The centenary of Kant's death / by Shadworth H. Hodgson. / Hodgson, Shadworth Hollway, 1832-1912

Author: Hodgson, Shadworth Hollway, 1832-1912
Title: The centenary of Kant's death / by Shadworth H. Hodgson.
Publisher: [London : British Academy, 1905?]
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Hodgson 
The Centenary of Kant's Death 




THE 

CENTENARY OF KANT'S DEATH 

By Shadworth H. Hodgson 



FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 



Read February 12, 1904 



[From the Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 7j 

Price Om Shilling net 



THE CENTENARY OF KANT'S DEATH 

BY SHADWORTH H. HODGSON 

FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

February 12, 1904 

IMMANUEL KANT, to do honour to whom, and in grateful com- 
memoration of whose services to philosophy, we have assembled 
on this twelfth day of February, 1904, which is the centenary of 
his death, Immanuel Kant was born in the city of Konigsberg, 
the capital of East Prussia, on April 22, 1724. His father, who was 
of Scottish extraction, was a leather-strap cutter, working for himself 
in a small way, in that city. Immanuel was one of a large family. 
He owed much to the careful training and religious teaching of his 
mother, whom, however, he lost early in life, at the age of thirteen, 
and to the regular domestic habits of the household. His schoolboy 
days were passed at the Collegium Fridericianum in Konigsberg under 
the head-mastership of Franz Albert Schultz, by whom among others 
he may have been made familiar, later in life, with the current 
Leibniz- Wolf philosophy, which his own was destined to supersede ; 
Schultz being also a Professor in the University, and a convinced 
expositor of that elaborate scholastic form into which Christian Wolf 
had thrown, or with which he had incorporated, the newest philo- 
sophical ideas of the day, those of Leibniz. At the age of sixteen 
and a half Kant entered as a student at the University of Konigsberg, 
selecting Mathematics and Philosophy in the wide sense as his special 
departments, in which he attended the lectures of Professor J. G. 
Teske and enjoyed the instruction and friendship of Professor Martin 
Knutzen, who gave him the run of his own library, and made him 
acquainted with the works of the English Newton. These studies 
bore fruit in Kant's first publication, Thoughts on the True Way 
of Estimating Living Forces (vis viva\ in 1747. Schultz's lectures 
in Theology he also attended. 

On completing his student course, Kant decided for the profession 
of a teacher, and earned his living for nine years as a tutor in private 
families. His father's death in the year 1746 had left him entirely 
dependent on his own exertions. In 1755 he took the degree of 
Doctor, and qualified as a Privatdocent at the University, his 

K 



2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

inaugural dissertation being entitled De Igne, which was followed 
soon after by his Principiorum Primorum Cognitionis Metaphysicae 
Nova Dilucidatio. He worked steadily in this capacity for fifteen 
years, till the year 1770, when he was appointed to the Chair of 
Logic and Metaphysic, the duties of which office he continued 
to perform till forced to relinquish them, shortly before his death 
in his eightieth year, by the advancing infirmities of age. 

Kant's life was thus the purely academical life of a student and 
teacher. It would seem that he seldom left Konigsberg, and was 
never beyond the boundary of the province of East Prussia. Short in 
stature, slight in figure, and far from robust in constitution, but 
at the same time endued with a deep and genuine love of knowledge 
for its own sake, as well as with a strict sense of morality, the student's 
life was one for which he was eminently fitted, and fitted to adorn. 
A glance at the list of his works, with their dates, which is given in 
the collected edition of Rosenkranz and Schubert, will show the wide 
range of subjects in which he was at home. Physics, Astronomy, 
Anthropology, and Theology seem to have been his favourites. His 
work entitled General Natural History of the Heavens on Newtonian 
Principles, written in 1755 and dedicated to the King, Frederick the 
Great, which has been compared to Laplace's theory which appeared 
long afterwards on the same subject, was deprived of effective 
publication at the time by the failure of a bookseller at Leipsic Fair. 
(I take this fact, along with the others relating to Kant's life, from 
the late Professor W. Wallace's Kant, in Dr. W. Knight's series 
of Philosophical Classics, published by Messrs. Blackwood, which 
again is itself based upon Schubert's Life of Kant, contained in the 
collected edition above mentioned.) Kant was never satisfied till 
he had, as it were, worked out to the end, and obtained a full 
rationale of, any subject which offered problems or suggested ques- 
tions requiring an answer, and so had arrived at the ultimate data 
involved in it, and the law of their combination. The honesty and 
thoroughness with which he worked at this task, whatever were the 
subjects in hand, are that which make his writings so extremely 
valuable and instructive. Fas est et ab hoste doceri ; so at any rate 
may one say who belongs in philosophy to an opposite school of 
thought, the school of those whose aim is to arrive at a true analysis 
of experience, and who may be called Experientialists, as opposed to 
those who proceed by speculating on its sources and its validity, and 
who may properly be designated A priorists. And if Kant himself 
were present with us to-day, I would appeal to him in extenuation of 
my temerity in undertaking this Address, and say Suffer yourself 



THE CENTENARY OF KANT'S DEATH 3 

to be commended Sit fas et ab hoste laudari where truth is the 
common object, all enemies are friends. 

But I have yet to mention that part of Kant's intellectual activity 
which is his most enduring title to renown, the Critical or Tran- 
scendental Philosophy. If Kant's activity had ceased before his 
bringing out the first edition of The Kritik of the Pure Reason 
in 1781, his fifty-seventh year, his influence on the thought of 
civilized man would have been comparatively slight, and we should not 
have assembled here to-day to celebrate his memory. It was because 
it affected the subjective aspect of experience, our knowledge or 
surmise of the universe, of which we find ourselves inhabitants, as 
distinguished from the objective aspect of that experience, the 
universe of persons and things as it appears to be in itself inde- 
pendently of experience, that Kant's new theory of the composition 
of experience had such far-reaching and spirit-stirring effects. It was 
a theory of the generating principles or factors of that experience 
as such. This world and the material universe of which it was 
a part, said Kant, we knew only by means of, or as part of, our 
experience ; then how came about our experience itself how was 
it composed, what was its value ? It could not come as a direct 
impression or picture from the world or the material universe as they 
appeared to be independently of ourselves, because, as they so 
appeared to be, they were the result of our experiencing, they might 
contain, or be the appearance of, some factors of that experience, but 
we ourselves, as we appeared to ourselves, must contain others, which 
did not appear, but which were no less essential. 

Kant's answer to this question, the theory which he devised to 
answer it, speaking broadly, was this, Our faculties, the faculties 
of our apperceptive Ego (which never appeared as in itself it was), 
worked in modes which supplied certain definite Forms, into which 
the Matter (as he called it) of Sense or Feeling was cast on coming 
into contact with our faculties, and in virtue of which it appeared as 
the ordered experience of our empirical Ego on the one hand, and of 
a material world and universe on the other. ' Reason,' says Kant 
in the Introduction to the first edition of the Kritik der Reinen 
Vernunft, ' is the faculty which supplies us with the principles of 
a priori knowledge. Hence Pure Reason is that which contains 
the principles of cognizing anything absolutely a priori.'' Its forms, 
therefore, according to Kant, spring from, and connect us with, what 
would otherwise be wholly transcendent and unknowable; as con- 
necting us with the transcendent they are transcendental. ' I call all 
knowledge transcendental? he says, ' which busies itself not only with 

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4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

objects but with our a priori conceptions of objects generally. The 
name for a System of such conceptions would be a Transcendental 
Philosophy 1 (Rosenkranz und Schubert's edition of Collected Works, 
in twelve volumes, 8vo, Leopold Voss, Leipzig, 1838-42, Vol. II. 
pp. 24 and 25). Many faculties are thus included under that of 
Reason (Vernunft) in this large sense. 

Our faculty of Intuition (Anschauung) casts the matter of sense 
into its own a priori forms of Space and Time. Our faculty of 
Understanding ( Verstand) works in forms, called by Kant Categories, 
which are the means of our rationally thinking, or reducing to 
rationality, any relation between feelings or forms, whether real or 
imaginary, so as to form concepts of objects. The Categories are 
twelve in number, three under each of the four heads of Quantity, 
Quality, Relation, and Modality. For applying the Categories to 
objects in Space and Time our faculty of Judgement (UrtheilsJcrqft) 
works in special forms called Schemata. These are the Schema of 
Substance, the Schema of Cause and Causality, the Schema of Mutual 
or Reciprocal Action, the Schema of Possibility, the Schema of 
Reality (WirklicJikeit), and the Schema of Necessity. 'The Sche- 
mata, 1 says Kant, 'are therefore nothing but Time-determinations 
a priori, according to rules, and these apply, following the order 
of the Categories, to the Time-series, the Time-content, the Time- 
order, the Time-comprehension in respect of all possible objects ' 
(Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Rosenkranz und Schubert's edition, 
Vol. II. p. 128. The passage appears also unaltered in the second 
edition of the Kritik). ' The schemata, then,' says Wallace in the 
work already cited, p. 173, ' are the true scientific categories. They 
are in Kant's words, " the true and only conditions for securing to the 
categories a bearing upon objects of giving them, in short, import 
and meaning." ' 

Our Judgement-faculty, says Kant, works in two ways, analytically 
and synthetically ; analytically it is busied only with a given object 
and what is already contained therein ; its first principle is the 
Axiom of Contradiction (Satz des Wider spruchs), a principle which 
belongs to, and is applied by, ordinary formal Logic ; ' What is 
contradictory of any given object cannot be predicated of it.' 
Ordinary formal Logic, however (die allgemeine Logik), has nothing 
whatever to do with explaining the possibility of Synthetic Judge- 
ments, these judgements being those in which, says Kant, ' I go out 
beyond a given object or concept, in order to bring something 
not contained therein into relation with it ; a relation, therefore, 
which is never one of Identity or of Contradiction, and in asserting 



THE CENTENARY OF KANT'S DEATH 5 

which the truth or error of the Judgement itself is not to be seen.' 
And again, ' The highest principle of all synthetic judgements is there- 
fore this : Every object is subject to the necessary conditions of the 
synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience.' 
This distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements, and the 
essential part which synthetic judgements play in the production 
of experience, seems to have been considered by Kant as perhaps the 
most important among all the several corner-stones of his system 
as a whole. We must have a power of synthesising impressions ; it 
is that power which is most essential to experience. 'The pos- 
sibility of experience,' he says, ' is that which gives objective reality 
to all our a priori cognitions.' And again, 'Since therefore ex- 
perience as empirical synthesis is the only mode of cognition which 
gives reality to all other synthesis, it follows that experience, as 
a priori cognition, has truth (agreement with the object known) only 
when it contains nothing more than what is necessary for the 
synthetic unity of experience generally.' (The four foregoing pas- 
sages appear in both the first and second editions of the Kritik.) 

It was in its finding a suitable place for,, and giving a satisfactory 
account of, the sense of necessity in some parts and domains of our 
knowledge, as for instance in Logic and in Mathematics, that Kant 
saw the great and decisive advantage of his own theory over that 
which preceded it, so far as that was based merely on the Leibnizian 
principle of there being a Sufficient Reason for the real existence 
of things, as distinguished from their logical possibility. ' How,' 
he asks in his Essay on The Progress of Metaphysic since Leibniz and 
Wolf, an Essay belonging to the later years of his life, 'can a 
Leibnizian (who knows of no a priori intuition of Space) maintain 
the necessity of Space having three and only three dimensions, since 
this representation of it, as he himself maintains, is of merely 
empirical origin, which affords no justification for the attribution 
of necessity ? ' (Rosenkranz und Schubert, Vol. I. p. 512). 

The Principles (Grundsdtze) of the Pure Understanding are next 
enumerated, and brought under the four heads : (1) Axioms of 
Intuition, (2) Anticipations of Perception, (3) Analogies of Ex- 
perience, and (4) Postulates of empirical thinking generally. In 
treating of these Principles, there is inserted, though only in the 
second and later editions, a Refutation of Idealism of the Berkeleyan 
type. And then comes the well-known chapter on the Distinction 
of all Objects into Phaenomena and Noumena, with an Appendix 
on the Amphiboly of the Reflective Conceptions, the amphiboly arising 
from our comparing conceptions together, without first ascertaining 



6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

that they belong to one and the same cognizing faculty, that is, 
whether they belong to Sensibility or to Understanding. There are 
four relations under which concepts forming part of a complex state 
of mind can be relevant to one another Sameness and Difference of 
Kind ; Accordance and Discordance ; Inner and Outer ; the Deter- 
minable and its Determination (Matter and Form). Ascertaining this 
reference constitutes a Transcendental Topic. ' We can compare con- 
cepts together logically,' says Kant, ' without troubling ourselves to 
inquire to what domain they belong, whether to the Understanding as 
Noumena 9 oTto Sensibility as Phenomena. But when we would approach 
the Objects, with the purpose of applying those concepts in understand- 
ing them, then transcendental Reflection (Uberlegung) is requisite, in 
the first place, to see whether the concepts to be applied belong to 
the Understanding or to Sensibility. Without this Reflection I make 
a very uncertain use of the concepts, and there arise fictitious synthetic 
principles, which the critical Reason cannot recognize, but which are 
founded solely on a transcendental amphiboly, that is, a wavering to 
and fro between objects of pure understanding and phenomena' 
(Rosenkranz und Schubert, Vol. II. p. 221. The passage appears also 
in the second edition). Kant maintains that Leibniz's Intellectuelles 
System der Welt, as he calls it, was largely based on this insecure 
foundation. Leibniz, he says, intellectualized phenomena of sense ; 
Locke, on the other hand, sensibilized concepts of the understanding. 
Kant ends this whole division of his work with an explanation of 
the four senses in which the word Nothing (Nichts) is used : 

Nothing. 

1. Empty Concept without Object (Ens Rationis). 

2. Missing Object of a Concept (Nihil Privativum). 

3. Empty Intuition without Object (Ens Imaginarium). 

4. Missing Object without Concept (Nihil Negativum). 

Kant has now completed the first Division of his Transcendental 
Logic, its Analytic, and passes to the second and concluding Division, 
the Transcendental Dialectic, the domain or field of operation of the 
faculty of Pure Reason itself in its strict sense, which Kant char- 
acterizes as the seat of transcendental Schein, mere Appearance, or 
Illusion. It was his criticism, or critical examination and theory of 
the Pure Reason in its operations under this Division of the subject, 
which gained for Kant the title of der Alles-zermalmends, the all- 
shattering, Kant. The first Division of Kant's Kritik is thus directed 
against Scepticism, the second against Dogmatism. His opening 
sentence is ' We have above named the Dialectic generallv, a Logic 



THE CENTENARY OF KANT'S DEATH 7 

of Illusion (Schein)."* Its principles carry it, the Pure Reason, beyond 
the region of possible experience ; they are not only a priori and 
transcendental to experience, but they hypostasise pure concepts or 
notions, and are, along with their objects, transcendent principles, 
transcendent objects. Yet this operation is unavoidable and neces- 
sarily involved in the logical function of the Pure Reason itself. 
What the Reason seeks in logical syllogizing is 'to find the Un- 
conditioned which conditions any given cognition of the Under- 
standing, and so completes it as an Unity ' (Ros. u. Sch., Vol. II. 
p. 249). 

The first Book of the Dialectic treats of the Transcendent Reason- 
Concepts of the Pure Reason, which Kant calls Ideas ; the second and 
concluding Book treats of the transcendent and dialectical conclusions 
of the Pure Reason: first, its Paralogisms relating to the Soul; second, 
its Antinomies relating to the Cosmos ; and third, its Ideals relating 
to God. All pure concepts whatever have to do, 1 says Kant, ' with 
the synthetic Unity of Representations ( Vorstellungeri), but concepts 
of the Pure Reason (transcendental Ideas) have to do with the un- 
conditioned synthetic unity of all conditions. Consequently all 
transcendental Ideas may be brought under three classes : first, the 
absolute (unconditioned) unity of the Thinking Subject ; second, the 
absolute unity of the series of Conditions of Phenomena ; and third, 
the absolute unity of the Condition of all Objects of thought 
generally' (Ros. u. Sch., Vol. II. p. 269). 

Now, what is it which renders all this business of the Pure Reason 
illusory, and reduces it to a mere appearance, as we have seen that in 
Kant's view it is ? It is the circumstance that Ideas of the Reason 
are formed out of pure concepts of the Understanding alone, concepts 
which can never be themselves given in experience, though they are 
that form of thought upon which all our understanding of experience 
is founded. They treat these pure concepts as if they were concrete 
experiences, consisting of sensibility or sensible imagery as well as of 
forms of thought. At p. 258, Vol. II, of the Ros. u. Sch. edition, he 
gives a scala of modes of representing objects, which makes this clear. 
' The genus] he says, ' is Vorstellung at large (repraesentatio). Under 
it stands Vorstellung with consciousness (perceptio). A Perception 
which relates solely to the Subject as a modification of its state is 
Empfindung (sensatio\ an objective perception is cognition, Erlcennt- 
niss (cognitio). This is either Intuition or Concept, Anschauung or 
Begriff (intuitus vel conceptus). The former of these refers im- 
mediately to the object, and is singular (einzeln\ the latter is 
mediated by a mark, something which may be common to a plurality 



8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

of things. The Concept is either an empirical or a pure concept ; and 
the pure concept, so far as it has its origin solely in the Understanding 
(not in the pure Image of Sensibility), is called Notio. A concept 
formed out of Notions, which goes beyond the possibility of being 
experienced, is the Idea or Reason-concept. Any one who has accus- 
tomed himself to this mode of distinguishing, must find it intolerable 
to hear the representation of a red colour called an Idea. It is not 
even to be called a Notion, or Understanding-concept.' 

Yet, notwithstanding all the foregoing destructive criticism of his 
own Ideas on Kant's part, the Ideas of the Pure Reason are not wholly 
and entirely illusory, the source of mere appearance only. True, they 
are not constitutive of Realities, but, since they are involved in the 
nature and operation of the faculty of Pure Reason itself, they are 
necessarily regulative of its procedure, supply the goals or ideal ends 
towards which the efforts of our thought should be directed, and keep 
us away from following arbitrary fancies. As Wallace expresses it, 
in the work already cited, pp. 182-3 : 

{ The ideas, strictly as ideal, have a legitimate and a necessary place in human 
thought. They express the unlimited obligation which thought feels laid upon 
itself to unify the details of observation ; they indicate an anticipated and 
postulated convergence between the various lines indicated by observation, even 
though observation may show that the convergence will never visibly be reached ; 
or they are standards and model types towards which experience may, and 
indeed must, if she is true to the cause of truth, conceive herself bound to 
approximate. Such is the function of ideas, as regulative ; they govern and 
direct the action of intellect in the effort to systematize and centralize knowledge. 
Our thought is thus guided by its own threefold maxims of homogeneity, specifi- 
cation, and continuity ; the first of which enjoins the unlimited reduction 
of special laws and forms to more general, the second demands indefinite liberty 
to mark out distinctions, and the third insists upon gradual and unbroken 
passage from species to species. Even the more concrete forms of the ideas have 
their use. The idea of a supreme intelligence, as regulative of the universe, 
serves as a clue to suggest the discovery of new relationships in the objects of 
nature. The idea of a soul serves to supply a principle of unity for our study of 
the mental phenomena ; and the idea of the world serves to keep before us the 
way in which natural phenomena are always indicating an increasing unity and 
interdependence. ' 

Moreover, and this is an important point in estimating Kant's 
theory as a whole, the Ideas, being strictly ideal, and not verifiable 
or realizable in experience, supply us with the possibility of intro- 
ducing another kind of Causality, besides the familiar one through 
invariable Laws of Nature, namely, a Causality through Freedom in 
rational beings, which, though not verifiable, is also for the same 
reasons not disprovable, by our actual experience. 

In the remaining and much shorter Part, which completes the 



THE CEN 7 TENARY OF KANTS DEATH 9 

whole work, the Doctrine of Method (Methodenlehre) the whole of 
the first Part being styled Doctrine of Elements (Elementarkhre) 
Kant seems to be making use of this Regulative Function of the 
Pure Reason. The whole of it is distributed under four heads: 
first, its Discipline, which treats of dogma, polemics, hypotheses, and 
proof; second, its Canon, treating of its ultimate End or Purpose, its 
ideal of the Summum Bonum, and the relative nature and value of 
Opinion, Knowledge, and Belief; third, its Architectonic, or the 
Systematic Construction combining its parts ; and fourth, Its History, 
in which the views of some few philosophers, beginning with the 
Greeks, are alone touched upon, and that with extreme brevity. 

The publication of the first edition of the Kritik of the Pure 
Reason in 1781 marked an important epoch in the development, 
not of Kant's philosophical thought only, but in that of Germany 
and of Europe. Its centenary was celebrated in this country by 
the publication of the late Professor Max Muller's English Trans- 
lation of it, and in Germany by the appearance of the first volume 
of Dr. H. Vaihinger's careful and seemingly exhaustive Commentary, 
a work still in progress (W. Spemann, Stuttgart). It was a splendid 
and assiduous effort of thought, kept up by Kant for many years, 
which enabled him to carry it to completion by no means a case 
of a theory rapidly worked out to make room and account for 
some new insight, or some newly discovered facts. It required the 
devotion of a student inspired by a deep and genuine faith in the 
trustworthiness of rational thought, not in speculative matters only, 
but also in matters of practice, social and political, in morals and 
in religion. It is Kant as a man that we are led to venerate by 
a study of this, the great work of his life, which is the foundation 
of those later works which completed his system, the Kritik of the 
Practical Reason in 1788, and the Kritik of the Judgement (Urtheils- 
Jcraft) in 1790. 

Kant, we have already seen, qualified as Privatdocent in the 
University of Konigsberg in the year 1755. Now it was in that 
very year that there appeared Sulzer's translation of Hume's Enquiry 
concerning Human Understanding so says Wallace, in the work 
already cited, p. 117, adding that in the very next year Kant is 
found recommending it to his class. It is, then, to the period 
beginning at that date or shortly afterwards, that we may refer 
that ' rousing from dogmatic slumber ' which Kant in the Prolegomena 
(1783) says that he had received many years before from David 
Hume, and which he says ' gave a wholly different direction to my 
investigations in the region of Speculative Philosophy ' (Ros. u. Sch., 



10 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

Vol. III. p. 9). The early part of his period of intellectual ferment 
thus coincided, or nearly so, with the Seven Years' War. Several 
works written between 1762 and 1766 seem to contain indications 
of the new lines of thought then opening before him. Among these 
may be mentioned : the False Subtilty of the Four Syllogistic Figures, 
1762 ; Attempt to introduce Negative Quantities into Philosophy, 1763 ; 
The only possible Ground of Strict Proof of God's Existence, 1763 ; 
Observed Facts relating to the Feelings of the Beautiful and the 
Sublime, 1764 ; and Dreams of a Spirit-seer (meaning Swedenborg) 
illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysic (meaning Leibniz), 1766. To 
which may be added his Dissertation De Mundi Sensibilis atque 
Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis, 1770, on occasion of his being 
called to the Professorship of Logic and Metaphysic. After that 
there followed a very decided lull in his production of works for 
the press a lull which it would seem was broken only once, and 
then only by his Program in preparation for his University Lectures 
On the Different Races of Men, in 1775 until with 1781 came the 
publication of the first edition of the Kritik of the Pure Reason. 

But the period immediately following that publication in 1781 
was one of very great activity. The greatest interest and attention 
had been aroused by it, and Kant himself was aware that his system 
was, as yet, very far from completion. The application of its results 
to the whole range of human action and in elucidation of natural 
phenomena had still to be given. To mention only the most im- 
portant of the works belonging to this period in 1783 appeared 
the Prolegomena to any Metaphysic which in the future may lay claim 
to a Scientific Character ; in 1785, the Foundations of the Metaphysic 
of Morals; in 1786 the Metaphysical Bases of Natural Science; in 
1787 the second edition of the Kritik of the Pure Reason; in 1788 
the Articles On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy, and 
that work which perhaps of all others fixed the attention of the 
public, the Kritik of the Practical Reason; in 1790 the last of 
the three works which together contain Kant's whole system the 
Kritik of the Judgement-faculty (Urtheilskraft), in two Parts, the 
first of which treats of Aesthetics and the sense of the Beautiful and 
the Sublime, and the second of the Teleology in Nature. But the 
works now mentioned are very far from representing Kant's whole 
output, in these years and onwards to the close of his life. For 
this I must again refer to the list of works given by Rosenkranz 
and Schubert in the eleventh volume of their collected edition. 

Nor can I attempt to give even a sketch of the line of argument 
followed by the two great Kritiks the Kritik of the Practical Reason 



THE CENTENARY OF KANTS DEATH 11 

and the Kritik of the Judgement-faculty. I restrict myself to calling 
attention to what is in Kant's own estimation the central idea, the 
central fact, in his whole system, giving unity to all its branches, 
the idea and fact of Freedom, exhibited by him as the essential 
characteristic of Reason as a Reality or Rational Agency, or in 
other words of a Will which is Rational, giving to itself the law 
under which it acts a law, therefore, which is binding a priori 
upon all rational creatures, and constitutes what Kant calls a Cate- 
gorical Imperative, as opposed to a conditional imperative, or one 
binding only supposing it is desired to attain a particular End. 
The absolute generality or universality of this law, its being inherent 
in the very nature of a rational activity, is that which constitutes 
its moral necessity, and the Freedom of that activity belongs to 
its essence simply as activity or active power. This Categorical 
Imperative belongs, therefore, to the Form, not the Matter, of 
Actions, and is thus expressed by Kant, 'Fundamental Law of the 
Pure Practical Reason, Act so, that the Maxim of thy Will can 
always at the same time be valid as the Principle of an Universal 
Lawgiving 1 (Ros. u. Sch., Vol. VIII. p. 141). The Freedom of the 
Will does not consist in its being free from Law, but in its autonomy, 
or acting according to a law which as an activity it prescribes to 
itself, or which is its form as an activity. 

' The Concept of Freedom, 1 writes Kant in the Preface to the 
Kritik of the Practical Reason, 6 so far as its reality is proved by 
an apodeictic law of the Practical Reason, is the key-stone to the 
entire structure of a system of the pure, including even the speculative 
reason ; and all other concepts (those of God and Immortality), which 
as mere Ideas remain in this latter without holdfast, now cleave to 
this concept of Freedom, and by it and through it attain stability 
(Bestand) and objective reality ; that is, their possibility is demon- 
strated by the fact that Freedom is actual (wirklich) ; for this Idea 
manifests itself by the Moral Law. 1 And in a note he adds, that 
4 Freedom is the Ratio Essendi of the Moral Law, while the Moral 
Law is the Ratio Cognoscendi of Freedom. For were not the Moral 
Law first clearly known to thought in our Reason, we should never 
hold ourselves warranted in making the assumption of anything 
like Freedom (although it contains no contradiction). But if there 
were no Freedom, then there would be no Moral Law at all to be 
found in us. 1 

It was this part of Kant's system, his doctrine of Freedom and the 
Moral Law, affecting so profoundly as it did the whole range of our 
ideas concerning life and practice, which gave to the whole theory 



12 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

of which it was a part its spirit-stirring interest in the eyes of his 
own contemporaries, an interest which it retains and is likely to 
retain so long as the questions which it raises are still the subject 
of debate among philosophers, no solution of them having met with 
general acceptance. I feel myself, however, bound to add (seeing 
that I have classed myself above with opponents of the Kantian 
school) that for my own part my belief is, that Kant's views of 
Freedom, the Categorical Imperative, and the Law of Moral Right 
and Wrong in conduct, as distinguished from a Law determined 
by the pursuit of Happiness, are the expression of a true insight, 
and will in the end, in some form or other, be accepted as true 
by philosophers of all schools, that is to say, whatever may be the 
method they adopt of approaching the facts to be explained. 

Speaking briefly, in conclusion, of the position occupied by Kant's 
system as a whole, I think we may say, that it replaced the Cartesian 
conception of an Universe consisting of two separate Realities the 
Res extensa and the Res cogitans (Matter and Mind), by the con- 
ception of an Universe consisting of two inseparable aspects or modes 
of Reality Things as they really were, though unrevealed and un- 
revealable to man, and the Revelations of those things to man, their 
Phenomena or Erscheinungen to him man himself, like everything 
else, bearing both characters, and his knowledge of himself being 
a knowledge of himself only as an Erscheinung. 

But it was not against Cartesianism in the shape given to it 
by Descartes that Kant's theory was directed ; it was against the 
theory which Leibniz had previously deduced from it and erected 
in its place. Leibniz had previously constructed the Universe out of 
an innumerable plurality of Cartesian res cogitantes, which he called 
Monads, all differing in quality from one another, of all degrees 
of qualification and endowment, and all held together in a Harmony 
Pre-established by a Monad of Monads, whom he called God, and 
conceived of in the same way as he conceived of the human Soul, 
namely, as a self-conscious Monad holding together the plurality 
of lower Monads which constituted its living body or organism. 
Matter and Space were conceived of by Leibniz as confused per- 
ceptions or thoughts of those Monads which were souls. This 
theory was an Idealism in virtue of its identification of active force or 
power with consciousness, so reducing the Cartesian res extensa to 
a confused perception on the part of Monads or res cogitantes. 

In this theory what Kant denied was mainly this first, that the 
Monads could be known as they were m themselves, and secondly, 
that Matter was nothing but a perception on the part of the Monads. 



THE CENTENARY OF KANT'S DEATH 13 

Kant's theory was thus essentially a criticism, critical of an existing 
positive or dogmatic theory ; it treated experience as a product 
of factors, which by virtue of that very way of treating them were 
conceived of as in themselves unknowable. As a speculative theory of 
the Universe it was, therefore, avowedly and of necessity incomplete. 
It introduced by its main conception an Unknowable into the 
Universe. 

But after the communication of so powerful a stimulus to thought, 
by the suggestion of so novel an idea, it was not to be expected that 
men should rest satisfied with the avowed incompleteness of the 
theory, its avowed inability to know the ultimate truth of things, 
things as they were in themselves, as well as in their appearances to 
themselves and others. The distinction was felt to be self-challenging, 
self-accusing. There must be some sense discoverable, so it was felt, 
in which Things-in-themselves and their Phenomena were identical. 
Hence came into existence the various Absolutist and Idealistic 
systems of philosophy, which sprang successively from Kant's, those 
of them which obtained the most vogue being those of Fichte, 
Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Hegel's in particular seeming 
for a time to command universal acceptance and approval. Among 
these should perhaps be classed the theory of the late Professor J. F. 
Ferrier of St. Andrew's, founded by him on the fact, supposed to 
be at once unambiguous and incontestable, of self-consciousness, and 
expounded in his well-known and admirably written Institutes of 
Metaphysic (second edition, 1856, Black wood and Sons). 

But 'back to Kant' has now for many years been the almost 
universal cry in Germany. It is now felt that the absolutist and 
idealistic line of development of Kant's doctrines was not the true 
line for philosophy to take, though the readiest and most natural 
under the circumstances. The cry, however, if it is not to be mis- 
leading, must be understood to mean Begin where Kant began, 
examine again the facts, not in order simply to adopt, but in order 
to verify, and in Kant's own sense criticize, his distinction between 
Things-in-themselves and Phenomena. Use that distinction solely as 
a lantern to the path. The avowedly Neo-criticist system founded 
on an union of Leibnizian and Kantian principles, by the late 
Charles Renouvier in France, the latest exposition of which is to 
be found in his last admirable work Le Personnalisme, published 
in 1903, a year before that veteran philosopher's death, would seem to 
be an advance in this direction. 

Kant founded, it is true, in the first of his three Kritiks, a new 
science which he called Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge ; but 



14 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

he founded it on the hypothesis of several distinct psychological 
faculties, each of which faculties he left undistinguished from the 
formal part of the consciousness, of which it was the bearer or the 
agent. To draw this distinction between the agent or agency and its 
form, and between both and the resulting consciousness, would seem 
to be the next problem to be solved by philosophy, in its onward 
progress from the vantage-ground already gained by Kant. Con- 
sciousness stands, or seems to stand, in a twofold relation to realities 
which are not consciousness, first in the relation of a knowing to 
its objects known, secondly in the causal or really efficient relation of 
a producer to its product, or vice versa, or both. The nature of this 
second, causal, or really efficient relation, which of course includes 
that of the real producer or Subject, as being one at least of its 
terms, is what has now to be determined. And in fact we are now 
witnessing, and some of us assisting in the solution of this problem. 
Psychology is now taking, even if it has not already taken, rank 
as a special positive science. I need only point to the appearance, 
in the January of this present year, of the first number of the 
British Journal of Psychology, and the first article therein ' On the 
Definition of Psychology,' by one of the Editors, who is also one of 
our own Fellows, Professor James Ward. 

If this step forward from Kant shall be securely and successfully 
taken, if Psychology shall become established as a positive science, 
based upon a definite conception of the real agent or Subject, and 
moving forward, like other positive sciences, by means of hypothesis, 
the result will be to raise what Kant called Epistemology to the rank 
of Philosophy in the strict sense of the term, namely, a systematized 
account of our whole knowledge or surmise of the nature of the 
Universe, of which we find ourselves inhabitants a Rationale of the 
Universe so far as attainable by man. Such a Rationale, supposing 
it attained, or even supposing its essential foundations laid and 
secured by the unanimous acceptance of all philosophical schools, 
would be the logical prius of all the positive sciences, physical, 
biological, psychological, practical. But I need hardly say, there 
is at present no prospect of an agreement among philosophers upon 
any set of known facts, which as known facts could serve as the 
essential foundations of philosophy. There are many and various 
philosophies, but there is at present no philosophy. It is still 
engaged in struggling for its status and organization, Kant's labours 
show the enormous difficulties and perplexities attending the attain- 
ment of one. Is the taking of the next step forward destined to 
be delayed till the appearance of another Kant ? 



B 2797 ,H6 1905 IMS 
Hodgson, Shadworth Hollway, 
The centenary of Kant's 
death 47091363 



MTtDlAEVAC STUDHK* 

89 QUEEN'S PARK 



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