning the relation of the ego and the world). Fichte experienced religious feelings the philosophical outcome of which he worked into his system. He now knows a first thing (the Deity as distinct from the absolute ego) and a last thing (the inwardness of religious devotion to the world-ground), which he had before not overlooked, much less denied, but combined in one with the second (the absolute ego or the moral order of the world) and the one before the last (moral action). It is incorrect to say that, in his later doctrine, Fichte substituted the inactive absolute in place of the active absolute ego, and the quiet blessedness of contemplation in place of ceaseless action. Not in place of these, but beyond them, while all else remains as it was. The categorical imperative, the absolute ego or knowledge is no longer God himself, but the first manifestation of God, though a necessary revelation of him. Religion had previously been included for Fichte in moral action; now fellowship with God goes beyond this, though morality remains its indispensable condition and inseparable companion. Finally, how to construe the previously avoided predicate, being, in relation to the Deity, is shown by the no less frequent designation of the absolute as the "Universal Life." The expression being, which it must be confessed is ambiguous, here signifies in our opinion only the quiet, self-identical activity of the absolute, in opposition to the unresting, changeful activity of the world-order and its finite organs, not that inert and dead being posited by the ego, the ascription of which to the Deity Fichte had forbidden in his essay which had been charged with atheism, not to speak of the existence-mode of a particular self-conscious and personal being. Instead of speaking of a conversion of Fichte to the position of his opponents, we might rather venture the paradoxical assertion, that, when he characterizes the absolute as the only true being, he intends to produce the same view in the mind of the reader as in his earlier years, when he expressed himself against the application of the concepts existence, substance, and conscious personality to God, on the ground that they are categories of sense. The chief thing, at least, remains unaltered: the opposition to a view of religion which transforms the sublime and sacred teaching of Christianity "into an enervating doctrine of happiness."

CHAPTER XI.

SCHELLING.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (von) Schelling was born January 27, 1775, at Leonberg (in Würtemberg), and died August 20, 1854, at the baths of Ragatz (in Switzerland). In 1790-95 he attended the seminary at Tübingen, in company with H?lderlin and Hegel, who were five years older than himself; at seventeen he published a dissertation on the Fall of Man, and a year later an essay on Religious Myths; and was called in 1798 from Leipsic-where, after several treatises[1] in explanation of the Science of Knowledge, he had issued, in 1797, the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature-to Jena. In the latter place he became acquainted with his future wife, Caroline,[2] née Micha?lis (1763-1809), widow of B?hmer and at this time the brilliant wife of August Wilhelm Schlegel. From 1803 to 1806 he served as professor in Würzburg; then followed two residences of fourteen years each in Munich, separated by seven years in Erlangen: 1806-20 as Member of the Academy of Sciences and General Secretary of the Academy of the Plastic Arts (he received this latter position after delivering on the king's birthday his celebrated address on "The Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature," 1807); and 1827-41 as professor in the newly established university, and President of the Academy of Sciences. In 1812 Schelling married his second wife, Pauline Gotter. Besides various journals[3] and the works to be noticed later, two polemic treatises should be mentioned, the Exposition of the True Relation of the Philosophy of Nature to the Improved Doctrine of Fichte, 1806, in which his former friend is charged with plagiarism, and the Memorial of the Treatise on Divine Things by Herr Jacobi, 1812, which answers a bitter attack of Jacobi still more bitterly. From this on our philosopher, once so fond of writing, becomes silent.[4] The often promised issue of the positive philosophy, which had already been twice commenced in print (The Ages of the World, 1815; Mythological Lectures, 1830), was both times suspended. Being called to the Berlin Academy by Frederick William IV., in order to counterbalance the prevailing Hegelianism, Schelling delivered lectures in the university also (on Mythology and Revelation), which he ceased, however, when notes taken by his hearers were printed without his consent.[5] His collected works were published in fourteen volumes (1856-61) under the care of his son, K.E.A. Schelling.[6]

[Footnote 1: On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy in General, On the Ego as Principle of Philosophy, both in 1795; Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, 1796; Essays in Explanation of the Science of Knowledge, 1797.]

[Footnote 2: Karoline, Letters, edited by G. Waitz, 1871.]

[Footnote 3: Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (with Hegel), 1802; Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, 1800 (continued as Neue Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik); Jahrbücher der Medizin als Wissenschaft (with Marcus), 1806-08; Allgemeine Zeitschrift von Deutschen für Deutsche, 1813.]

[Footnote 4: Besides a supplement to Die Weltalter and his inaugural lecture at Berlin, he published only two prefaces, one to Viktor Cousin über franz?sische und deutsche Philosophie, done into German by Hubert Beckers, 1834, and one to Steffens's Nachgelassene Schriften, 1846.]

[Footnote 5: Paulus, Die endüch offenbar gewordene positive Philosophie der Offenbarung, 1843. Frauenst?dt had previously published a sketch from this later doctrine, 1842.]

[Footnote 6: On Schelling cf. the Lectures by K. Rosenkranz, 1843; the articles by Heyder in vol. xiii. of Herzog's Realencyclop?die für protestantische Theologie, 1860, and Jodl in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie; R. Haym, Die romantische Schule, 1870; Aus Schellings Leben, in Briefen, edited by Plitt, 3 vols., 1869-70. [Cf. also Watson's Schelling's Transcendental Idealism (Griggs's Philosophical Classics, 1882); and several translations from Schelling in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.-TR.]]

The leading motive in Schelling's thinking is an unusually powerful fancy, which gives to his philosophy a lively, stimulating, and attractive character, without making it to a like degree logically satisfactory. If the systems of Fichte and Hegel, which in their content are closely related to Schelling's, impress us by their logical severity, Schelling chains us by his lively intuition and his suggestive power of feeling his way into the inner nature of things. With him analogies outweigh reasons; he is more concerned about the rich content of concepts than about their sharp definition; and in the endeavor to show the unity of the universe, both in the great and in the little, especially to show the unity of nature and spirit, he dwells longer on the relationship of objects than on their antitheses, which he is glad to reduce to mere quantitative and temporary differences. He adds to this an astonishing mobility of thought, in virtue of which every offered suggestion is at once seized and worked into his own system, though in this the previous standpoint is unconsciously exchanged for a somewhat altered one. Schelling's philosophy is, therefore, in a continual state of flux, nearly every work shows it in a new form, and it is always ideas from without whose incorporation has caused the transition. Besides Leibnitz, Kant, and Fichte, who were already familiar to Schelling as a pupil at Tübingen, it was first Herder, then Spinoza and Bruno, who exerted a transforming influence on his system, to be followed later by Neoplatonism and B?hme's mysticism, and, finally, by Aristotle and the Gnostics, not to speak of his intercourse with his contemporaries Kielmeyer, Steffens, Baader, Eschenmayer, and others. Omitting his early adherence to Fichte, at least three periods must be distinguished in Schelling's thinking. The first period (1797-1800) includes the epoch-making feat of his youth, the philosophy of nature, and, as an equally legitimate second part of his system, the philosophy of spirit or transcendental philosophy. The latter is a supplementary recasting of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, while in the former Schelling follows Kant and Herder. The second period, from 1801, adds to these two co-ordinate parts, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, and as a fundamental discipline, a science of the absolute, the philosophy of identity, which may be characterized as Spinozism revived on a Fichtean basis. Besides the example of Spinoza, Giordano Bruno had most influence on this form of Schelling's philosophy. With the year 1809, after the signs of a new phase had become perceptible from 1804 on, his system enters on its third, the theosophical, period, the period of the positive philosophy, in which we shall distinguish a mystical and a scholastic stage. The former is represented by the doctrine of freedom inspired by Jacob B?hme; the latter, by the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which goes back to Aristotle and the Gnostics. In the first period the absolute for Schelling is creative nature; in the second, the identity of opposites; in the third it is an antemundane process which advances from the not-yet-present of the contraries to their overcoming. In neither of these advances is it Schelling's intention to break with his previous teachings, but in each case only to add a supplement. That which has hitherto been the whole is retained as a part. The philosophy of nature takes its place beside the completed Fichtean transcendental philosophy, with equal rights, though with a reversed procedure; then the theory of identity assumes a place above both; finally, a positive (existential) philosophy is added to the previous negative (rational) philosophy.

%1a. Philosophy of Nature.%

Schelling agrees with Fichte that philosophy is transcendental science, the doctrine of the conditions of consciousness, and has to answer the question, What must take place in order that knowledge may arise? They agree, further, that these conditions of knowledge are necessary acts, outgoings of an active original ground which is not yet conscious self, but seeks to become such, and that the material world is the product of these actions. Nature exists in order that the ego may develop. But while Fichte correctly understood the purpose of nature, to help intelligence into being, he failed to recognize the dignity of nature, for he deprived it of all self-dependence, all life of its own, all generative power, and treated it merely as a dead tool, as a passive, merely posited non-ego. Nature is not a board which the original ego nails up before itself in order, striking against it, to be driven back upon itself, to be compelled to reflection, and thereby to become theoretical ego; in order, further, working over the non-ego, and transforming it, to exercise its practical activity: but it is a ladder on which spirit rises to itself. Spirit develops out of nature; nature itself has a spiritual element in it; it is undeveloped, slumbering, unconscious, benumbed intelligence. By transferring to nature the power of self-position or of being subject, Schelling exalts the drudge of the Science of Knowledge to the throne. The threefold division, "infinite original activity-nature or object-individual ego or subject," remains as in Fichte, only that the first member is not termed pure ego, but nature, yet creative nature, natura naturans. Schelling's aim is to show how from the object a subject arises, from the existent something represented, from the representable a representer, from nature an ego. He could only hope to solve this problem if he conceived natural objects-in the highest of which, man, he makes conscious spirit break forth or nature intuit itself-as themselves the products of an original subject, of a creative ground striving toward consciousness. For him also doing is more original than being. It would not be exact, therefore, to define the difference between Fichte and Schelling by saying that, with the former, nature proceeds from the ego, and with the latter the ego, from nature. It is rather true that with them both nature and spirit are alike the products of a third and higher term, which seeks to become spirit, and can accomplish this only by positing nature. In the Science of Knowledge, it is true, this higher ground is conceived as an ethical, in the Philosophy of Nature as a physical, power, although one framed for intelligence; in the former, moreover, the natura naturata appears as the position once for all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increasing intelligence. In the unconscious products of nature, nature's aim to reflect upon itself, to become intelligence, fails, in man it succeeds. Nature is the embryonic life of spirit. Nature and spirit are essentially identical: "That which is posited out of consciousness is in its essence the same as that which is posited in consciousness also." Therefore "the knowable must itself bear the impress of the knower." Nature the preliminary stage, not the antithesis, of spirit; history, a continuation of physical becoming; the parallelism between the ideal and the real development-series-these are ideas from Herder which Schelling introduces into the transcendental philosophy. The Kantio-Fichtean moralism, with its sharp contraposition of nature and spirit, is limited in the Naturphilosophie by Herder's physicism.

"Nature is a priori" (everything individual in it is pre-determined by the whole, by the Idea of a nature in general); hence the forms of nature can be deduced from the concept of nature. The philosopher creates nature anew, he constructs it. Speculative physics considers nature as subject, becoming, productivity (not, like empirical science, as object, being, product), and for this purpose it needs, instead of individualizing reflection, an intuition directed to the whole. To this productive nature, as to the absolute ego of Fichte, are ascribed two opposite activities, one expansive or repulsive, and one attractive, and on these is based the universal law of polarity. The absolute productivity strives toward an infinite product, which it never attains, because apart from arrest no product exists. At definite points a check must be given it in order that something knowable may arise. Thus every product in nature is the result of a positive, centrifugal, accelerating, universalizing force, and a negative, limiting, retarding, individualizing one. The endlessness of the creative activity manifests itself in various ways: in the striving for development on the part of every product, in the preservation of the genus amid the disappearance of individuals, in the endlessness of the series of products. Nature's creative impulse is inexhaustible, it transcends every product. Qualities are points of arrest in the one universal force of nature; all nature is a connected development. Because of the opposition in the nature-ground between the stimulating and the retarding activity, the law of duality everywhere rules. To these two forces, however, still a third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation or measure of their connection. This is the source of the threefold division of the Philosophy of Nature. The magnet with its union of opposite polar forces is the type of all configuration in nature.

With Fichte's synthetic method and Herder's naturalistic principles Schelling combines Kantian ideas, especially Kant's dynamism (matter is a force-product),[1] and his view of the organic (organisms are self-productive beings, and are regarded by us as ends in themselves, because of the interaction between their members and the whole). The three organic functions sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, on the other hand, Schelling took from Kielmeyer, whose address On the Relations of the Organic Forces, 1793, excited great attention. The concept of life is dominant in Schelling's theory of nature. The organic is more original than the inorganic; the latter must be explained from the former; that which is dead must be considered as a product of departing life. No less erroneous than the theory of a magic vital force is the mechanical interpretation, which looks on life merely as a chemical phenomenon. The dead, mechanical and chemical, forces are merely the negative conditions of life; to them there must be added as a positive force a vital stimulus external to the individual, which continually rekindles the conflict between the opposing activities on which the vital process depends. Life consists, that is, in the perpetual prevention of the equilibrium which is the object of the chemical process. This constant disturbance proceeds from "universal nature," which, as the common principle of organic and inorganic nature, as that which determines them for each other, which founds a pre-established harmony between them, deserves the name of the world-soul. Schelling thus recognizes a threefold nature: organized, inorganic, and universal organizing (according to Harms, cosmical) nature, of which the two former arise from the third and are brought by it into connection and harmony. (As Schelling here takes an independent middle course between the mechanical explanation of life and the assumption of a specific vital force, so in all the burning physical questions of the time he seeks to rise above the contending parties by means of mediating solutions. Thus, in the question of "single or double electricity," he ranges himself neither on the side of Franklin nor on that of his opponents; in regard to the problem of light, endeavors to overcome the antithesis between Newton's emanation theory and the undulation theory of Euler; and, in his chapter on combustion, attacks the defenders of phlogiston as well as those who deny it).

[Footnote 1: Schelling terms his philosophy of nature dynamic atomism, since it posits pure intensities as the simple (atoms), from which qualities are to be explained.]

Schelling's philosophy of nature[1] proposes to itself three chief problems: the construction of general, indeterminate, homogeneous matter, with differences in density alone, of determinate, qualitatively differentiated matter and its phenomena of motion or the dynamical process, and of the organic process. For each of these departments of nature an original force in universal nature is assumed-gravity, light, and their copula, universal life. Gravity-this does not mean that which as the force of attraction falls within the view of sensation, for it is the union of attraction and repulsion-is the principle of corporeality, and produces in the visible world the different conditions of aggregation in solids, fluids, and gases. Light-this, too, is not to be confounded with actual light, of which it is the cause-is the principle of the soul (from it proceeds all intelligence, it is a spiritual potency, the "first subject" in nature), and produces in the visible world the dynamical processes magnetism, electricity, and chemism. The higher unity of gravity and light is the copula or life, the principle of the organic, of animated corporeality or the processes of growth and reproduction, irritability, and sensibility.

[Footnote 1: This is contained in the following treatises: Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 1797; On the World-soul, 1798; First Sketch of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 1799; Universal Deduction of the Dynamical Process or the Categories of Physics (in the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik) 1800. In the above exposition, however, the modified philosophy of nature of the second period has also been taken into account.]

General matter or the filling of space, arises from the co-operation of three forces: the centrifugal, which manifests itself as repulsion (first dimension), the centripetal, manifested as attraction (second dimension), and the synthesis of the two, manifested as gravity (third dimension). These forces are raised by light to a higher potency, and then make their appearance as the causes of the dynamical process or of the specific differences of matter. The linear function of magnetism is the condition of coherence; the surface force of electricity, the basis of the qualities perceivable by sense; the tri-dimensional force of the chemical process, in which the two former are united, produces the chemical qualities. Galvanism forms the transition to living nature, in which through the operation of the "copula" these three dynamical categories are raised to organic categories. To magnetism as the most general, and hence the lowest force, corresponds reproduction (the formative impulse, as nutrition, growth, and production, including the artistic impulse); electricity develops into irritability or excitability; the higher analogue to the chemical process as the most individual and highest stage is sensibility or the capacity of feeling. (Such at least is Schelling's doctrine after Steffens had convinced him of the higher dignity of that which is individual, whereas at first he had made sensibility parallel with magnetism, and reproduction with chemism, because the former two appear most seldom, and the latter most frequently. Electricity and irritability always maintained their intermediate position.) With the awakening of feeling nature has attained its goal-intelligence. As inorganic substances are distinguished only by relative degrees of repulsion and attraction, so the differentiation of organisms is conditioned by the relation of the three vital functions: in the lower forms reproduction predominates, then irritability gradually increases, while in the highest forms both of these are subordinated to sensibility. All species, however, are connected by a common life, all the stages are but arrests of the same fundamental force. This accentuation of the unity of nature, which establishes a certain kinship between Schelling's philosophy of nature and Darwinism, was a great idea, which deserves the thanks of posterity in spite of such defects as its often sportive, often heedlessly bold reasoning in details.

The parallelism of the potencies of nature, as we have developed it by leaving out of account the numerous differences between the various expositions of the Naturphilosophie, may be shown by a table:

I. UNIVERSAL NATURE. II. INORGANIC NATURE III. ORGANIC NATURE.

(ORGANIZING)