Will Durant---The Philosophy of Kant

Immanuel Kant and German idealism roads to Kant never has a system of thought so dominated an epoch as the philosophy of Immanuel Kant dominated the thought of the 19th century after almost three score years of quiet and secluded development the uncanny Scot of königsberg roused the world from its dogmatic slumbers in 1781 with his famous critique of Pure Reason and from that year to our own the critical philosophy has ruled the speculative roost of Europe the philosophy of Schopenhauer rose to brief power on the romantic wave that broke in 1848 the theory of evolution swept everything before it after 1859 and the exhilarating iconoclasm of Nietzsche won the center of the philosophic stage as the century came to a close but these were secondary in surface developments underneath them the strong and steady current of the Kantian movement flowed on always wider and deeper until today it's essential theorems are the axioms of all mature philosophy nietzsche takes Conte for granted and passes on Schopenhauer calls the critique the most important work in German literature and considers any man a child until he is understood can't Spencer could not understand Conte and for precisely that reason perhaps fell a little short of the fullest philosophic stature to adapt Hegel's phrase about Spinoza to be a philosopher one must first have been a Kantian therefore let us become conscience at once but it cannot be done at once apparently for in philosophy as in politics the longest distance between two points is a straight line Kant is the last person in the world whom we should read on Kant our philosopher is like and unlike Jehovah he speaks through clouds but without the illumination of the lightning flash he disdains examples and the concrete they would have made his book too long he argued so abbreviated it contains some 800 pages only professional philosophers were expected to read him and these would not need illustrations yet when Conte gave the manuscript of the critique to his friend Hertz a man much versed in speculation Hertz returned it half read saying he feared insanity if he went on with it what shall we do with such a philosopher let us approach him deviously and cautiously beginning at a safe and respectful distance from him let us start at various points on the circumference of the subject and then grope our way towards that subtle center where the most difficult of all philosophies has its secret and its treasure from Voltaire to Kant the road here is from theoretical reason without religious faith to religious faith without theoretical reason Voltaire means the enlightenment the encyclopedia the age of reason the warm enthusiasm of Francis Bacon had inspired all Europe except Russo with unquestioning confidence in the power of science and logic to solve at last all problems and illustrate the infinite perfectibility of man Don d'Orsay in prison wrote his historical tableau of the progress of the human spirit 1793 which spoke the sublime trust of the 18th century in knowledge and reason and asked no other key to utopia than universal education even the steady Germans had their Alpha Clairol their rationalist Christian Wulff and they're hopeful Lessing and the excitable Parisians of the revolution dramatized this apotheosis of the intellect by worshipping the goddess of Reason impersonated by a charming lady of the streets in Spinoza this faith in reason had begotten a magnificent structure of geometry and logic the universe was a mathematical system and could be described a priori by pure deduction from accepted axioms in Hobbes the rationalism of bacon had become an uncompromising atheism and materialism again nothing was to exist but atoms and the void from Spinoza to Diderot the Rex of faith lay in the wake of advancing reason one by one the old dogmas disappeared the Gothic cathedral of medieval belief with its delightful details and grotesques collapsed the ancient God fell from his throne along with the Bourbons heaven faded into mere sky and hell became only an emotional expression Elvis you send old Bach made atheism so fashionable in the salons of France that even the clergy took it up and Lemaitre went to peddle it in Germany under the auspices of Prussia's king when in 1784 Lessing shocked yakobe by announcing himself a follower of Spinoza it was a sign that faith had reached its nadir and that reason was triumphant David Hume who played so vigorous a role in the Enlightenment assault on supernatural belief said that when reason is against a man he will soon turn against reason religious faith and hope voiced in a hundred thousand steeples rising out of the soil of Europe everywhere were too deeply rooted in the institutions of society and in the heart of man to permit their ready surrender to the hostile verdict of reason it was inevitable that this faith and this hope so condemned would question the competence of the judge and would call for an examination of Reason as well as of religion what was this intellect that proposed to destroy with the syllogism the beliefs of thousands of years and millions of men was it infallible or was it one human organ like any other with strictest limits to its functions and its powers the time had come to judge this judge to examine this ruthless Revolutionary Tribunal that was dealing out death so lavishly to every ancient hope the time had come for a critique of reason from Locke to Kant the way had been prepared for such an examination by the work of Locke Berkeley and Hume and yet apparently their results were too hostile to religion John Locke 1632 to 1704 had proposed to apply to psychology the inductive tests and methods of Francis Bacon in his great essay on human under Bandung 1689 reason for the first time in modern thought had turned in upon itself and philosophy had begun to scrutinize the instrument which it so long had trusted this introspective movement in philosophy grew step by step with the introspective novel as developed by Richardson and Rousseau just as the sentimental and emotional color of Clarissa Harlowe and la nouvelle Eloise had its counterpart in the philosophic exaltation of instinct and feeling above intellect and reason how does knowledge arise have we as some would people suppose innate ideas as for example of right and wrong and God ideas inherent in the mind from birth prior to all experience anxious theologians worried lest belief in the deity should disappear because God had not yet been seen in any telescope had thought that faith and morals might be strengthened if their central and basic ideas were shown to be inborn in every normal soul but block good Christian though he was ready to argue most eloquently for the reasonableness of Christianity could not accept these suppositions he announced quietly that all our knowledge comes from experience and through our senses that there is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses the mind is at birth a clean sheet a tabula rasa and Sense experience writes upon it in a thousand ways until sensation begets memory and memory baguettes ideas all of which seem to lead to the startling conclusion that since only material things can affect our sense we know nothing but matter and must accept a materialistic philosophy if sensations are the stuff of thought the hasty argued matter must be the material of mind not at all said Bishop George Berkeley 1684 217 53 this Lockean analysis of knowledge proves rather that matter does not exist except as a form of mind it was a brilliant idea to refute materialism by the simple expedient of showing that we know of no such thing as matter in all Europe only a Gaelic imagination could have conceived this metaphysical magic but see how obvious it is said the bishop has not locked told us that all our knowledge is derived from sensation therefore all our knowledge of anything is merely our sensations of it and the ideas derived from these sensations a thing is merely a bundle of perceptions ie classified and interpreted sensations you protest that your breakfast is much more substantial than a bundle of perceptions and that a hammer that teaches you carpentry through your thumb has a most magnificent materiality but your breakfast is at first nothing but a congeries of sensations of sight and smell and touch and then of taste and then of internal comfort and warmth likewise the hammer is a bundle of sensations of color size shape weight touch et cetera it's reality for you is not in its materiality but in the sensations that come from your thumb if you had no senses the hammer would not exist for you at all it might strike your dead thumb forever and yet wind from you not the slightest attention it is only a bundle of sensations or a bundle of memories it is a condition of the mind all matters so far as we know it is a mental condition and the only reality that we know directly is mind so much for materialism but the Irish Bishop had reckoned without the Scotch skeptic David Hume 1711 to 1776 at the age of 26 shocked all Christendom with his highly heretical treatise on human nature one of the classics and marvels of modern philosophy we know the mind said Hume only as we know matter by perception though it be in this case internal never do we perceive any such entity as the mind we perceive merely separate ideas memories feelings etc the mind is not a substance an organ that has ideas it is only an abstract name for the series of ideas the perceptions memories and feelings are the mind there is no observable soul behind the process of thought the result appeared to be that Hume had as effectually destroyed mind as Berkeley had destroyed matter nothing was left and philosophy found itself in the midst of ruins of its own making no wonder that a wit advised the abandonment of the controversy saying no matter never mind but Hume was not content to destroy Orthodox religion by dissipating the concept of soul he proposed also to destroy science by dissolving the concept of law science and philosophy alike since Bruno and Galileo had been making much of natural law of necessity in the sequence of effect upon cause Spinoza had reared his majestic metaphysics upon this proud conception but observe said Hume that we never perceive causes or laws we perceive events and sequences and infer causation and necessity a law is not an eternal and necessary decree to which events are subjected but merely a mental summary and shorthand of our kaleidoscopic experience we have no guarantee that the sequences hitherto observed will reappear unaltered in future experience law is an observed custom in the sequence of events but there is no necessity in custom only mathematical formulas have necessity they alone are inherently and unchangeably true and this merely because such formulae are tautological the predicate is already contained in the subject three times three equals nine is an eternal and necessary truth only because three times three and nine are one in the same thing differently expressed the predicate adds nothing to the subject science then must limit itself strictly to mathematics and direct experiment it cannot trust two unverified adduction from laws when we run through libraries persuaded of these principles rights are uncanny skeptic what havoc must we make if we take in our hands any volume of school metaphysics for instance let us ask does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number no does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence no commit it then to the flames for it can contain nothing but office tree and delusion imagine how the years of the Orthodox tingled at these words here the epistemological tradition the inquiry into the nature sources and validity of knowledge had ceased to be a support to religion the sword with which Bishop Berkeley had slain the dragon of materialism had turned against the immaterial mind and the immortal soul and in the turmoil science itself had suffered severe injury no wonder that when Immanuel Kant in 1775 read a German translation of the works of David Hume he was shocked by these results and was roused as he said from the dogmatic slumbers in which he had assumed without question the essentials of religion and the basis of science were both science and faith to be surrendered to the skeptic what could be done to save them from Rousseau to Kant to the argument of the Enlightenment that reason makes for materialism Berkeley had essayed the answer that matter does not exist but this had led in Hume to the retort that by the same token mind does not exist either another answer was possible that reason is no final test there are some theoretical conclusions against which our whole being rebels we have no right to presume that these demands of our nature must be stifled at the dictates of a logic which is after all but the recent construction of a frail and deceptive part of us how often our instincts and feelings push aside the little syllogisms which would like us to behave like geometrical figures and make love with mathematical precision sometimes no doubt and particularly in the novel complexities and artificialities of urban life reason is the better guide but in the great crises of life and in the great problems of conduct and belief we trust to our feelings rather than to our diagrams if reason is against religion so much the worse for reason such an effect was the argument of jean-jacques Rousseau 1712 to 1778 who almost alone in France for the materialism and atheism of the Enlightenment what a fate for a delicate and neurotic nature to have been cast amidst the robust rationalism and the almost brutal hedonism of the encyclopedist s-- Rousseau had been a sickly youth driven into brooding and introversion by his physical weakness and the unsympathetic attitude of his parents and teachers he had escaped from the stings of reality into a hothouse world of dreams where the victories denied him in life and love could be had for the imagining his confessions reveal an unreconciled complex of the most refined sentimentality with an obtuse sense of decency and honor and through it all an unsullied conviction of his moral superiority in 1749 the academy of dijon offered a prize for an essay on the question as the progress of the sciences and the arts contributed to corrupt or to purify morals Russo's essay won the prize culture is much more of an evil than a good he argued with all the intensity and sincerity of one who finding culture out of his reach proposed to prove it worthless consider the frightful disorders which printing has produced in Europe wherever philosophy arises the moral health of the nation decays it was even a saying among the philosophers themselves that since learned men had appeared honest men were nowhere to be found I venture to declare that a state of reflection is contrary to nature and that a thinking man an intellectual as we would now say is a depraved animal it would be better to abandon our over rapid development of the intellect and to aim rather at training the heart in the affections education does not make a man good it only makes him clever usually for mischief instinct and feeling are more trustworthy than reason in his famous novel la nouvelle Eloise 1761 Rousseau illustrated at great length the superiority of feeling to intellect sentimentality became the fashion among the ladies of the aristocracy and among some of the men France was for a century watered with literary and then with actual tears and the great movement of the European intellect in the 18th century gave way to the romantic emotional literature of 1789 to 1848 the current carried with it a strong revival of religious feeling the ecstasy's of Chateaubriand she need du Christian yzma 1802 were merely an echo of the confession of faith of the Savard vicar which Rousseau included in his ethical essay on education Emile 1762 the argument of the confession was briefly this that though reason might be against belief in God and immortality feeling was overwhelmingly in their favor why should we not trust an instinct here rather than yield to the despair of an arid skepticism when contra de miel he omitted his daily walk under the linden trees in order to finish the book at once it was an event in his life to find here another man who was groping his way out of the darkness of atheism and who boldly affirmed the priority of feeling over theoretical reason in these supra sensual concerns here at last was the second half of the answer to e religion now finally all the scoffers and doubters would be scattered to put these threads of argument together to unite the ideas of Berkeley and Hume with the feelings of Rousseau to save religion from reason and yet at the same time to save science from scepticism this was the mission of Immanuel Kant but who was Immanuel Kant Kant himself he was born at Koenig spared Prussia in 1724 except for a short period of tutoring in a nearby village this quiet little professor who loved so much to lecture on the geography and ethnology of distant lands never left his native city he came of a poor family which had left Scotland some hundred years before Emmanuel's birth his mother was a PI attest ie a member of a religious sect which like the Methodists of England insisted on the full strictness and rigor of religious practice and belief our philosopher was so immersed in religion from morning to night that on the one hand he experienced a reaction which led him to stay away from church all through his adult life and on the other hand he kept to the end the somber stamp of the German Puritan and felt as he grew old a great longing to preserve for himself in the world the essentials at least of the faith so deeply inculcated in him by his mother but a young man growing up in the age of Frederick and Voltaire could not insulate himself from the sceptical current of the time Kant was profoundly influenced even by the men whom later he aimed to refute and perhaps most of all by his favorite enemy Hume we shall see later the remarkable phenomenon of a philosopher transcending the conservatism of his maturity and returning in almost his last work and at almost the age of 72 a virile liberalism that would have brought his martyrdom and not his age and his fame protected him even in the midst of his work of religious restoration we hear with surprising frequency the tones of another Kahn whom we might almost mistake for a Voltaire Schopenhauer thought it not the least merit of Frederick the Great that under his government can't could develop himself and dared to publish his critique of Pure Reason hardly under any other government with a salaried professor therefore in Germany a government employee have ventured such a thing Kant was obliged to promise the immediate successor of the Great King that he would write no more it was an appreciation of this freedom that can take the critique toot said 'let's Fredericks farsighted progressive Minister of Education in 1755 Kant began his work as private lecturer at the University of Clinics Berg for 15 years he was left in this lowly post twice his applications for a professorship were refused at last in 1770 he was made professor of logic and metaphysics after many years of experience as a teacher he wrote a textbook of pedagogy of which he used to say that it contained many excellent precepts none of which he had ever applied yet he was perhaps a better teacher than writer and two generations of students learned to love him one of his practical principles was to attend most to those pupils who were of middle ability the dunces he said were beyond all help and the geniuses would help themselves nobody expected him to startle the world with a new metaphysical system to startle anybody seemed the very last crime that this timid and modest professor would commit he himself had no expectations in that line at the age of 42 he wrote I have the fortune to be a lover of metaphysics but my mistress has shown me few favors as yet he spoke in those days of the bottomless abyss of metaphysics and of metaphysics as a dark ocean without Shores or lighthouse strewn with many a philosophic wreck he could even attack the meta physicians as those who dwelt on the high towers of speculation where there is usually a great deal of wind he did not foresee that the greatest of all metaphysical tempest s' was to be of his own blowing during these quiet years his interests were rather physical than metaphysical he wrote on planets earthquakes fire winds ether volcanoes geography ethnology and a hundred other things of that sort not usually confounded with metaphysics his theory of the heavens 17:55 proposed something very similar to the nebular hypothesis of Laplace and attempted a mechanical explanation of all sidereal motion and development all the planets Kant thought have been or will be inhabited and those that are farthest from the Sun having had the longest period of growth have probably a higher species of intelligent organisms than any yet produced on our planet his anthropology put together in 1798 from the lectures of a lifetime suggested the possibility of the animal origin of man Kant argued that if the human infant in early ages when man was still largely at the mercy of wild animals had cried as loudly upon entering the world as it does now it would have been found out and devoured by beasts of prey that an all probability therefore man was very different at first from what he had become under civilization and then count went on subtly how nature brought about such a development and by what causes it was aided we know not this remark carries us a long way it suggests the thought whether the present period of history on the occasion of some great physical revolution may not be followed by a third when an orangutan or a chimpanzee would develop the organs which serve for walking touching speaking into the articulated structure of a human being with a central organ for the use of understanding and gradually advance under the training of social institutions was this use of the future tense cons cautiously indirect way of putting forth his view of how man had really developed from the beasts so we see the slow growth of this simple little man hardly five feet tall modest shrinking and yet containing in his head or generating there the most far-reaching revolution in modern philosophy Kant's life says one biographer passed like the most regular of regular verbs rising coffee drinking writing lecturing dining walking Cecina each had its set time and when a manual Kant in his gray coat cane in hand appeared at the door of his house and strolled towards the small avenue of linden trees which is still called the philosopher's walk the neighbors knew it was exactly half-past three by the clock so he promenade it up and down during all seasons and when the weather was gloomy or the gray clouds threatened rain his old servant Lampa was seen plotting anxiously after with a large umbrella under his arm like a symbol of prudence he was so frail and physique that he had to take severe measures to regimen himself he thought it's safer to do this without a doctor so he lived to the age of 80 at 70 he wrote an essay on the power of the mind to master the feeling of illness by force of resolution one of his favorite principles was to breathe only through the nose especially when outdoors hence in autumn winter and spring he would permit no one to talk to him on his daily walks better silence than a cold he applied philosophy even to holding up his stockings by bands passing up into his trousers pockets where they ended in springs contained in small boxes he thought everything out carefully before acting and therefore remained a bachelor all his life long twice he thought of offering his hand to a lady but he reflected so long that in one case the lady married a bolder man and in the other the lady removed from Konigsberg before the philosopher could make up his mind perhaps he felt like Nietzsche that marriage would hamper him in the honest pursuit of truth a married man Talleyrand used to say will do anything for money and content written at 22 with all the fine enthusiasm of omnipotent youth I have already fixed upon the line which I am resolved to keep I will enter on my course and nothing shall prevent me from pursuing it and so he persevered through poverty and obscurity sketching and writing and rewriting his magnum opus for almost fifteen years finishing it only in 1781 when he was 57 years old never did a man mature so slowly and then again never did a book so startled and upset the philosophic world the critique of Pure Reason a word about what to read Kant himself is hardly intelligible to the beginner because his thought is insulated with a bizarre and intricate terminology hence the paucity of direct quotation in this chapter perhaps the simplest introduction is Wallis's Kant in the Blackwood philosophical classics heavier and more advanced his Paulson's Immanuel Kant Chamberlain's Immanuel Kant two volumes New York 1914 is interesting but erratic and aggressive a good criticism of Kant may be found in Chopin ours world as will and idea volume two pages one to one fifty nine but caveat emptor what is meant by this title critique is not precisely a criticism but a critical analysis Kant is not attacking pure reason except at the end to show its limitations rather he hopes to show its possibility and to exalted above the impure knowledge which comes to us through the distorting channels of sense for pure reason is to mean knowledge that does not come through our senses but is independent of all Sense experience knowledge belonging to us by the inherent nature and structure of the mind at the very outset then Kant flings down a challenge to lock in the English school knowledge is not all derived from the senses Hume thought he had shown that there is no soul and no science that our minds are but our ideas in procession and Association and our certainties but probabilities in perpetual danger of violation these false conclusions says Kant are the result of false premises you assume that all knowledge comes from separate and distinct sensations naturally these cannot give you necessity or in variable sequences of which you may be forever certain and naturally you must not expect to see your soul even with the eyes of the internal sense let us grant that absolute certainty of knowledge is impossible if all knowledge comes from sensation from an independent external world which shows us no promise of regular of behavior but what if we have knowledge that is independent of sense experience knowledge whose truth is certain to us even before experience a priori then absolute truth and absolute science would become possible would it not is there such absolute knowledge this is the problem of the first critique my question is what we can hope to achieve with reason when all the material and assistance of experience are taken away the critique becomes a detailed biology of thought an examination of the origin and evolution of concepts an analysis of the inherited structure of the mind this as Kant believes is the entire problem of metaphysics in this book I have chiefly aimed at completeness and I venture to maintain that there ought not to be one single metaphysical problem that has not been solved here or to the solution of which the key at least has not have been supplied eggsy ji monumental IRA perennials with such eager tizen nature Spurs us on to creation the critique comes to the point at once experience is by no means the only field to which our understanding can be confined experience tells us what is but not that it must be necessarily what it is and not otherwise if therefore never gives us any really general truths and our reason which is particularly anxious for that class of knowledge is roused by it rather than satisfied general truths which at the same time bear the character of an inward necessity must be independent of experience clear and certain in themselves that is to say they must be true no matter what hour later experience may be true even before experience true a priori how far can we advance independently of all experience in a priori knowledge is shown by the brilliant example of mathematics mathematical knowledge is necessary and certain we cannot conceive of future experience violating it we may believe that the Sun will rise in the West tomorrow or that Sunday in some verbal asbestos world fire will not burn stick but we cannot for the life of us believe that two times two will ever make anything else than four such truths are true before experience they do not depend on experience past present or to come therefore they are absolute and necessary truths it is inconceivable that they should ever become untrue but whence do we get this character of absoluteness and necessity not from experience for experience gives us nothing but separate sensations and events which may alter their sequence in the future these truths derive their necessary character from the inherent structure of our minds from the natural and inevitable manner in which our minds must operate for the mind of man and here at last is the great thesis of Kant is not passive wax upon which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states it is an active organ which molds and coordinates sensations into ideas an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought transcendental aesthetic the effort to answer this question to study the inherent structure of the mind or the innate laws of thought is what Kant calls transcendental philosophy because it is a problem transcending sense experience I call knowledge transcendental which is occupied not so much with objects as with our a priori concepts of objects with our modes of correlating our experience into knowledge there are two grades or stages in this process of working up the raw material of sensation into the finished product of thought the first stage is the coordination of sensations by applying to them the forms of perception space and time the second stage is the coordination of the perceptions so developed by applying to them the forms of conception the categories of thought Kant using the word aesthetic in its original and etymological sense as Cano ting sensation or feeling cause the study of the first of these stages transcendental aesthetic and using the word logic as meaning the science of the forms of thought he calls the study of the second stage transcendental logic these are terrible words which will take meaning as the argument proceeds once over this hill the road to Kant will be comparatively clear now just what is meant by sensations and perceptions and how does the mind change the former into the latter by itself a sensation is merely the awareness of a stimulus we have a taste on the tongue an odor in the nostrils a sound in the ears the temperature on the skin a flash of light on the retina a pressure on the fingers it is the raw crude beginning of experience it is what the infant has in the early days of its groping mental life it is not yet knowledge but let these various sensations group themselves about an object in space and time say this Apple let the odor in the nostrils and the taste on the tongue the light on the retina the shape revealing pressure of the fingers in the hand unites and group themselves about this thing and there is now an awareness not so much of a stimulus as of a specific object there is a perception sensation has passed into knowledge but again was this passage this grouping automatic did the sensations of themselves spontaneously and naturally fall into a cluster and an order and so become perception yes said Locke and Hume not at all says Kant for these varied sensations come to us through varied channels of sense through a thousand afferent nerves that pass from skin and eye and ear and tongue into the brain what a medley of messengers they must be as they crowd into the chambers of the mind calling for attention no wonder Plato spoke of the rabble of the senses and left to themselves they remain rabble a chaotic manifold pitifully impotent waiting to be ordered into meaning and purpose and power as readily might the messages brought to a general from a thousand sectors of the battle line weave themselves unaided into comprehension and and know there is a lawgiver for this mob a directing and coordinating power that does not merely receive but takes these atoms of sensation and molds them into sense observe first that not all of the messages are accepted myriad forces play upon your body at this moment a storm of stimuli beats down upon the nerve endings which amoeba like you put forth to experience the external world but not all that call are chosen only those sensations are selected that can be molded into perceptions suited to your present purpose or that bring those imperious messages of danger which are always relevant the clock is ticking and you do not hear it but that same ticking not louder than before will be heard at once if your purpose wills it so the mother asleep at her infants cradle is deaf to the turmoil of life about her but let the little one move and the mother gropes her way back to waking attention like a diver rising hurriedly to the surface of the sea let the purpose be addition and the stimulus two and three brings the response five let the purpose be multiplication in the same stimulus the same auditory sensations two and three bring the response six Association of sensations or ideas is not merely by contiguity in space or time nor by similarity nor by recency frequency or intensity of experience it is above all determined by the purpose of the mind sensations and thoughts are servants they await our call they do not come unless we need them there is an agent of selection and direction that uses them and is their master in addition to the sensations and the ideas there is the mind this agent of selection and coordination Kant thinks uses first of all two simple methods for the classification of the material presented to it the sense of space and the sense of time as the general arranges the messages brought him according to the place from which they come and the time at which they were written and so finds an order and a system for them all so the mind allocates its sensations in space and attributes them to this object here or that object there to this present time or to that past space and time are not things perceived but modes of perception ways of putting sense into sensation space and time our organs of perception they are a priori because all ordered experience involves and presupposes them without them sensations could never grow into perceptions they are a priori because it is inconceivable that we should ever have any future experience that will not also involve them and because they are a priori their laws which are the laws of mathematics are a priori absolute and necessary world without end it is not merely probable it is certain that we shall never find a straight line that is not the shortest distance between two points mathematics at least is saved from the dissolvent skepticism of David Hume can all the sciences be similarly saved yes if their basic principle the law of causality that a given cause must always be followed by a given effect can be shown like space and time to be so inherent in all the processes of understanding that no future experience can be conceived that would violate or escape it is causality to a priori an indispensable prerequisite and condition of all thought transcendental analytic so we pass from the wide field of sensation and perception to the dark and narrow chamber of thought from transcendental aesthetic to transcendental logic and first to the naming and analysis of those elements in our thought which are not so much given to the mind by perception as given to perception by the mind those levers which raise the perceptual knowledge of objects into the conceptual knowledge of relationships sequences and laws those tools of the mind which refine experience into science just as perceptions arranged sensations around objects in space and time so conception arranges shuns objects and events about the ideas of cause unity reciprocal relation necessity contingency etc these and other categories are the structure into which perceptions are received and by which they are classified and molded into the ordered concepts of thought these are the very essence and character of the mind mind is the coordination of experience and here again observe the activity of this mind that was to Locke and Hume mere passive wax under the blows of sense experience consider a system of thought like Aristotle's is it conceivable that this almost cosmic ordering of data should have come by the automatic anarchistic spontaneity of the data themselves see this magnificent card catalog in the library intelligently ordered into sequence by human purpose then picture all these card cases thrown upon the floor all these cards scattered pell-mell into riotous disorder can you now conceive these scattered cards pulling themselves up munchausen like from their disarray passing quietly into their alphabetical and topical places in their proper boxes and each box into its fit place in the rack until all should be order and sense and purpose again what a miracle story these skeptics have given us after all sensation is unorganized stimulus perception is organized sensation conception is organized perception science is organized knowledge wisdom is organized life each is a greater degree of order and sequence and unity whence this order this sequence this unity not from the things themselves for they are known to us only by sensations that come through a thousand channels at once in disorderly multitude it is our purpose that put order and sequence and unity upon this importunate lawlessness it is ourselves our personalities our minds that bring light upon these seas Locke was wrong when he said there is nothing in the intellect except what was first in the census Leibniz was right when he added nothing except the intellect itself perceptions without conceptions says Kant are blind if perceptions wove themselves automatically into ordered thought if mind were not an active effort hammering out order from chaos how could the same experience leave one man mediocre and in a more active and tireless soul be raised to the light of wisdom and the beautiful logic of truth the world then has order not of itself but because the thought that knows the world is itself an ordering the first stage in that classification of experience which at last is science and philosophy the laws of thought are also the laws of things for things are known to us only through this thought that must obey these laws since it and they are one in effect as Hegel was to say the laws of logic and the laws of nature are one and logic and metaphysics merge the generalized principles of science are necessary because they are ultimate laws of thought that are involved and presupposed in every experience past present and to come science is absolute and truth is everlasting transcendental dialectic nevertheless this certainty this absoluteness of the highest generalizations of logic and science is paradoxically limited and relative limited strictly to the field of actual experience and relatives strictly to our human mode of experience for if our analysis has been correct the world as we know it is a construction a finished product almost one might say a manufactured article to which the mind contributes as much by its molding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli so we perceive the top of the table as round whereas our sensation is of an ellipse the object as it appears to us is a phenomenon an appearance perhaps very different from the external object before it came within the can of our senses what that original object was we can never know the thing in itself may be an object of thought or inference a noumenon but it cannot be experienced for in being experienced it would be changed by its passage through sense and thought it remains completely unknown to us what objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses we know nothing but our manner of perceiving them that manner being peculiar to us and not necessarily shared by every being though no doubt by every human being the moon has known to us is merely a bundle of sensations as Hume so unified as Hume did not see by our native mental structure through the elaboration of sensations into perceptions and of these into conceptions or ideas in result the moon is for us merely our ideas not that can't ever doubts the existence of matter and the external world but he adds that we know nothing certain about them except that they exist our detailed knowledge is about their appearance their phenomena about the sensations which we have of them idealism does not mean as the man in the street thinks that nothing exists outside the perceiving subject but that a goodly part of every object is created by the forms of perception and understanding we know the object is transformed into idea what it is before being so transformed we cannot know science after all is naive it supposes that it is dealing with things in themselves in their full-blooded external and uncorrupted reality philosophy is a little more sophisticated and realizes that the whole material of science consists of sensations perceptions and conceptions rather than of things Const greatest merits as Schopenhauer is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself it follows that any attempt by either science or religion to say just what the ultimate reality is must fall back into mere hypothesis the understanding can never go beyond the limits of sensibility such transcendental science loses itself in Anton mieze and such transcendental theology loses itself in Perales isms it is the cruel function of transcendental dialectic to examine the validity of these attempts of reason to escape from the enclosing circle of sensation and appearance into the unknowable world of things in themselves anton amis are the insoluble dilemmas born of a science that tries to overleap experience so for example when knowledge attempts to decide whether the world is finite or infinite in space thought rebels against either supposition beyond any limit we are driven to conceive something further endlessly and yet infinity is itself inconceivable again did the world have a beginning in time we cannot conceive eternity but then - we cannot conceive any point in the past without feeling at once that before that something was or has that chain of causes which science studies a beginning a first cause yes for an endless chain is inconceivable no for a first cause uncaused is inconceivable as well is there any exit from these blind alleys of thought there is says Kant if we remember that space-time and cause our modes of perception and conception which must enter into all our experience since they are the web and structure of experience these dilemmas arise from supposing that space-time and cause are external things independent of perception we shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space and time and cause but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things but modes of interpretation and understanding so with the Perales is imrat all theology which attempts to prove by theoretical reason that the soul is an incorruptible substance that the will is free and above the law of cause and effect and that there exists a necessary being God as the presupposition of all reality transcendental dialectic must remind theology that substance and cause and Ness city are finite categories modes of arrangement and classification which the mind applies to sense experience and reliably valid only for the phenomena that appeared to such experience we cannot apply these conceptions to the Newman 'el or merely inferred and conjectural world religion cannot be proved by theoretical reason so the first critique ends one could well imagine David Hume uncanny er Scott than Kant himself viewing the results with a sardonic smile here was a tremendous book 800 pages long waited beyond bearing almost with ponderous terminology proposing to solve all the problems of metaphysics and incidentally to save the absoluteness of science and the essential truth of religion what did the book really done it had destroyed the naive world of science and limited it if not in degree certainly in scope and to a world confessedly of mere surface and appearance beyond which it could issue only in farcical antinomy z-- so science was saved the most eloquent and incisive portions of the book had argued that the objects of faith a free and immortal soul a benevolent creator could never be proved by reason so religion was saved now under the priests of Germany protested madly against this salvation and revenged themselves by calling their dogs Immanuel Kant and no wonder that Heine compared the little professor of königsberg with the terrible Robespierre the latter had merely killed the king and a few thousand Frenchmen which a German might forgive but can't said Heine had killed God had undermined the most precious arguments of theology what a sharp contrast between the outer life of this man and his destructive world convulsing thoughts had the citizens of königsberg surmised the whole significance of those thoughts they would have felt a more profound or in the presence of this man than in that of an executioner who merely slays human beings but the good people saw in him nothing but a professor of philosophy and when at the fixed hour he sauntered by they nodded a friendly greeting and set their watches was this caricature or revelation the critique of practical reason if religion cannot be based on science and theology on what then on morals the basest in theology is too insecure better that it should be abandoned even destroyed faith must be put beyond the reach or realm of reason but therefore the moral basis of religion must be absolute not derived from questionable sense experience or precarious inference not corrupted by the admixture of fallible reason it must be derived from the inner self by direct perception and intuition we must find a universal and necessary ethic a priori principles of morals is absolute and certain as mathematics we must show that Pure Reason can be practical ie can of itself determine the will independently of anything empirical that the moral sense is innate and not derived from experience the moral imperative which we need as the basis of religion must be an absolute a categorical imperative now the most astounding reality in all our experience is precisely our moral sense our inescapable feeling in the face of temptation that this or that is wrong we may yield but the feeling is there nevertheless la matanza fade they projet le soir au fait des Artistes in the morning I make good resolutions in the evening I commit follies but we know that they are so T's so we resolve again what is it that brings the bite of remorse and the new resolution it is the categorical imperative in us the unconditional command of our conscience to act as if the maxim of our action were to become by our will a universal law of nature we know not by reasoning but by vivid and immediate feelings that we must avoid behavior which if adopted by all men would render social life impossible do I wish to escape from a predicament by a lie but while I can will the lie I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law for with such a law there would be no promises at all hence the sense in me that I must not lie even if it be to my advantage prudence is hypothetical its motto is honesty when it is the best policy but the moral law in our hearts is unconditional and absolute and in action is good not because it has good results or because it is wise but because it is done in obedience to this inner sense of Duty this moral law that does not come from our personal experience but legislates imperiously and a priori for all our behavior past present and future the only thing unqualifiedly good in this world is a good will the will to follow the moral law regardless of profit or loss for ourselves never mind your happiness do your duty morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness let us seek the happiness in others but for ourselves perfection whether it bring us happiness or pain to achieve perfection in yourself and happiness in others so act as to treat humanity whether in thine own person or in that of another in every case as an end never only as a means this too as we directly feel is part of the categorical imperative let us live up to such a principle and we shall soon create an ideal community of rational beings to create it we need only act as if we already belonged to it we must apply the perfect law in the imperfect state it is a hard ethic you say this placing of Duty above beauty of morality above happiness but only so can we cease to be beasts and begin to be gods notice meanwhile that this absolute command to duty proves at last the freedom of our wills how could we ever have conceived such a notion as Duty if we had not felt ourselves free we cannot prove this freedom by theoretical reason we prove it by feeling it directly in the crisis of moral choice we feel this freedom is the very essence of our inner selves of the pure ego we feel within ourselves the spontaneous activity of a mind molding experience and choosing goals our actions once we initiate them seem to follow fixed and invariable laws but only because we perceive their results through sense which clothes all that it transmits in the dress of that causal law which our minds themselves have made nevertheless we are beyond and above the laws we make in order to understand the world of our experience each of us is a center of initiative force and creative power in a way which we feel but cannot prove each of us is free and again though we cannot prove we feel that we are deathless we perceive that life is not like those traumas so beloved by the people in which every villain is punished and every act of virtue meets with its reward we learn in you everyday that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the Dove and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough if mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue it would not be wise to be too good and yet knowing all this having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition we still feel the command to righteousness we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good how could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth a new awakening if we did not vaguely know that in that later and longer life the balance will be redressed and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundredfold finally and by the same token there is a God if the sense of Duty involves and justifies belief in rewards to come the postulate of immortality must lead to the supposition of the existence of a cause adequate to this effect in other words it must postulate the existence of God this again is no proof by reason the moral sense which has to do with the world of our actions must have priority over that theoretical logic which was developed only to deal with sense phenomena our reason leaves us free to believe that behind the thing in itself there is a just God our moral sense commands us to believe it Rousseau was right above the logic of the head is the feeling in the heart Pascal was right the heart has reasons of its own which the head can never understand on religion and reason does this appear trite and timid and conservative but it was not so on the contrary this bold denial of rational theology this frank reduction of religion to moral faith and hope aroused all the Orthodox of Germany to protests to face this 40 parson power as Byron would have called it required more courage than one usually associates with the name of Kant that he was brave enough appeared in all clarity when he published at 66 his critique of judgment and at 69 his religion within the limits of Pure Reason in the earlier of these books Kant returns to the discussion of that argument from design which in the first critique he had rejected as an insufficient proof of the existence of God he begins by correlating design and beauty the beautiful he thinks is anything which reveals symmetry and unity of structure as if it had been designed by intelligence he observes in passing and Schopenhauer here helped himself to a good deal of his theory of art that the contemplation of symmetrical design always gives us a disinterested pleasure and that an interest in the beauty of nature for its own sake is always a sign of goodness many objects in nature show such beauty such symmetry and unity as almost to drive us to the notion of supernatural design but on the other hand says Kant there are also in nature many instances of waste and chaos of useless repetition and multiplication nature preserves life but at the cost of how much suffering and death the appearance of external design then is not a conclusive proof of Providence the theologians who use the idea so much should abandon it and the scientists who have abandoned it should use it it is a magnificent clue and leads to hundreds of revelations for there is design undoubtedly but it is internal design the design of the parts by the whole and if science will interpret the parts of an organism in terms of their meaning for the whole it will have an admirable balance for that other heuristic principle the mechanical conception of life which is also fruitful for discovery but which alone can never explain the growth of even a blade of grass the essay on religion is a remarkable production for a man of 69 it is perhaps the boldest of all the books of Kant since religion must be based not on the logic of theoretical reason but on the practical reason of the moral sense it follows that any Bible or revelation must be judged by its value for morality and cannot itself be the judge of a moral code churches and dogmas have value only insofar as they assist the moral development of the race when mere Creed's or ceremonies us--our priority over moral excellence as a test of religion religion has disappeared the real church is a community of people however scattered and divided who are united by devotion to the common moral law it was to establish such a community that Christ lived and died it was this real church which he held up in contrast to the ecclesiastic ISM of the Pharisees but another Ecclesiastes ISM has almost overwhelmed this noble conception Christ has brought the kingdom of God nearer to earth but he has been misunderstood and in place of God's kingdom the kingdom of the priests has been established among us creed and ritual have again replaced the good life and instead of men being bound together by religion they are divided into a thousand sects and all manner of pious nonsense is inculcated as a sort of heavenly Court service by means of which one may win through flattery the favor of the ruler of heaven again miracles cannot prove a religion for we can never quite rely on the testimony which supports them and prayer is useless if it aims at a suspension of the natural laws that hold for all experience finally the nature of perversion is reached when the church becomes an instrument in the hands of a reactionary government when the clergy whose function it is to console and guide a harassed humanity with religious faith and hope and chair are made the tools of theological obscurantism and political oppression the audacity of these conclusions lay in the fact that precisely this had happened in Prussia Frederick the Great had died in 1786 and had been succeeded by Frederick William the second to whom the liberal policies of his predecessor seemed to smack unpatriotic Lee of the French enlightenment said 'let's who had been Minister of Education under Frederick was dismissed and his place was given to a Piatt 'test Verner vulner had been described by Frederick as a treacherous and intriguing priest who divided his time between alchemy and Rosicrucian mysteries and climbed to power by offering himself as an unworthy instrument to the new monarchs policy of restoring the Orthodox faith by compulsion in 1788 vulnera decree which forbade any teaching in school or university the deviated from the Orthodox form of Lutheran Protestantism he established a strict censorship of raw forms of publication and ordered the discharge of every teacher suspected of any heresy count was at first left unmolested because he was an old man and as one royal adviser said only a few people read him and these did not understand him but the essay on religion was intelligible and though it rang true with religious fervour it revealed too strong a strain of Voltaire to pass the new censorship the Berliner mo knots shrift which had planned to publish the essay was ordered to suppress it contacted now with a vigor and courage hardly credible in a man who had almost completed threescore years and ten he sent the essay to some friends at llena and through them had it published by the press of the university there llena was outside of prussia under the jurisdiction of that same liberal duke of vimar who was then caring for goethe the result was that in 1794 kant received an eloquent cabinet order from the prussian king which read as follows our highest person has been greatly displeased to observe how you misuse your philosophy to undermine and destroy many of the most important and fundamental Cochrane's of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity we demand of you immediately an exact account and expect that in future you will give no such cause of offense but rather that in accordance with your duty you will employ your talents and authority so that our paternal purpose may be more and more attained if you continue to oppose this order you may expect unpleasant consequences Conte replied that every scholar should have the right to form independent judgments on religious matters and to make his opinions known but that during the reign of the present King he would preserve silence some biographers who can be very brave by proxy have condemned him for this concession but let us remember that Conte was 70 that he was frail in health and not fit for a fight and that he had already spoken his message to the world on politics and eternal peace the Prussian government might have pardoned consti ology had he not been guilty of political heresies as well three years after the accession of Frederick William ii the french revolution had said all the thrones of europe trembling at the time when most of the teachers in the Prussian universities had rushed to the support of legitimate monarchy Kant 65 years young hailed the revolution with joy and with tears in his eyes said to his friends now I can say like Simeon Lord let now thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation he had published in 1784 a brief exposition of his political theory under the title of the natural principle of the political order considered in connection with the idea of a universal Cosmo political history Kant begins by recognizing in that strife of each against all which had so shocked Hobbes nature's method of developing the hidden capacities of life struggle is the indispensable accompaniment of progress if men were entirely social man would stagnate a certain alloy of individualism and competition is required to make the human species survive and grow without qualities of an unsocial kind men might have led an Arcadian Shepherd life in complete harmony contentment and mutual love but in that case all their talents would have forever remained hidden in their germ Kant therefore was no slavish follower of Rousseau thanks be then to nature for this unsociable 'no sin vyas jealousy and vanity for this insatiable desire for possession and for power man wishes Concord but nature knows better what is good for his species and she wills discord in order that man may be impelled to a new exertion of his powers and to the further development of his natural capacities the struggle for existence then is not altogether an evil nevertheless men soon perceived that it must be restricted within certain limits and regulated by rules customs and laws hence the origin and development of civil society but now the same unsociable 'no switch forced men into society becomes again the cause of each Commonwealth's assuming the attitude of uncontrolled freedom in its External Relations ie as one state in relation to other states and consequently any one state must expect from any other the same sort of evils as formerly oppressed individuals and compelled them to enter into a civil union regulated by law it is time that nations like men should emerge from the wild state of nature and contract to keep the peace the whole meaning and movement of history is the ever greater restriction of pugnacity and violence the continuous enlargement of the area of peace the history of the human race viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political Constitution internally and externally perfect as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her and mankind can be fully developed if there is no such progress the labors of successive civilizations are like those of Sisyphus who again and again up the high hill heaved a huge round stone only to have it roll back as it was almost at the top history would be then nothing more than an endless and circuitous folly and we might suppose like the Hindu that the earth is a place for the expiation of old and forgotten sins the essay on eternal peace published in 1795 when Kant was 71 is a noble development of this theme Kant knows how easy it is to laugh at the phrase and under his title he writes these words were once put by a Dutch innkeeper on his sign board as a satirical inscription over the representation of a churchyard cemetery canted before complained as apparently every generation must that our rulers have no money to spend on public education because all their resources are already placed to the account of the next war the nations will not really be civil I until all standing armies are abolished the audacity of this proposal stands out when we remember that it was Prussia itself which under the father of Frederick the Great had been the first to establish conscription standing armies excite States to out rival one another in the number of their armed men which has no limit through the expense occasioned thereby peace becomes in the long run more oppressive than a short war and standing armies are thus the cause of aggressive Wars undertaken in order to get rid of this burden for in time of war the army would support itself on the country by requisitioning quartering and pillaging preferably in the enemy's territory but if necessary in one's own land even this would be better than supporting it out of government funds much of this militarism in Khan's judgment was due to the expansion of Europe into America and Africa and Asia with the resultant quarrels of the thieves over their new booty if we compare the Barbarian instances of in hospitality with the in human behavior of the civilized and especially the commercial states of our continent the injustice practiced by them even in their first contact with foreign lands and people's fills us with horror the mere visiting of such people's being regarded by them as equivalent to a conquest America the Negro lands the Spice Islands the Cape of Good Hope etc on being discovered were treated as countries that belonged to nobody for the aboriginal inhabitants were reckoned as nothing and all this has been done by nations who make a greater do about their piety and who while drinking up iniquity like water would have themselves regarded as the very elect of the Orthodox faith the old Fox of Konigsberg was not silenced yet Kant attributed this imperialistic greed to the oligarchical Constitution of European States the spoils went to a select few and remained substantial even after division if democracy were established and all shared in political power the spoils of international robbery would have to be so subdivided as to constitute a resistible temptation hence the first definitive article the conditions of eternal peace is this the civil constitution of every state shall be Republican and war shall not be declared except by a plebiscite of all the citizens when those who must do the fighting have the right to decide between war and peace history will no longer be written in blood on the other hand in a constitution where the subject is not a voting member of the state and which is therefore not republican the resolution to go to war is a matter of the smallest concern in the world for in this case the ruler who as such is not a mere citizen but the owner of the state need not in the least suffer personally by war nor has he to sacrifice his pleasures of the table or the chase or his pleasant palaces court festivals or the like he can therefore resolve for war from insignificant reasons as if it were but a hunting expedition and as regards its propriety he may leave the justification of it without concern to the diplomatic corps who were always too ready to give their services for that purpose how contemporary truth is the apparent victory of the revolution over the armies of reaction in 1795 led Khan to hope that Republic's would now spring up throughout Europe and that an international order would arise based upon a democracy without slavery and without exploitation and pledged to peace after all the function of government is to help and develop the individual not to use and abuse him every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being to use him as a mere means for some external purpose this too is part and parcel of that categorical imperative without which religion is a hypocritical farce Kant therefore calls for equality not of ability but of opportunity for the development and application of ability he rejects all prerogatives of birth and class and traces all hereditary privilege to some violent conquest in the past in the midst of obscurantism and reaction and the union of all monarchical Europe to crush the revolution he takes his stand despite his 70 years for the new order for the establishment of democracy and liberty everywhere never had old age so bravely spoken with the voice of youth but he was exhausted now he had run his race and fought his fight he withered slowly into a childlike senility that came at last to be a harmless insanity one by one his sensibilities and his powers left him and in 1804 aged 79 he died quietly and naturally like a leaf falling from a tree criticism and estimate and now how does this complex structure of logic metaphysics psychology ethics and politics stand today after the philosophic storms of a century have beaten down upon it it is pleasant to answer that much of the great edifice remains and that the critical philosophy represents an event of permanent importance in the history of thought but many details and outworks of the structure have been shaken first then is space a mere form of sensibility having no objective reality independent of the perceiving mind yes and no yes for space is an empty concept were not filled with perceived objects space merely means that certain objects are for the perceiving mind at such and such a position or distance with reference to other perceived objects and no external perception is possible except of objects in space space then is assuredly a necessary form of the external sense and no for without doubt such spatial facts as the annual elliptical circuit of the Sun by earth though stable only by a mind are independent of any perception whatever the deep and dark blue ocean rolled on before Byron told it to and after he had ceased to be nor is space a construct of the mind through the coordination of spaceless sensations we perceive space directly through our simultaneous perception of different objects in various points as when we see an insect moving across a still background likewise time as a sense of before and after or a measurement of motion is of course subjective and highly relative but a tree will age wither and decay whether or not the lapse of time is measured or perceived the truth is that count was too anxious to prove the subjectivity of space as a refuge from materialism he feared the argument that if space is objective and universal God must exist in space and be therefore spatial and material he might have been content with the critical idealism which shows that all reality is known to us prime as our sensations and ideas the old fox bit off more than he could chew he might well have contented himself too with the relativity of scientific truth without straining towards that Mirage the absolute recent studies like those of Pearson in England Mach in Germany and all reap Wong Kar a in France agree rather with Hume than with Kant all science even the most rigorous mathematics is relative in its truth science itself is not worried about the matter a high degree of probability contents it perhaps after all necessary knowledge is not necessary the great achievement of Kant is to have shown once for all that the external world is known to us only as sensation and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa the inactive victim of sensation but a positive agent selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives we can make subtractions from this accomplishment without injuring its essential greatness we may smile with Schopenhauer if the exact baker's dozen of categories so prettily boxed into triplets and then stretched and contracted and interpreted deviously and ruthlessly to fit and surround all things and we may even question whether these categories or interpretive forms of thought are innate existing before sensation and experience perhaps so in the individual as Spenser conceded though acquired by the race and then again probably acquired even by the individual the categories may be grooves of thought habits of perception and conception gradually produced by sensations and perceptions automatically arranging themselves first in disorderly ways then by a kind of natural selection of forms of arrangement in orderly and adaptive and illuminating ways it is memory that classifies and interprets sensations into perceptions and perceptions into ideas but memory is an accretion that unity of the mind which Kant thinks native the transcendental unity of a perception is acquired and not by all and can be lost as well as one in amnesia or alternating personality or insanity concepts are an achievement not a gift the 19th century dealt rather hardly with Kant's ethics his theory of an innate a priori absolute moral sense the philosophy of evolution suggested irresistible ethat the sense of duty is a social deposit in the individual the content of conscience is acquired though the vague disposition to social behavior is innate the moral self the social man is no special creation coming mysteriously from the hand of God but the late product of a leisurely evolution morals are not absolute they are a code of conduct more or less haphazardly developed for group survival and varying with the nature and circumstances of the group a people hemmed in by enemies for example will consider as immoral that zestful and restless individualism which a nation youthful insecure in its wealth and isolation will condone as a necessary ingredient in the exploitation of Natural Resources and the formation of national character no action is good in itself as Kant supposes his pietistic youth and his hard life of endless duty and infrequent pleasure gave him a moralistic bent he came at last to advocate Duty for duties sake and so fell unwittingly into the arms of Prussian absolutism there is something of a severe Scotch Calvinism in this opposition of duty to happiness Kant continues Luther and the stoic Reformation as Voltaire continues Montaigne and the epicurean Renaissance he represented a stern reaction against egoism and hedonism in which Elvis use and old Bach had formulated the life of their reckless era very much as Luther had reacted against the luxury and laxity of Mediterranean Italy but after a century of reaction against the absolutism of Kant's ethics we find ourselves again in a welter of urban sensualism and immorality of ruthless individualism untempered with democratic conscience or aristocratic honor and perhaps the day will soon come when a disintegrating civilization will welcome again Kantian called to duty the Marvel in Kahn's philosophy is his vigorous revival in the second critique of those religious ideas of God freedom and immortality which the first critique had apparently destroyed in counts works says Nietzsche's critical friend Paul ray you feel as though you were at a country fair you can buy from him anything you want freedom of the will and captivity of the will idealism and a refutation of idealism atheism and the good Lord like a juggler out of an empty hat Kant draws out of the concept of duty a god immortality and freedom to the great surprise of his readers Schopenhauer too takes a fling at the derivation of immortality from the need of reward convert you which at first bore itself so bravely towards happiness loses its independence later and holds out its hand for a tip the great pessimist believes that Kant was really a skeptic who having abandoned belief himself hesitated to destroy the faith of the people for fear of the consequences to public morals Kant discloses the groundlessness of speculative theology and leaves popular theology untouched nay even establishes it in a nobler form as a faith based upon moral feeling this was afterwards distorted by the philosophers into rational apprehension and consciousness of God etc while Kant does he demolished old and revered errors and knew the danger of doing so rather wished through the moral theology merely to substitute a few weak temporary supports so that the ruin might not fall upon him but that he might have time to escape so to Heine in what is no doubt an intentional caricature represents conn after having destroyed religion going out for a walk with his old servant Lampe and suddenly perceiving that the old man's eyes are filled with tears then Immanuel Kant has compassion and shows that he is not only a great philosopher but also a good man and half kindly half ironically he speaks old Lampe must have a God or else he cannot be happy says the practical reason for my part the practical reason may then guarantee the existence of God if these interpretations were true we should have to call the second critique a transcendental anaesthetic but these adventurous reconstructions of the inner can't need not be taken too seriously the fervor of the essay on religion within the limits of Pure Reason indicates a sincerity too intense to be questioned and the attempt to change the base of religion from theology to morals from Creed's to conduct could have come only from a profoundly religious mind it is indeed true he wrote to Moses Mendelssohn in 1766 that I think many things with the clearest conviction which I never have the courage to say but I will never say anything which I do not think naturally a long and obscure treatise like the great critique lends itself to rival interpretations one of the first reviews of the book written by reinholt a few years after it appeared said as much as we can say today the critique of Pure Reason has been proclaimed by the dogmatists as the attempt of a skeptic who undermines the certainty of all knowledge by the skeptics as a piece of arrogant presumption that undertakes to erect a new form of dogmatism upon the ruins of previous systems by the supernaturalists as a subtly plotted artifice to displace the historical foundations of religion and to establish naturalism without polemic by the natural ists as a new prop for the dying philosophy of faith by the materialists as an idealistic contradiction of the reality of matter by the spiritualists as an unjustifiable limitation of all reality to the corporeal world concealed under the name of the domain of experience in truth the glory of the book lay in its appreciation of all these points of view and to an intelligence as keen as khan's own it might well appear that he had really reconciled them all and fused them into such a unity of complex truth as philosophy had not seen in all its history before as to his influence the entire philosophic thought of the 19th century revolved about his speculation shuns after Khan told Germany began to talk metaphysics Schiller and Goethe studied him beethoven quoted with admiration his famous words about the two wonders of life the starry heavens above the moral law within and Fichte shelling Hegel and Schopenhauer produced in rapid succession great systems of thought reared upon the idealism of the old Konigsberg sage it was in these balmy days of German metaphysics that jean-paul Richter wrote God has given to the French the land to the English the sea to the Germans the Empire of the air Kant's criticism of reason and his exaltation of feeling prepared for the volunteerism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche the intuition is am of Berg song and the pragmatism of William James his identification of the laws of thought with the laws of reality gave to Hegel a whole system of philosophy and his unknowable thing in itself influenced Spenser more than Spencer knew much of the obscurity of Carlyle is traceable to his attempt to allegorize the already obscure thought of Goethe and Kant that diverse religions and philosophies are but the changing garments of one eternal truth cared and Greene and Wallace and Watson and Bradley and many others in England though their inspiration to the first critique and even the wildly innovating Nietzsche takes his epistemology from the great [ __ ] of königsberg whose static ethics he so excitedly condemns after a century of struggle between the idealism of Kant variously reformed and the materialism of the Enlightenment variously redressed the victory seems to lie with can't even the great materialist Elvis use wrote paradoxically men if I may dare say it are the creators of matter philosophy will never again be so naive as in her earlier and simpler days she must always be different Hereafter and profounder because Kant lived

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Keywords: Philosophy (Field Of Study), Immanuel Kant (Author), Will Durant (Author)

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Published: Sun Nov 09 2014