II. THE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON[1495]…

II. THE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON[1495]

This introduction summarises the preceding argument, and distinguishes the new problems of Antinomy from those of the Paralogisms. In rational psychology pure Reason attains, as it were, euthanasia; in the antinomies an entirely different situation is disclosed. For though rational cosmology is able to expound itself in a series of demonstrated theses, its teaching stands in irreconcilable conflict with the actual nature of appearances, as expressed through a series of antitheses which are demonstrable in an equally cogent manner.

SECTION I

SYSTEM OF THE COSMOLOGICAL IDEAS[1496]

The first eight paragraphs of this section are of great textual interest. They must have been written at a time when Kant still intended to expound his entire criticism of metaphysical science in the form of a doctrine of antinomy. For they define the Ideas of Reason as exclusively cosmological,[1497] and give a very different explanation of their origin from that which has been expounded in the preceding chapters. Evidently, therefore, this part of the section must have been written prior to Kant’s formulation of the metaphysical deduction from the three species of syllogism. This is supported by the fact that the argument begins anew, just as if the matter had not previously been discussed; and that, though a new view of the nature of Reason is propounded, there is not the least mention of the more Idealist view which it displaces. Reason, Kant here teaches, is not a faculty separate from the understanding, and does not therefore produce any concept peculiar to itself. Reason is simply a name for the understanding in so far as it acts independently of sensibility, and seeks, by means of its pure forms, in abstraction from all empirical limitations, to grasp the unconditioned. “The transcendental Ideas are in reality nothing but categories extended to the unconditioned.” The intelligible, as thus conceived by the understanding, expresses itself, as he later shows, in a series of theses; while the sensuous expresses its opposite and conflicting character in a series of antitheses.

Yet not all categories yield a concept of the unconditioned. That is possible only to those which concern themselves with a series of members conditioning and conditioned, and in reference to which, therefore, the postulate of an unconditioned would seem to be legitimate, viz.: (1) unconditioned quantity in space and time; (2) unconditioned quality (indivisibility and simplicity) of reality in space (matter); (3) unconditioned causality of appearances; (4) unconditioned necessity of appearances. As this arrangement is determined by the needs of Kant’s architectonic, no detailed comment is here called for. Its consequences we shall have ample opportunity to consider later. As already noted, Kant’s statement in A 414 = B 441, that “the category of substance and accident does not lend itself to a transcendental Idea,” shows very clearly that, at the time when he composed this passage, he had not yet bethought himself of placing a separate and independent Idea at the basis of rational psychology. But as Kant here strives to follow the fourfold arrangement of the categories, the content of these paragraphs must either have been later recast or have been composed in the interval between his discovery of the metaphysical deduction of the categories and his formulation of the corresponding deduction of the Ideas from the three forms of syllogism. It may also be observed that the derivation of the cosmological Idea from the hypothetical syllogism, which embodies only the category of causality, clashes with the above specification of it in terms of all four rubrics of category.

The remaining paragraphs (ninth to thirteenth) of this section must be of later date, as they are developed in view of the independent treatment of the theological Ideal.[1498] (Adickes, in dating the ninth and tenth paragraphs with the preceding instead of with the concluding paragraphs, would seem to have overlooked this fact.) In order to justify the treatment of the Ideas of a first cause and of unconditioned necessity, as cosmological, Kant now asserts that the antinomies concern only appearances--“our [cosmical] Ideas being directed only to what is unconditioned among the appearances,”[1499] and not to noumena.[1500] His explanation of the nature of transcendental illusion, and of the antinomies in particular, as being due to a failure to distinguish between appearance and things in themselves, is thus ruthlessly sacrificed to considerations of architectonic. Kant could not, of course, consistently hold to the position here adopted; but it causes him from time to time, especially in dealing with the third and fourth antinomies, to make statements which tend seriously to obscure the argument and to bewilder the careful reader.

Kant is far from clear as to the relation in which the concepts of the totality of conditions and of the unconditioned stand to one another.[1501] In A 322 = B 379 they would seem to be taken as exactly equivalent concepts. In A 416-17 = B 443-5 they are apparently regarded as distinct, the former only leading up to the latter. But discussion of this important point must meantime be deferred.[1502]

SECTION II

ANTITHETIC OF PURE REASON[1503]

”[Antithetic] is the conflict between two apparently dogmatic judgments [Erkenntnisse] to neither of which can we ascribe any superior claim to acceptance over the other, i.e. by Antithetic I mean a thesis, together with an antithesis.” “Transcendental Antithetic is an investigation of the antinomy of pure Reason, its causes and outcome.”

The very existence of such antinomy presupposes a twofold condition: first, that it does not refer to a gratuitous but to an inevitable problem of human Reason, “one which it must necessarily encounter in its natural progress”; and secondly, that the thesis and the antithesis together generate a “natural and inevitable illusion,” which continues to persist even after its deceptive power has been clearly disclosed. Such conflict is caused by the fact that Reason seeks a unity which transcends the understanding, and which nevertheless is meant to conform to the conditions of the understanding. If the unity is adequate to the demands of Reason, it is too great for the understanding; if it is commensurate with the understanding, it is too small for Reason.[1504] The theses express the higher unity at which Reason aims; the antitheses are the judgments to which the understanding is constrained by the nature of the appearances with which both it and Reason profess to deal. If we hold to Reason, we make assertions contradictory of the appearances; while if we place reliance on the understanding, Reason condemns our conclusions.

This conflict is limited to those few problems above enumerated in which we are called upon to complete a given series.[1505] Since totality, whether in the form of a first beginning of the series or as an actual infinity of the whole series, can never itself be experienced, these are problems in regard to which experience can be of no assistance to us. It can neither confirm nor refute any particular solution. The only possible method of deciding between the competing claims is to watch or even to provoke the conflict, in the hope that we may finally be able to detect some misunderstanding, and so to resolve the conflict to the satisfaction of both the litigants. Such is Kant’s description of what he entitles his “sceptical method.”[1506]

Without here attempting a full discussion of the subject, it seems advisable to point out at the very start what Kant’s exposition seriously obscures, namely, the real character of the evidence upon which the theses and the antitheses respectively rest. The latter are not correctly stated as transcending experience, and as therefore incapable of confirmation by it. The proofs which Kant offers of them are, indeed, of a non-empirical a priori character. They are formulated in terms of the dogmatic rationalism of the Leibnizian position, with a constant appeal to abstract principles. But, as a matter of fact, they can be much more adequately established--in so far as they can be established at all--through analysis of the spatial and temporal conditions of material existence. As space and time are continuous and homogeneous, any assertion which is true of a space or time however small is likewise true of a space or time however large. Any space consists of spaces, and must be regarded as itself part of a larger whole.[1507] Any time consists of parts which are themselves times, and is apprehensible only as following upon preceding times. It is by such considerations as these that we are led to regard the material world as unlimited, as infinitely divisible, and as having no first state.

Kant’s method of demonstrating the theses--that the world is limited, is finitely divisible, and has a first state--is no less misleading. Here again his rationalistic arguments conceal the basis upon which the various theses really rest. Their true determining ground is the demand of Reason for some more satisfactory form of unconditionedness than that which is found in the actual infinite. It is this demand which has led philosophers to look around for proofs in support of the theses, and to elaborate those rationalistic arguments which Kant here reproduces. Thus the grounds of the antitheses are altogether different from those of the theses; and in neither case are they properly represented by the arguments which Kant employs.[1508]

The reasons why Kant in his detailed statement of the antinomies has omitted, or at least subordinated, the above considerations, are complex and various. In the first place, this doctrine of antinomy was in several of its main features already formulated prior to his development of the Critical philosophy. It forms part of his Dissertation of 1770; and at that time Kant was still largely in fundamental sympathy with the Leibnizian ontology. Secondly, Kant is here professing to criticise the science of rational cosmology, and is therefore bound to expound it in more or less current form. And in the third place, he teaches that the antinomies exist as antinomies only when viewed from the false standpoint of dogmatic rationalism. Had he eliminated the rationalistic proofs, the conflict of the antinomies, in its strictly logical form, as the conflict of direct contradictories, would at once have vanished. The general framework of this division of the Dialectic demanded a rationalistic treatment of both theses and antitheses, and Kant believed that the rationalistic proofs which he propounds in their support are unanswerable, so long as the dogmatic standpoint of ordinary consciousness and of Leibnizian ontology is preserved. But even when that important limitation is kept in view, Kant fails to justify this interpretation of the conflict, and we must therefore be prepared to find that his proofs, whether of theses or of antitheses, are in all cases inconclusive. I shall append to each of his arguments a statement of the reasons which constrain us to reject them as unsound. We shall then be in a position to consider his whole doctrine of antinomy in its broader aspects, and in its connection with the teaching of the other main divisions of the Dialectic.

FIRST ANTINOMY

=Thesis.=--(a) The world has a beginning in time, and (b) is also limited in regard to space.

=Thesis= a. =Proof.=--If we assume the opposite, namely, that the world has no beginning in time, and if we define the infinite as that which can never be completed by means of a successive synthesis, we must conclude that the world-series can never complete itself. But the entire series of past events elapses, i.e. completes itself at each moment. It cannot therefore be infinite.

=Criticism.=--This argument gains its plausibility from the illegitimate use of the term ‘elapse’ (verfliessen) as equivalent to ‘complete itself.’ If it be really correct to define the infinite as that which can never be completed, the conclusion to be drawn is that the temporal series is always actually infinite, and that no point or event in it is nearer to or further from either its beginning or its end.[1509] We may select any point in the series as that from which we propose to begin a regress to the earlier members of the series, but if the series is actually infinite, it will be a regress without possibility of completion, and one therefore which removes all justification for asserting that at the point chosen a series has completed itself. It has no beginning, and has no completion. What it has done at each moment of the past it is still doing at each present moment, namely, coming out of an inexhaustible past and passing into an equally inexhaustible future. Time is by its given nature capable of being interpreted only as actually infinite, alike in its past and in its future. It cannot complete itself any more than it can begin itself. The one would be as gross a violation of its nature as would the other. The present exists only as a species of transition, unique in itself, but analogous in nature to the innumerable other times that constitute time past. It is a transition from the infinite through the infinite to the infinite. That we cannot comprehend how, from an infinitude that has no beginning, the present should ever have been reached, is no sufficient reason for denying what by the very nature of time we are compelled to accept as a correct description of the situation which is being analysed. The actual nature of time is such as to rule out from among the possibilities the thesis which Kant is here professing to be able to establish; time, being such as it actually is, can have no beginning.

What thus holds of time may likewise hold of events in time. If time is actually infinite, no proof can be derived from it in support of the assumption that the world has had a beginning in time.

The phrase “by means of a successive synthesis” gives a needlessly subjectivist colouring to Kant’s method of proof. The antinomy is professedly being stated from the realist standpoint, and ought not therefore to be complicated by any such reference. This objection applies, as we shall find, still more strongly to Kant’s proof of the second part of the thesis. The latter proof depends upon this subjectivist reference; the present proof does not.

Kant limits his problem to the past infinitude of time. The reason for this lies, of course, in the fact that he is concerned with the problem of creation. The limitation is, however, misleading.

=Thesis= b.--The world is limited in regard to space.

=Proof.=--Assume the opposite, namely, that the world is an infinite, given whole of coexisting parts. A magnitude not given within the determinate limits of an intuition can only be thought through the synthesis of its parts, and its totality through their completed synthesis. In order, therefore, that we may be able to think as a single whole the world which fills all space, the successive synthesis of the parts of an infinite world must be regarded as completed, i.e. an infinite must be regarded as having elapsed in the enumeration of all coexisting things. This, however, is impossible. An infinite aggregate of actual things cannot therefore be viewed as a given whole, nor as being given as coexistent. Consequently the world of spatial existences must be regarded as finite.

=Criticism.=--From the impossibility of traversing infinite space in thought by the successive addition of part to part, Kant here argues that “an infinite aggregate of actual things cannot be viewed as a given whole,” and consequently that the world cannot be infinitely extended in space. That is, from a subjective impossibility of apprehension he infers an objective impossibility of existence. But Kant has himself defined the infinite as involving this subjective impossibility; for in the proof of thesis a he has stated that the infinitude of a series consists in the very fact that it can never be completed through successive synthesis. Kant is therefore propounding against the existence of the infinite the very feature which by definition constitutes its infinitude. The implication would seem to be that the concept of the infinite is the concept of that which ex definitione cannot exist, and that there is therefore a contradiction in the very idea of the actual infinite.

Deferring for a moment the further objections to which such procedure lies open, we may observe that Kant, in arguing from a subjective to an objective impossibility, commits the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi. For when the conditions of objective existence are recognised in their distinction from those of mental apprehension, the supposed contradiction vanishes, and the argument ceases to have any cogency. The use of the words ‘given’ and ‘whole’ is misleading. If space is infinite, it is without bounds, and cannot therefore exist as a whole in any usual meaning of that term. For the same reason it must be incapable of being given as a whole. Its infinitude is a presupposition which analysis of actually given portions of it constrains us to postulate, and has to be conceived in terms of the definition employed in thesis a. The given must always be conceived as involving what is not itself given and what is not even capable of complete construction. In terms of this presupposition an actual infinite, not given and not capable of construction, can be represented with entire consistency.

But to return to the main assumption upon which Kant’s proof would seem to rest: it is all-important to observe that Kant does not, either in the Critique or in any other of his writings, assert that the concept of the actual infinite is inherently self-contradictory. This is a matter in regard to which many of Kant’s critics have misrepresented his teaching. Kant’s argument may, as we have just maintained, be found on examination to involve the above assertion; but this, if clearly established, so far from commending the argument to Kant, would have led him to reject it as invalid. The passage in the Dissertation[1510] of 1770, which contains his most definite utterance on this point, represents the view from which he never afterwards departed. It may be quoted in full.

“Those who reject the actual mathematical infinite do so in a very casual manner. For they so construct their definition of the infinite that they are able to extract a contradiction from it. The infinite is described by them as a quantity than which none greater is possible, and the mathematical infinite as a multiplicity--of an assignable unit--than which none greater is possible. Since they thus substitute maximum for infinitum, and a greatest multiplicity is impossible, they easily conclude against this infinite which they have themselves invented. Or, it may be, they entitle an infinite multiplicity an infinite number, and point out that such a phrase is meaningless, as is, indeed, perfectly evident. But again they have fought and overthrown only the figments of their own minds. If, however, they had conceived the mathematical infinite as a quantity which, when related to measure, as its unity, is a multiplicity greater than all number; and if furthermore, they had observed that measurability here denotes only the relation [of the infinite] to the standards of the human intellect, which is not permitted to attain to a definite conception of multiplicity save by the successive addition of unit to unit, nor to the sum-total (which is called number) save by completing this progress in a finite time; they would have perceived clearly that what does not conform to the established law of some subject need not on that account exceed all intellection. An intellect may exist, though not indeed a human intellect, which perceives a multiplicity distinctly in one intuition [uno obtutu] without the successive application of a measure.”

The concluding sentences of this Dissertation passage may be taken as Kant’s own better and abiding judgment in regard to the question before us. We must not argue from the impossibility of mentally traversing the infinite to the impossibility of its existence. Indeed the essentials of the above passage are restated in the ‘Observation’ on this thesis.[1511] Thus the concept of the actual infinite is not only, as a concept, perfectly self-consistent, it is also one which, in view of the nature of time and of space, we are constrained to accept as a correct representation of the actually given. The thesis of this first antinomy runs directly counter to admitted facts. That Kant is here arguing in respect to the world, and not merely in respect to space and time, does not essentially alter the situation. For if space and time are necessarily to be viewed as infinite, there can be no a priori proof--none, at least, of the kind here attempted--that the world-series may not be so likewise.

=Antithesis.=--(a) The world has no beginning in time; (b) has no limits in space. In both these respects the world is infinite.

In these antitheses Kant assumes that space and time are actually infinite, and from that assumption advances to the proof that this is likewise true of the world in its spatial and temporal aspects. This, by itself, ought to be sufficient evidence that Kant does not regard the actual infinite as an inherently impossible conception. As the antinomies are avowedly formulated from the realist, dogmatic standpoint of ordinary consciousness, Kant is also enabled to assume that if the world begins to be, it must have an antecedent cause determining it to exist at that moment rather than at another.

=Antithesis= a. =Proof.=--Let us assume the opposite, namely, that the world has a beginning. It will then be preceded by an empty time in which it was not. But in an empty time no becoming is possible, since in such a time no part possesses over any other any distinguishing condition of existence rather than of non-existence. The world must therefore be infinite as regards past time.

=Criticism.=--In this argument everything depends upon what is to be meant by the term ‘world.’ If Kant means by it merely the material world, the assumption of its non-existence does not leave only empty time and space. Other kinds of existence may be possible, and in these a sufficient cause of its first beginning may be found. The nature of creative action will remain mysterious and incomprehensible, but that is no sufficient reason for denying its possibility. If, on the other hand, Kant means by the world ‘all that is,’ the assumption of its non-existence is likewise the assumption of the non-existence of all its possible causes. That, however, is for ordinary consciousness a quite impossible assumption, since it runs counter to the causal principle which is taken as universally valid. From this point of view the argument consists in making an impossible assumption, and in then pointing out the impossible consequence which must follow. By such a mode of argument no conclusion can be reached. Kant’s decision ought rather to have been that, as time is actually infinite, the world may be so likewise, but that though reality must in some form be eternally existent, the material world cannot be proved to be so by any a priori proof of the kind here given.

=Antithesis= b. =Proof.=--Let us assume the opposite, namely, that the world is finite, existing in an empty limitless space. There will then be not only a relation of things in space, but also of things to space. But as the world is a totality outside of which no object of intuition can be found, the relation of the world to empty space is a relation to no object. Such a relation is nothing. Consequently the opposite holds; the world must be infinitely extended.

=Criticism.=--That Kant himself felt the inadequacy of this argument, when taken from the dogmatic standpoint, is indicated by the lengthy note which he has appended to it, and which develops his own Critical view of space as not a real independent object, but merely the form of external intuition. From the standpoint of ordinary consciousness space is a self-existent entity, and there is no insuperable difficulty in conceiving a relation as holding between it and its contents. The introduction of the opposed standpoint of the Aesthetic therefore runs directly counter to Kant’s own intention of expounding the antinomies from the dogmatic standpoint which involves this realist view of space, and of showing that they afford, in independence of the arguments of the Aesthetic, an indirect proof of the untenableness of that belief.[1512] The conclusion which ought to have been drawn is analogous to that above suggested for thesis a. As space is actually infinite, the material world may be so likewise; but that it actually is so, cannot be established by an a priori argument of the kind here attempted.

SECOND ANTINOMY

=Thesis.=--Every composite substance in the world consists of simple parts, and nothing anywhere exists save the simple or what is composed of it.

=Proof.=--Let us assume the opposite, namely, that substances do not consist of simple parts. If all composition be then removed in thought, no composite part, and (as there are no simple parts) also no simple part, and therefore nothing whatsoever, will remain. Consequently no substance will be given. Either, therefore, it is impossible to remove in thought all composition, or after its removal something that exists without composition, i.e. the simple, must remain. In the former case the composite would not itself consist of substances (with them composition is a merely accidental relation, and they must, as self-persisting beings, be able to exist independently of it). As this contradicts our assumption, only the latter alternative remains, namely, that the substantial compounds in the world consist of simple parts.

=Criticism.=--Kant here assumes, by his definition of terms, the point which he professes to establish by argument. The substance referred to, though never itself mentioned by name, is extended matter. Kant identifies it with ‘composite substance.’ Substance, he further dogmatically decides, is that which is capable of independent existence, and to which all relations of composition are therefore merely accidental. If these assumptions be granted, it at once follows that composition cannot be essential to matter, and that when all composition is thought away, its reality will be disclosed as consisting in simple parts. Kant, however, makes no attempt to prove that extended matter can be defined in any such terms. From the dogmatic point of view of ordinary consciousness, though not from the sophisticated standpoint of Leibniz, extension is of the very essence of matter; and, as Kant himself believed,[1513] the continuity of extension is such as to exclude all possibility of elimination of the composite. For he maintains that, however far division be carried, the parts remain no less composite than the whole from which the regress has started. On any such view the extended and the composite are not equivalent terms. The opposite of the composite is the simple; the opposite of the extended is the non-extended. Kant is here surreptitiously substituting a Leibnizian metaphysics in place of the empirical reality which is supposed to necessitate the argument.

In the Observation on this thesis Kant shows consciousness of the defects of his argument. It does not apply to space, time, or change.

“We ought not to call space a compositum but a totum, because its parts are possible only in the whole, not the whole through the parts.”[1514]

As Kant further states, he is speaking only of the simples of the Leibnizian system. This thesis is “the dialectical principle of monadology.” Again in the Observation on the antithesis, in commenting on the mathematical proof of the infinite divisibility of matter, Kant even goes so far as to declare that the argument of the thesis is based on an illegitimate substitution of things in themselves, conceived by the pure understanding, for the appearances with which alone the antinomy is concerned.[1515]

“...it is quite futile to attempt to overthrow, by sophistical manipulation of purely discursive concepts, the manifest, demonstrated truth of mathematics.”

=Antithesis.=--No composite thing in the world consists of simple parts, and there nowhere exists in the world anything simple.

=Proof.=--Let us assume the opposite, namely, that a composite thing (as substance) consists of simple parts. As all external relation, and therefore all composition of substances, is only possible in space, space must consist of as many parts as there are parts of the composite that occupies it. Space, however, does not consist of simple parts, but of spaces. The simple must therefore occupy a space. Now as everything real which occupies a space contains in itself a manifold of constituents external to one another, and therefore is composite, and as a real composite is not composed of accidents (for without substance accidents could not be outside one another), but of substances, the simple would be a substantial composite, which is self-contradictory.

=Criticism.=--The Leibnizian standpoint is here completely deserted. Instead of proceeding to demonstrate the direct opposite of the thesis, Kant in this argument deals with the extended bodies of empirical intuition. The proof given ultimately reduces to an argument from the continuous nature of space to the continuous nature of the matter which occupies it. But as the thesis and the antithesis thus refer to different realities, the former to things in themselves conceived by pure understanding, and the latter to the sensuous, no antinomy has been shown to subsist. Antinomy presupposes that both the opposing assertions have the same reference. Kant, as already noted, argues in the Observation to this antithesis that all attempts “made by the monadists” to refute the mathematical proof of the infinite divisibility of matter are quite futile, and are due to their forgetting that in this discussion we are concerned only with appearances.

“The monadists have, indeed, been sufficiently acute to seek to avoid this difficulty by not treating space as a condition of the possibility of the objects of outer intuition (bodies), but by taking these and the dynamical relation of substances as the condition of the possibility of space. But we have a concept of bodies only as appearances, and as such they necessarily presuppose space as the condition of the possibility of all outer appearance.”[1516]

How Kant, after writing these words, should still have left standing the proof which he has given of the thesis may be partially explained as due to the continuing influence of his earlier view,[1517] according to which antinomy represents not a conflict between opposing views of the world of ordinary consciousness, but between the demands of pure thought and the forms of sensuous existence. That older view of antinomy here gains the upper hand, notwithstanding its lack of agreement with the general scheme of the Dialectic.

There is a further inconsistency in Kant’s procedure which may perhaps be taken as indicating the early origin of this portion of the Critique. He presents the mathematical proof of the continuity of matter as conclusive. Yet in the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science (1786) he most emphatically states that “the infinite divisibility of matter is very far from being proved through proof of the infinite divisibility of space.”[1518]

Russell,[1519] in discussing the thesis and antithesis on their merits, from the point of view of certain present-day mathematical theories, makes the following criticism of Kant’s procedure.

“Here, again, the argument applies to things in space and time, and to all collections, whether existent or not.... And with this extension[1520] the proof of the proposition must, I think, be admitted; only that terms or concepts should be substituted for substances, and that, instead of the argument that relations between substances are accidental (zufällig), we should content ourselves with saying that relations imply terms and complexity implies relations.”

Russell further argues that Kant’s assumption in the antithesis, that “space does not consist of simple parts, but of spaces,” cannot be granted. It

“...involves a covert use of the axiom of finitude, i.e. the axiom that, if a space does consist of points, it must consist of some finite number of points. When once this is denied, we may admit that no finite number of divisions of a space will lead to points, while yet holding every space to be composed of points. A finite space is a whole consisting of simple parts, but not of any finite number of simple parts. Exactly the same thing is true of the stretch between 1 and 2. Thus the antinomy is not specially spatial, and any answer which is applicable in Arithmetic is applicable here also. The thesis, which is an essential postulate of Logic, should be accepted, while the antithesis should be rejected.”

But, as above observed,[1521] those mathematicians who adopt this view so alter the meaning of the term point that it would perhaps be equally true to say that the thesis, as thus interpreted by Russell, coincides with what Kant believes himself to be asserting in the antithesis.

THIRD ANTINOMY

=Thesis.=--Causality according to the laws of nature is not the only causality from which the appearances of the world can be deduced. There is also required for their explanation another, that of freedom.

=Proof.=--Let us assume the opposite. In that case everything that happens presupposes a previous state upon which it follows according to a rule. That previous state is itself caused in similar fashion, and so on in infinitum. But if everything thus happens according to the mere laws of nature, there can never be a first beginning, and therefore no completeness of the series on the side of the derivative causes. But the law of nature is that nothing happens without a cause sufficiently determined a priori. If, therefore, all causality is possible only according to the laws of nature, the principle contradicts itself when taken in unlimited universality. Such causality cannot therefore be the sole causality possible. We must admit an absolute spontaneity, whereby a series of appearances, that proceed according to laws of nature, begins by itself.

=Criticism.=--The vital point of this argument lies in the assertion that the principle of causality calls for a sufficient cause for each event, and that such sufficiency is not to be found in natural causes which are themselves derivative or conditioned. As the antecedent series of causes for an event can never be traced back to a first cause, it can never be completed, and can never, therefore, be sufficient to account for the event under consideration. Either, therefore, the principle of causality contradicts itself, or some form of free self-originative causality must be postulated. This argument cannot be accepted as valid. Each natural cause is sufficient to account for its effect. That is to say, the causation is sufficient at each stage. That the series of antecedent causes cannot be completed is due to its actual infinitude, not to any insufficiency in the causality which it embodies.[1522] To prove his point, Kant would have to show that the conception of the actual infinite is inherently self-contradictory; and that, as we have already noted, he does not mean to assert. His argument here lies open to the same criticism as we have already passed upon his argument in proof of the thesis of the first antinomy.

=Antithesis.=--There is no freedom; everything in the world proceeds solely in accordance with laws of nature.

=Proof.=--Let us assume the opposite. Free causality, i.e. the power of absolute origination, presupposes the possibility of a state of the cause which has no causal connection with its preceding state, and which does not follow from it. But this is opposed to the law of causality, and would render unity of experience impossible. Freedom is therefore an empty thought-entity (Gedankending), and is not to be met with in any experience.

=Criticism.=--We may first observe the strange relation in which the proof of the thesis stands to that of the antithesis. According to the former, freedom must be postulated because otherwise the principle of causality would contradict itself. According to the latter, freedom is impossible, and for the same reason. Now, as Erhardt has pointed out,[1523] a principle cannot be reconciled with itself through the making of an assumption which contradicts it. That would only be the institution of a second contradiction, not the removal of the previous conflict. If the proof of the thesis be correct, that of the antithesis must be false; if the proof of the antithesis be correct, that of the thesis must be invalid. For though the thesis and the antithesis may themselves contradict one another, such conflict must not exist between the grounds upon which they establish themselves. If the reasons cited in their support are contradictory of one another, the total argument is rendered null and void. The supporting proofs being contradictory of one another, nothing whatsoever has been established. There will remain as a pressing and immediate problem the task of distinguishing the truth from among the competing alternatives; and until this has been done, the argument cannot proceed. The assumption of freedom either does or does not contradict the principle of causality. Antinomy is not the simple assertion that both A and not-A are true, but that A and not-A, though contradictory of one another, can both be established by arguments in which such contradiction does not occur.[1524]

The proof given of the thesis would seem, as already noted, to be untenable. The principle of natural causality is not self-contradictory. What now is to be said regarding the proof of the antithesis? If the principle of natural causality be formulated as asserting that every event has an antecedent cause determining it to exist, then certainly free, spontaneous, or self-originating causality is excluded. Here, as in Kant’s proof of the antithesis of the first antinomy, everything depends upon definition of the terms employed. It must be borne in mind that the antinomies are asserted to exist only on the dogmatic level. Critical considerations must not, therefore, be allowed to intervene. Now for ordinary consciousness the concept of causality has a very indefinite meaning, and a very wide application. Causation may be spontaneous as well as mechanical, spiritual as well as material. All possibilities lie open, and no mere reference to the concept of causal dependence suffices to decide between them. Free causality, so far as dogmatic analysis of the causal postulate can show to the contrary, may or may not be possible.[1525] Kant has failed to establish the antithesis save by the surreptitious introduction of conclusions which presuppose the truth of his Critical teaching. This is especially shown in the emphasis laid upon ‘unity of experience.’ The further statement[1526] that freedom means lawlessness is only true if Kant’s teaching is mutilated by reduction merely to its assertion of the objective validity of the mechanistic principles of natural science. Kant is both running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.

Though this antinomy is chiefly concerned with the problem of freedom, i.e. of spontaneous origination within the world, the proof of the thesis refers only to the cosmological problem of a first cause.[1527] The reasons of this oscillation we shall have occasion to consider in dealing with the fourth antinomy. The terms world and nature play the same ambiguous part as in the antithesis of the first antinomy; they tend to be employed in the narrower, mechanistic sense of Kant’s own Critical teaching.

FOURTH ANTINOMY

As the proofs of the thesis and antithesis proceed on lines identical with those of the third antinomy, I shall omit detailed statement of them.[1528] Kant again argues from the fact that every change has a condition which precedes it in time. There is no difference in the proofs themselves, but only in the nature of the inference which they are made to support. In the third antinomy they lead to the assertion and denial of free causality; in the fourth antinomy they lead to the assertion and denial of an absolutely necessary being. The assertion is required in order to save the principle of causality from self-contradiction; the denial is also necessary, and for the same reason. The illegitimacy of this procedure has already been pointed out.[1529] Though the thesis and the antithesis will, if antinomy be assumed to represent an actual conflict, contradict one another, no such conflict is allowable in the grounds which profess to establish them. We must not assert, as argument, that both A and not-A are true.

In the Observation on the antithesis[1530] Kant has himself taken notice of this “strange” situation.

“From the same ground on which, in the thesis, the existence of an original being was inferred, its non-existence is inferred, and that with equal stringency.”

A necessary being is inferred to exist, because the past series of events cannot contain all the conditions of an event, unless the unconditioned is to be found among them. A necessary being is denied to exist, because the series of merely conditioned events contains all the conditions that there are. Kant’s defence of this procedure is as follows:

“Nevertheless, the method of argument in both cases is entirely in conformity even with ordinary human reason, which frequently falls into conflict with itself from considering its object from two different points of view. M. de Mairan[1531] regarded the controversy between two famous astronomers, which arose from a similar difficulty in regard to choice of standpoint, as a sufficiently remarkable phenomenon to justify his writing a special treatise upon it. The one had argued that the moon revolves on its own axis, because it always turns the same side towards the earth. The other drew the opposite conclusion that the moon does not revolve on its own axis, because it always turns the same side towards the earth. Both inferences were correct, according to the point of view which each chose in observing the moon’s motion.”

This example is not really relevant. In spite of Kant’s assertion to the contrary, the point of view is one and the same in thesis and in antithesis. In both cases the absolutely necessary being is viewed as the first of the changes in the world of sense. To maintain that when thus viewed it both is and is not demanded by the law of causality, is as impossible as to assert that in one and the same meaning of our terms the moon both does and does not revolve on its own axis.

That the proofs of the fourth antinomy are identical with those of the third is due to the fact that Kant, under the stress of his architectonic,[1532] is striving to construct four antinomies while only three are really distinguishable. The third and fourth antinomies coincide as formulations of the problem whether or not the conditioned implies, and originates in, the unconditioned. The precise determination of this unconditioned, whether as free causality or as a necessary being, or in any other way, is a further problem, and does not properly fall within the scope of the cosmological inquiries, which are alone in place in this division of the Critique.

The manner in which Kant, in treating of freedom, makes the transition[1533] from the cosmological (or theological) unconditioned to the psychological is significant. The cosmological unconditioned is proved to exist by the argument of the thesis, and its existence is at once interpreted as establishing at least in this one case the actuality of free spontaneous causality. Kant remarks that this

“...transcendental Idea of freedom does not by any means constitute the entire content of the psychological concept of that name, which is mainly empirical, but only that of absolute spontaneity of action.... The necessity of a first beginning, due to freedom, of a series of appearances we have demonstrated only in so far as it is required for the conceivability of an origin of the world.... But as, after all, the power of spontaneously originating a series in time has thus been proved (though not understood), it is now permissible for us to admit within the course of the world different series as capable in their causality of beginning of themselves, and so to attribute to their substances a power of acting from freedom.”

That each such successive series in the world can only have a relatively primary beginning, and must always be preceded by some other state of things, is no sufficient objection to such causality.

“For we are here speaking of an absolutely first beginning not in time, but in causality. If, for instance, I at this moment arise from my chair in complete freedom, without being necessarily determined thereto by the influence of natural causes, a new series, with all its natural consequences in infinitum, has its absolute beginning in this event, although the event itself is only, with regard to time, the continuation of a preceding series.”

Thus Kant’s proof of freedom in the thesis of the third antinomy is merely a corollary from his proof of the existence of a cosmological or theological unconditioned; and further, this freedom is not, like the cosmological unconditioned, proved to exist, but only to be “admissible” as a possibility. Similarly in the antithesis, the only disproof of freedom is the disproof of unconditioned causality in general. The antinomy deals with the general opposition and relation between the contingent and the unconditioned.

It is this same opposition exactly which constitutes the subject-matter of the fourth antinomy. The terms used are different, but their meanings are one and the same. For though Kant substitutes ‘absolutely necessary being’ for ‘unconditioned causality,’ the former is still conceived as belonging to the world of sense, as the unconditioned origin of its changes. And as Kant is careful to add, only the causal, cosmological argument can be employed to establish the existence of an absolutely necessary being; nothing can legitimately be inferred from the mere Idea. The verbal change is consequently verbal only; the argument of the fourth antinomy coincides in result no less than in method of proof with the argument of the third. It is impossible to define the unconditioned in any more specific fashion save by an enquiry which entirely transcends the scope of the argument that Kant is here presenting. Kant’s procedure also lies open to the further objection that the conception of an absolutely necessary being, which he here introduces without preliminary analysis or explanation, is later shown by him[1534] to be devoid of significance. He employs it, but precludes himself from either investigating it or from drawing any serviceable consequences from it. The situation is not without the elements of comedy. In order to seem to mark a real distinction between the fourth and the third antinomies, Kant has perforce to trespass upon the domain of theology; but as he is aware that the trespass is forbidden, he seeks to mitigate the offence by returning from the foray empty-handed. To such unhappy straits is he again reduced by his over-fond devotion to architectonic.

SECTION III

THE INTEREST OF REASON IN THIS SELF-CONFLICT[1535]

This section, though extremely important, requires no lengthy comment. It is lucid and straightforward. It may be summarised as follows. The theses and the antitheses rest upon diverse and conflicting interests. The theses, though expressed in dry formulas, divested of the empirical features through which alone their true grandeur can be displayed, represent the proud pretensions of dogmatic Reason. The antitheses give expression to principles of pure empiricism. The former are supported by interests of a practical and popular character: upon them morals and religion are based. The latter, while conflicting with our spiritual interests, far exceed the theses in their intellectual advantages. This explains

“...the zelotic passion of the one party, and the calm assurance of the other, and why the world hails the one with eager approval, and is implacably prejudiced against the other.”

No legitimate objection could be raised against the principles of the empirical philosopher, if he sought only to rebuke the rashness and presumption of Reason when it boasts of knowledge, and when it represents as speculative insight that which is grounded only in faith.

“But when empiricism itself, as frequently happens, becomes dogmatic ..., and confidently denies whatever lies beyond the sphere of its intuitive knowledge, it betrays the same lack of modesty; and that is all the more reprehensible owing to the irreparable injury which is thereby caused to the practical interests of Reason.”

Each party asserts more than it knows. The one allows our practical interests to delude Reason as to its inherent powers; the other would so extend empirical knowledge as to destroy the validity of our moral principles. Kant regards the opposition as being historically typified by the contrasted systems of Platonism and Epicureanism. It befits us, as self-reflecting beings, to free ourselves, at least provisionally, from the partiality of those divergent interests, and by application of “the sceptical method,” unconcerned about consequences, to penetrate to the primary sources of this perennial conflict. As Kant states in the next section, the conflict is of such a character as to be genuinely resolvable.

This section must have been written, or at least first sketched, at the time when Kant still intended to bring his whole criticism of the metaphysical sciences within the scope of his doctrine of antinomy.[1536]

SECTION IV

OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL PROBLEMS OF PURE REASON, IN SO FAR AS THEY ABSOLUTELY MUST BE CAPABLE OF SOLUTION[1537]

There are sciences the very nature of which requires that every question which can occur in them must be completely answerable from what can be presumed to be known. This is true of the science of ethics. When I ask to what course of action I am committed in moral duty, the question must be answerable in terms of the considerations which have led to its being propounded. For there can be no moral obligation in regard to that of which we cannot have knowledge. We must not plead that the problem is unanswerable; a solution must be found. Kant proceeds to argue that this is no less true of transcendental philosophy.

“...it is unique among speculative sciences in that no question which concerns an object given to pure Reason is insoluble for this same human Reason, and that no excuse of an unavoidable ignorance, or of the unfathomable depth of the problem, can release us from the obligation to answer it thoroughly and completely. That very concept which enables us to ask the question must also qualify us to answer it, since, as in the case of right and wrong, the object is not to be met with outside the concept.”

The third and fourth paragraphs would seem to be later interpolations. The section, like Section III., must have been written at the time when Kant still regarded the doctrine of antinomy as covering the entire field of metaphysics. Transcendental philosophy is identified with cosmology, as dealt with in the antinomies. But in the third paragraph the former is taken as a wider term. Also, in the first two paragraphs the problems of pure Reason are regarded as soluble because their objects are not to be met with outside the concepts of them; whereas in the third paragraph they are viewed as soluble because their object is given empirically. Again, in the second paragraph transcendental philosophy has been taken as unique among speculative [i.e. theoretical] sciences; in the fourth paragraph mathematics is placed alongside it.

Examination of this section as a whole (and the same is true of the immediately following section) justifies the conclusion that at the time when it was written Kant regarded the Ideas of Reason as having a purely and exclusively regulative function, and consequently as exhausting their inherent meaning in their empirical reference. He regards them as entirely lacking in metaphysical significance. They are invented by Reason for Reason’s own satisfaction, and must therefore yield in their internal content the explanation of their existence, and must also supply a complete and thorough answer to all problems which are traceable to them. A dogmatic (i.e. ontological) solution of the antinomies is, as we have already found, impossible; the Critical solution considers the question subjectively,

“...in accordance with the foundation of the knowledge upon which it is based.”[1538] “For your object is only in your brain, and cannot be given outside it; so that you have only to take care to be at one with yourself, and to avoid the amphiboly which transforms your Idea into a supposed representation of an object which is empirically given and therefore to be known according to the laws of experience.”[1539]

Kant’s argument in proof of this purely subjective interpretation of the Ideas consists in showing that they are not presented in any given appearances, and are not even necessary to explain appearances. The unconditioned, whether of quantity, of division, or of origination, has nothing to do with any experience, whether actual or possible.

“You would not, for instance, in any wise be able to explain the appearances of a body better, or even differently, if you assumed that it consists either of simple or of inexhaustibly composite parts; for neither a simple appearance nor an infinite composition can ever come before you. Appearances demand explanation only in so far as the conditions of their explanation are given in perception, [and the unconditioned can never be so given].”[1540]

This standpoint, at once sceptical and empirical, is further developed in the next section.

SECTION V

SCEPTICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE COSMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS[1541]

Applying the “sceptical method,”[1542] Kant argues that even supposing one or other party could conclusively establish itself through final refutation of the other, no advantage of any kind would accrue. The victory would be a fruitless one, and the outcome “mere nonsense.”[1543] The sole validity of the Ideas lies in their empirical reference; and yet that reference is one which proves them to be, when objectively interpreted, entirely meaningless. The cosmological Idea is always either too large or too small for any concept of the understanding. No matter what view is taken, the only possible object (viz. that yielded by experience) will not fit into it. If the world has no beginning, or is infinitely divisible, or has no first cause, the regress transcends all empirical concepts; while if the world has a beginning, is composed of simple parts, and has a first cause, it is too small for the concepts through which alone it can be experienced. In other words, the cosmological Ideas are always either too large or too small for the empirical regress, and therefore stand condemned by sense-experience, which can alone impart relation to an object, i.e. truth and meaning to any concept. For, as Kant explicitly states, we must not reverse this relation and condemn empirical concepts, as being in the one case too small, and in the other case too large for the Idea. Experience, not Ideas, is the criterion alike of reality and of truth.

“The possible empirical concept is, therefore, the standard by which we must judge whether the Idea is mere Idea and thought-entity (Gedankending), or whether it finds its object in the world.”[1544]

When two things are compared, that for the sake of which the other exists is the sole proper standard. We do not say “that a man is too long for his coat, but that the coat is too short for the man.”[1545] We are thus confirmed in the view that the antinomies rest upon a false view of the manner in which the object of the cosmological Ideas can be given; and are set upon the track, followed out in the next section, of the illusion to which they are due.

This reduction of the Ideas to mere thought-entities is one of the two alternative views which, as we have already stated,[1546] compete with one another throughout the entire Dialectic. We may, for instance, compare the above explanation of the conflict between the Ideas and experience with that given in A 422 = B 450. In the latter passage the antinomies are traced to a conflict between Reason and understanding. If the unity is adequate to the demands of Reason, it is too great for the understanding; if it is adequate to the understanding, it is too small for Reason. Kant does not here allow that the claims of Reason are ipso facto condemned through the incapacity of experience to fulfil them. On the contrary, he implies that it is through the Ideas that we come to realise the merely phenomenal character of everything experienced.

Our task, in this Commentary, is only to distinguish the passages in which those two conflicting tendencies appear, and to trace the consequences which follow from Kant’s alternation between them. Discussion of their significance had best be deferred to the close of the Dialectic, where Kant dwells upon the regulative function of Reason. At present we need merely note that the main content of the above sections, in which the sceptical view is expounded, is of early date, prior to the working out of the Paralogisms and of the Ideal.

SECTION VI

TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM AS THE KEY TO THE SOLUTION OF THE COSMOLOGICAL DIALECTIC[1547]

In this section subjectivism is dominant. The type of transcendental idealism expounded is that earlier and less developed form which connects with the doctrine of the transcendental object.[1548] It shows no trace of Kant’s maturer teaching. No distinction is drawn between representation and the objects represented. To the transcendental object, the “purely intelligible cause” of appearances in general, and to it alone, Kant ascribes “the whole extent and connection of our possible perceptions.”[1549] Appearances exist only in the degree to which they are constructed in experience. As they are mere representations, they cannot exist outside the mind. Independently of such construction, they may indeed be said to be given in the transcendental object, but they only become objects to us on the supposition that they can be reached through extension of the series of our actual perceptions. It is in this form alone, as conceived in a regressive series of possible perceptions, and not as having existed in itself, that even the immemorial past course of the world can be represented as real;

“...so that all events which have taken place in the immense periods that have preceded my own existence mean really nothing but the possibility of extending the chain of experience from the present perception back to the conditions which determine it in time.”[1550]

A similar interpretation has to be given to all propositions which assert the present reality of that which has never been actually experienced.

“In outcome it is a matter of indifference whether I say that in the empirical progress in space I can meet with stars a hundred times farther removed than the outermost now perceptible to me, or whether I say that they are perhaps to be met with in cosmical space even though no human being has ever perceived or ever will perceive them. For even if they were given as things in themselves, without relation to possible experience,[1551] they are still nothing for me, and therefore are not objects, save in so far as they are contained in the series of the empirical regress.”[1552]

The distinction between appearances and things in themselves must always, Kant observes, be borne in mind when we are interpreting the meaning of our empirical concepts; and this is especially necessary when those concepts are brought into connection with the cosmological Idea of an unconditioned. The antinomies are due to a failure to appreciate this fundamental distinction, and the key to their solution lies in its recognition.

“It would be an injustice to ascribe to us that long-decried empirical idealism which, while it admits the genuine actuality of space, denies the existence of the extended beings in it....”[1553]

This is in line with the passages from the Prolegomena commented upon above.[1554]

SECTION VII

CRITICAL DECISION OF THE COSMOLOGICAL CONFLICT OF REASON WITH ITSELF[1555]

Kant’s argument is as follows. The antinomies rest upon the principle that if the conditioned be given, the entire series of all its conditions is likewise given. If the objects of the senses were independently real, there would be no escape from this assumption, and the dialectical conflict would consequently be irresolvable. Transcendental idealism, as above stated, reveals a way out of the dilemma. As appearances are merely representations, their antecedent conditions do not exist as appearances, save in the degree in which they are mentally constructed. Though the appearances are given, their empirical conditions are not thereby given. The most that we can say is that a regress to the conditions, i.e. a continued empirical synthesis in that direction, is commanded or required. The cosmological argument can thus be shown to be logically invalid. The syllogism, which it involves, is as follows:

If the conditioned be given, the entire series of all its conditions is likewise given.

The objects of the senses are given.

Therefore the entire series of all their conditions is likewise given.

In the major premiss the concept of the conditioned is employed transcendently (Kant says transcendentally), in the minor empirically. But though the inference thus commits the logical fallacy of sophisma figurae dictionis, the ground of its occurrence, and the reason why it is not at once detected, lie in a natural and inevitable illusion which leads us to accept the sensible world in space as being independently real. Only through Critical investigation can the deceptive power of this illusion be overcome. Owing to its influence, the above fallacy has been committed by dogmatists and empiricists alike. It can be shown that in refuting each other

... “they are really quarrelling about nothing, and that a certain transcendental illusion has caused them to see a reality where none is to be found.”[1556]

The existence of antinomy, Kant further argues, presupposes that theses and antitheses are contradictory opposites, i.e. that no third alternative is possible. When opposed assertions are not contradictories but contraries, the opposition, to use Kant’s terms, is not analytical but dialectical. Both may be false; for the one does not merely contradict the other, but makes, in addition, a further statement on its own account. Now examination of the illusion above described enables us to perceive that the opposites, in reference to which antinomy occurs, are of this dialectical character. Theses and antitheses are alike false. Since the world does not exist as a thing in itself, it exists neither as an infinite whole nor as a finite whole, but only in the degree in which it is constructed in an empirical regress. We must not apply “the Idea of absolute totality, which is valid only as a condition of things in themselves,”[1557] to appearances. (The words which I have italicised mark the emergence of Kant’s non-sceptical, non-empirical view of the nature and function of the Ideas of Reason.) Thus antinomy, rightly understood, does not favour scepticism, but only the “sceptical method,” and indeed yields an indirect proof of the correctness of Critical teaching. This proof may be presented in the form of a dilemma. If the world is a whole existing in itself, it is either finite or infinite. But the former alternative is refuted by the proofs given of the antitheses, and the latter alternative by the proofs of the theses. Therefore the world cannot be a whole existing in itself. From this it follows that appearances are nothing outside our representations; and that is what is asserted in the doctrine of transcendental idealism.

In A 499 = B 527 Kant uses ambiguous language,[1558] which can be interpreted as asserting that in the regress there can be no lack of given conditions. Such a statement would presuppose positive knowledge regarding the unknown transcendental object.[1559] The opposite, more correct, view is given in A 514-15 = B 542-3 and A 517 ff. = B 545 ff., though in the latter passage with a reversion to the above position.[1560]

The earlier manuscripts, which Kant has so far been employing, probably terminate either, as Adickes suggests,[1561] at the end of this section, or at the close of Section VIII., which is of doubtful date. Section IX. is certainly from a later period; it represents a more complex standpoint, in which Reason is no longer viewed as possessing a merely empirical function, and in which consequently the theses and antitheses are no longer indiscriminately denounced as being alike false. Under the influence of his later, more Idealistic preoccupations, Kant so far modifies the above solution as to assert that in the ease of the last two antinomies both theses and antitheses are true, when properly interpreted.

SECTION VIII

THE REGULATIVE PRINCIPLE OF PURE REASON IN REGARD TO THE COSMOLOGICAL IDEAS[1562]

The principle of pure Reason, correctly formulated, is that when the conditioned is given a regress upon the totality of its conditions is set as a problem. As such it is valid,

“...not indeed as an axiom ... but as a problem for the understanding ..., leading it to undertake and to continue, according to the completeness in the Idea, the regress in the series of conditions of any given conditioned.”[1563]

It does not anticipate, prior to the regress, what actually exists as object, but only postulates, in the form of a rule, how the understanding ought to proceed. It does not tell us whether or how the unconditioned exists, but how the empirical regress is to be carried out under the guidance of a mere Idea. Such a rule can be regulative only, and the Idea of totality which it contains must never be invested with objective reality. As the absolutely unconditioned can never be met with in experience, we know, indeed, beforehand that in the process of the regress the unconditioned will never be reached. But the duty of seeking it by way of such regress is none the less prescribed.

Kant proceeds to give a somewhat bewildering account of the familiar distinction between progressus in infinitum and progressus in indefinitum, and to draw a very doubtful distinction between the series in division of a given whole and the series in extension of it.[1564] The illustration from the series of human generations is an unfortunate one; the discovery that it began at some one point in the past would not necessarily violate any demand of Reason. Such a series is not comparable with those of space, time, and causality.[1565] The only important result of this digression is the conclusion that whatever demand be made, whether of regress in infinitum or of regress in indefinitum, in neither case can the series of conditions be regarded as being given as infinite in the object.

“The question, therefore, is no longer how great this series of conditions may be in itself, whether finite or infinite, for it is nothing in itself; but how we are to carry out the empirical regress, and how far we should continue it.”[1566]

We have already noted[1567] Kant’s ambiguous suggestion in A 499 = B 527, that in the empirical regress there can be no lack of given conditions. The statement, thus interpreted, is illegitimate. The most that he can claim is that, were further sensations not forthcoming, we should still have to conceive those last obtained as being preceded by empty space and time, and as lacking in any experienced cause. Under such circumstances we should experience neither finitude nor unconditionedness, but only incapacity to find a content suitable to the inexhaustible character of the spatial and temporal conditions of experience, or in satisfaction of our demand for causal antecedents. In A 514-15 = B 542-3 Kant shows consciousness of this difficulty, but in dealing with it adopts a half-way position which still lies open to objection. He recognises that, since no member of a series can be empirically given as absolutely unconditioned, a higher member is always possible, and that the search for it is therefore prescribed; none the less he asserts that in regard to given wholes we are justified in taking up a very different position, namely, that the regress in the series of their internal conditions does not proceed, as in the above case, in indefinitum, but in infinitum, i.e. that in this case more members exist and are empirically given than we can reach through the regress. In given wholes we are commanded to find more members; in serial extension we are justified only in inquiring for more. This half-way position is a makeshift, and is in no respect tenable. The evidence for the infinite extensibility of space and time is as conclusive as for their infinite divisibility. And when we consider sensuous existence under these forms, it is just as possible that the transcendental object may, beyond a certain point, fail to supply material for further division, as that it may fail to yield data for further expansion. What Kant asserts of the latter, that further advance must always remain as a possibility, and for that Reason must always call for the open mind of further inquiry, without any attempted anticipatory assertion either pro or contra, alone represents the true Critical standpoint. The cessation of data may really, however, be due to an increase in the subtlety of the conditioning processes that incapacitates them from acting upon our senses;[1568] by indirect means this disability may be overcome. Reason, in its conception of an unconditioned, prescribes to us a task that is inexhaustible in its demands. We have no right to lay down our intellectual arms before any barrier however baffling, or to despair before any chasm however empty and abrupt.

SECTION IX

THE EMPIRICAL EMPLOYMENT OF THE REGULATIVE PRINCIPLE OF REASON IN REGARD TO ALL COSMOLOGICAL IDEAS[1569]

SOLUTION OF THE FIRST AND SECOND ANTINOMIES

=Statement.=--The fundamental fact upon which, as Kant has already stated, the regulative principle of Reason is based, is that it is impossible to experience an absolute limit. It is always possible that a still higher member of the series may be found; and that being so, it is our duty to search for it. But as we are here dealing with possibilities only, the regress is in indefinitum, not in infinitum.

“...we must seek the concept of the quantity of the world only according to the rule which determines the empirical regress in it. This rule says no more than that however far we may have attained in the series of empirical conditions, we should never assume an absolute limit, but should subordinate every appearance, as conditioned, to another as its condition, and that we must then advance to this condition. This is the regressus in indefinitum, which, as it determines no quantity in the object, is clearly enough distinguishable from the regressus in infinitum.”[1570]

We are acquainted only with the rule, and not with the whole object. Any assertion, therefore, which we can make, must be dictated solely by the rule, and be an expression of it. Neither the thesis nor the antithesis of the first antinomy is valid; there is a third alternative. The sensible world is neither finite nor infinite in extent; it is infinitely extensible, in terms of the rule.

Unfortunately Kant is not content to leave his conclusion in this form. He complicates his argument, and bewilders the reader, by maintaining that this is a virtual acceptance of the antithesis, in that we assert negatively, that an absolute limit in either time or space is empirically impossible;[1571] and affirmatively, that the regress goes on in indefinitum, and consequently has no absolute quantity.

Kant also repeats the argument of the preceding section in regard to given wholes.[1572] When the problem is that of subdivision, the regress starts from a given whole, and therefore from a whole whose conditions (the parts) are given with it. The division is, therefore, in infinitum, and not merely in indefinitum. This does not, however, he argues, mean that the given whole consists of infinitely many parts. For though the parts are contained in the intuition of the whole, yet the whole division arises only through the regress that generates it. It is a quantum continuum, not a quantum discretum.[1573] This argument has been criticised above.[1574] Kant here ignores the possibility that the parts of matter, though extended, may be physically indivisible, or that they may be centres of force which control, but do not occupy, a determinate space.

REMARKS ON THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE MATHEMATICAL-TRANSCENDENTAL AND THE DYNAMICAL-TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS[1575]

=Statement.=--Kant again[1576] introduces the distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical. The mathematical Ideas synthesise the homogeneous, the dynamical may connect the heterogeneous. In employing the former we must therefore remain within the phenomenal; through the latter we may be able to transcend it. The way is thus opened for propounding, in regard to the third and fourth antinomies, a solution in which the pretensions of Reason no less than those of understanding may find satisfaction. Whereas both the theses and the antitheses of the first and second antinomies have to be declared false, those of the third and fourth antinomies may both be true--the theses applying to the intelligible realm, and the antitheses to the world of sense.

=Comment.=--When the distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical is thus extended from the categories to the Ideas, its validity becomes highly doubtful. Space and time are certainly themselves homogeneous, and the categories of quality and quantity, in so far as they are mathematically employed, may perhaps be similarly described. But when the term is still further extended, to cover the pairs of correlative opposites with which the first two antinomies deal, those, namely, between the limited and the unlimited, the simple and the infinitely divisible, Kant would seem to be making a highly artificial distinction. The first two antinomies deal not with space and time as such, but with the sensible world in space and time; and within this sensible world, even in its quantitative aspects, qualitative differences have to be reckoned with. Common sense does, indeed, tend to assume that the unlimited and the simple must, like that which they condition, be in space and time, and so form with the conditioned a homogeneous series. But this assumption ordinary consciousness is equally disposed to make in regard to a first cause and to the unconditionally necessary.

Kant further attempts[1577] to distinguish between the mathematical and the dynamical by asserting that the dynamical antinomies are not concerned with the quantity of their object, but only with its existence. He admits, however, that in all four cases a series arises which is either too large or too small for the understanding; and that being so, in each case the problem arises as to the existence of an unconditioned.

The artificiality of Kant’s distinction becomes clear when we recognise that the opposed solutions, which he gives of the two sets of antinomies, can be mutually interchanged. As the sensible world rests upon intelligible grounds, both the theses and the antitheses of the first two antinomies may be true, the former in the intelligible realm and the latter in the sensuous. Similarly, both the theses and antitheses of the third and fourth antinomies may be false. In the sensible world, about which alone anything can be determined, the series of dynamical conditions forms neither a finite nor an infinite series. There is a third alternative, akin to that of the antitheses, but distinct in character from it, namely, that the series is infinitely extensible. Kant’s differential treatment of the two sets of antinomies is arbitrary, and would seem to be due to his having attempted to superimpose, with the least possible modification, a later solution of the antinomies upon one previously developed. In the earlier view, as we have already had occasion to observe, Reason has a merely empirical application. Its Ideas are taken as existing “only in the brain.” Only their empirical reference can substantiate them, or indeed give them the least significance. And as they are by their very nature incapable of empirical embodiment, all assertions which involve them must necessarily be false. Later, Kant came to regard Reason as having its own independent rights. Encouraged by his successful establishment of the objective validity of the categories, progressively more and more convinced of the importance of the distinction, which that proof reinforced, between appearances and things in themselves, and preoccupied with the problems of the spiritual life, his old-time faith in the absolute claims of pure thought reasserted itself. Through Reason we realise our kinship with noumenal realities, and through its demands the nature of the unconditioned is foreshadowed to the mind. The theses and antitheses, which throughout the entire history of philosophy have competed with one another, may both be true. Their perennial conflict demonstrates the need for some more catholic standpoint from which the two great authorities by which human life is controlled and directed, the intellectual and the moral, may be reconciled. Neither can be made to yield to the other; each is supreme in its own field. The distinction between appearances and things in themselves, recognition of which is the first step towards an adequate theory of knowledge, and without which the nature of the intellectual life remains self-contradictory and incomprehensible, itself affords the means of such a reconciliation. The understanding is the sole key to the world of appearance, the moral imperative to the realm of things in themselves. Reason with its demand for the unconditioned mediates between them, and enables us to realise our dual vocation.

This radical alteration of standpoint was bound to make the employment of manuscript representing the earlier and more sceptical attitude altogether unsatisfactory; and only Kant’s constitutional unwillingness to sacrifice what he had once committed to paper can account for his retention of the older expositions. He allows his previous treatment of the first two antinomies to remain in its sceptical form, and, by means of the distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical, develops his newer, more Idealist view exclusively in reference to the third and fourth antinomies. That it is no less applicable to the others, we have already seen.

Though the Idealist view, as here expounded, may be thus described, relatively to the sceptical view of Reason, as later, that is not to be taken as meaning that it represents the latest stage in the development of Kant’s Critical teaching. It seems to belong to the period prior to that in which the central sections of the Analytic were composed. The evidence[1578] for this consists chiefly in its subjectivist references to the nature of appearances. It would seem to be contemporary with Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental object.

SOLUTION OF THE THIRD ANTINOMY[1579]

=Statement.=--As appearances are representations only, they must have a ground which is not itself an appearance;[1580] and though the effects of such an intelligible cause appear, and accordingly are determined through other appearances, its causality is not itself similarly conditioned. Both it and its causality lie outside the empirical series; only the effects fall within the realm of experience. And that causality, not being subject to time, does not require to stand under another cause as its effect. In this way Kant derives from his transcendental idealism an explanation of the possibility of an action being at once free and causally determined. This explanation he takes as applying either to a first cause of the whole realm of natural phenomena or to a finite being regarded as a free agent. The proof of the possibility of this metaphysical, or, as Kant entitles it, “transcendental freedom,” removes what has always been the real difficulty that lay in the way of “practical freedom.” The conception of freedom is a transcendental Idea which can neither be derived from experience nor verified by it. It is created by Reason for itself;[1581] and reveals the possibility that in this third antinomy both thesis and antithesis may be true. The alternatives--“every effect must arise from nature,” and “every effect must arise from freedom”--are not exclusive of one another. They may be true of one and the same event in different relations.[1582] The event may be free in reference to its intelligible cause, determined as an existence in space and time. Were appearances things in themselves, freedom and causality would necessarily conflict: by means of the above ontological distinction freedom can be asserted without any diminution in the scope allowed to the causal principle. All events, without a single possible exception, are subject to the law of natural determination; and yet every event may at the same time proceed from a free cause.

POSSIBILITY OF HARMONISING CAUSALITY THROUGH FREEDOM WITH THE UNIVERSAL LAW OF NATURAL NECESSITY[1583]

=Statement.=--The above conclusion is so seemingly paradoxical that Kant devotes this and the following section to its further elucidation. How can events be both free and determined? The answer lies in recognition of the two-sided character of every natural existence. It is, in one aspect, mere appearance; in another, it has at its foundation a transcendental object. It is an appearance of the latter, and for its complete comprehension this latter must be taken into account. Now there is nothing to prevent us from attributing to the transcendental object a causality which is not phenomenal. Such causality may make the appearance just that appearance which it is. In the world of sense every efficient cause must have a specific empirical character, since only so can it determine one effect rather than another according to the universal and invariable law expressive of its nature. We must similarly allow to the transcendental object an intelligible character, and trace to it all those appearances which as members of the empirical series stand to one another in unbroken causal connection. This transcendental object, owing to its intelligible character, is not in time. Its act does not either arise or perish, and is not, therefore, subject to the law of empirical determination which applies only to the changeable, i.e. to events subsequent upon previous states. Such supersensuous causality can find no place in the series of empirical conditions, and though it can be conceived only in terms of the empirical character which is its outcome, the difference between it and natural causality may be as complete as that which subsists between the transcendental and the empirical objects of knowledge. In its empirical character the action is a part of nature, and enters into a causal nexus which conforms to universal laws.[1584] All its effects are inevitably determined by antecedent natural conditions. In its intelligible character, however, this same active subject must be considered free from all influence of sensibility and from all determination through natural events. In so far as it is a noumenon, there can be no change in it, and therefore nothing which is capable of explanation in terms of natural causes. Even its empirical effects are not traceable to it as events in time. For as events these effects are always the results of antecedent empirical causes. What is alone due to noumenal causality is that empirical character in virtue of which appearances are what they are, and owing to which they stand in specific and necessary causal relations to one another.

“...the empirical character is permanent, while its effects, according to variation in the concomitant, and in part limiting conditions, appear in changeable forms.”[1585]

Empirical causality is itself in its specific nature conditioned by an intelligible cause.[1586]

EXPLANATION OF THE RELATION OF FREEDOM TO NECESSITY OF NATURE[1587]

=Statement.=--No single appearance can be exempted from the law of natural causality. For it would then be placed outside all possible experience, and would be for us a fiction of the brain, or rather could not be conceived at all. Nothing, therefore, in nature can act freely or spontaneously. But while thus recognising that all events without exception are empirically conditioned, we may, as already pointed out, regard empirical causality as itself an effect of a non-empirical and intelligible power.[1588] In events there may be nothing but nature, and yet nature itself, or perhaps even some of the existences composing it, may rest upon powers of a noumenal order. Kant proceeds to show that such an hypothesis is not only allowable, but is indispensable for understanding the distinguishing features of human life in its practical aspect.

Man is a natural existence, and his activities are subject to empirical laws. Like all other objects of nature, he has an empirical character, and in virtue of it takes his place as an integral part of the system of nature. But man is unique among all natural existences in that he not only knows himself as a sensible existence, but also, through pure apperception, becomes aware of himself as possessing faculties of a strictly intelligible character.[1589] Such are the faculties of understanding and Reason, especially the latter in its practical employment. The “ought” of the moral imperative expresses a kind of necessity and a form of causation which we nowhere find in the world of nature. The understanding can know in nature only what actually is, has been, or will be. Nothing natural can be other than it is in the particular relations in which it is found. Moral action transcends the natural in that it finds its cause, not in an appearance or set of appearances, but in an Ideal of pure Reason. Such action must indeed be possible under natural conditions, but such conditions do not determine its rightness, and consequently cannot determine its causality.

“Reason ... does not here follow the order of things as they present themselves in appearance, but frames to itself with perfect spontaneity an order of its own according to Ideas, to which it adapts the empirical conditions, and according to which it declares actions to be necessary even although they have never yet taken place, and perhaps never will take place. And at the same time it also presupposes that Reason can have causality in regard to all these actions, since otherwise no empirical effects could be expected from its Ideas.”[1590]

If such action of pure Reason be admitted to be possible, it will have to be viewed, purely intelligible though it be, as also possessing an empirical character, i.e. as conforming to the system of nature. Its empirical consequences will be the effects of antecedent appearances, and will empirically determine by natural necessity all subsequent acts. In this empirical character, therefore, there can be no freedom. Were our knowledge of the circumstances sufficiently extensive, every human action, so far as it is appearance, could be predicted and shown to be necessary. How, then, can we talk of actions as free, when from the point of view of appearances they must in all cases be regarded as inevitable? The solution is that which has already been given of the broader issue. The entire empirical character, the whole system of nature, is determined by the intelligible character. And the former results from the latter, not empirically, and therefore not according to any temporal, causal law. It does not arise or begin at a certain time. The intelligible character conditions the empirical series as a series, and not as if it were a first member of it.

“Thus what we have missed in all empirical series is disclosed as possible, namely, that the condition of a successive series of events may itself be empirically unconditioned.”[1591]

The intelligible character lies outside the series of appearances. “Reason is the abiding (beharrliche) condition of all free actions....”[1592] Freedom ought not, therefore, to be conceived only negatively as independence of empirical conditions, but also positively as the power of originating a series of events. The empirical series is in time. Reason, which is its unconditioned condition, admits of nothing antecedent to itself; it knows neither before nor after. The series is the immediate effect of a non-temporal reality.

In illustration of his meaning, not, as he is careful to add, with the profession of thereby confirming its truth, Kant points out that moral judgment upon a vicious action is not determined in view of the inheritance, circumstances and past life of the offender, but is passed just as if he might in each action be supposed to begin, quite by himself, a new series of effects. This, in Kant’s view, shows that practical Reason is regarded as a cause completely capable, independently of all empirical conditions, of determining the act, and that it is present in all the actions of men under all conditions, and is always the same. To explain why the intelligible character should in any specific case produce just this particular empirical character, good or bad,

“...transcends all the powers of our Reason, indeed all its rights of questioning, just as if we were to ask why the transcendental object of our outer sense-intuition yields intuition in space only and no other.”[1593]

In conclusion Kant states that his intention has not been to establish the reality of freedom, not even to prove its possibility. Freedom has been dealt with only as a transcendental Idea; and the only point established is that freedom is, so to speak, a possible possibility, in that it is not contradicted either by experience or by anything that can be proved to be a presupposition of experience.

=Comment.=--Adequate comment upon this section is difficult for many reasons. The section is full of archaic expressions from the earlier stages of Kant’s Critical teaching. Secondly, the section anticipates a problem which is first adequately dealt with in the second Critique. And lastly, but not least, the discussion of freedom in connection with a cosmological antinomy leads Kant to treat it in the same manner as the general antinomy, and in so doing to ignore the chief difficulty to which human freedom, as an independent problem with its own peculiar difficulties, lies open. For it is comparatively easy to reconcile the universality of the causal principle with the unconditionedness of the transcendental ground upon which nature as a whole is made to rest. It is a very different matter to reconcile the spontaneous origination of particular causal series, or the freedom of particular existences, such as human beings, with the singleness and uniformity of a natural system in which every part is determined by every other. Self-consciousness, with the capacity which it confers of constructing rational ideals, certainly, as Kant rightly contends, creates a situation to which mechanical categories are by no means adequate. But the mere reference to the conceivability of distinct causal series, having each a pure conception as their intelligible ground, does not suffice to meet the fundamental difficulty that, on Kant’s own admission, each such separate series must form an integral part of the unitary system of natural law. In only one passage does Kant even touch upon this difficulty. Speaking[1594] of Reason’s power of originating a series of events, he adds that while nothing begins in Reason itself (as it admits of no conditions antecedent to itself in time), the new series must none the less have a beginning in the natural world. But the proviso, which he at once makes, indicates that he is aware that this statement is untenable. For he adds the qualification that though a beginning of the series, it is never an absolutely first beginning. In other words, it is not a beginning in any real sense of the term. As the argument of his next paragraph shows, it is the entire system of nature, and not any one series within it, which can alone account, in empirical terms, for any one action.

It is open to Kant to argue, as he has already done,[1595] that the transcendental object conditions each separate appearance as well as all appearances in their totality, and that the specific empirical character of each causal series is therefore no less noumenally conditioned than is nature as a whole. But this does not suffice to meet the difficulty--how, if all natural phenomena constitute a single closed system in which everything is determined by everything else, a moral agent, acting spontaneously, can be free to originate a genuinely new series of natural events. We seem constrained to conclude that Kant has failed to sustain his position. A solution is rendered impossible by the very terms in which he formulates the problem. If the spiritual and the natural be opposed to one another as the timeless and the temporal, and if the natural be further viewed as a unitary system, individual moral freedom is no longer defensible. Only the “transcendental freedom” of the cosmological argument can be reckoned as among the open possibilities.

As regards the character of the Critical doctrine which underlies this section, we need only note that the statement in A 546-7 = B 574-5, that man knows himself through pure apperception as “a purely intelligible object,”[1596] does not conform to Kant’s final teaching. The section can be dated through its unwavering adherence to the subjectivist doctrine of the transcendental object.[1597]

SOLUTION OF THE FOURTH ANTINOMY[1598]

=Statement.=--The above solution is adopted. Both thesis and antithesis may be true, the latter of the world of sense and the former of its non-empirical ground. All things sensible are contingent, but the contingent series in its entirety may nevertheless rest upon an unconditionally necessary being. The unconditioned, since it is outside the series, does not require that any one link in the series should be itself unconditioned. “Reason follows its own course in the empirical, and again a peculiar course in its transcendental use,” i.e. it limits itself by the law of causality in dealing with appearances, lest in losing the thread of the empirical conditions it should fall into idle and empty speculations; while, on the other hand, it limits that law to appearances, lest it should wrongly declare that what is useless for the explanation of appearances is therefore impossible in itself. This does not prove that an absolutely necessary being is really possible, but only that its impossibility must not be concluded from the necessary contingency of all things sensuous.

=Comment.=--Kant’s method of distinguishing[1599] this conclusion from that of the preceding antinomy is again artificial. “Necessary being” is not in conception more extramundanum than “unconditioned cause.” If Kant’s distinction were valid, the argument of the fourth antinomy would no longer be cosmological; it would coincide with the problem of the Ideal of Pure Reason.

CONCLUDING NOTE ON THE WHOLE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON[1600]

=Statement.=--When we seek the unconditioned entirely beyond experience, our Ideas cease to be cosmological; they become transcendent. They separate themselves off from all empirical use of the understanding, and create to themselves an object, the material of which is not taken from experience, and which is therefore a mere thing of the mind (blosses Gedankending). None the less the cosmological Idea of the fourth antinomy impels us to take this step. When sensuous appearances, as merely contingent, require us to look for something altogether distinct in nature from them, our only available instruments, in so doing, are those pure concepts of things in general which contingent experience involves. We use them as instruments in such manner as may enable us to form, through analogy, some kind of notion of intelligible things. Taken in abstraction from the forms of sense, they yield that notion of an absolutely necessary Being which is equivalent to the concept of the theological Ideal.

CONCLUDING COMMENT ON KANT’S DOCTRINE OF THE ANTINOMIES

We may now, in conclusion, briefly summarise the results obtained in this chapter. Kant fails to justify the assertion that on the dogmatic level there exist antinomies in which both the contradictory alternatives allow of cogent demonstration. His proofs are in every instance invalid. The real nature of antinomy must, as he himself occasionally intimates, be defined in a very different manner, namely, as a conflict between the demand of Reason for unity and system, and the specific nature of the conditions, especially of the spatial and temporal conditions, under which the sensuous exists. In this wider form it constitutes a genuine problem, which demands for its solution the fundamental Critical distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves, and also a more thoroughgoing discussion than has yet been attempted of the nature of Reason and of the function of its Ideas. It is to these connected questions that Kant devotes his main attention in the remaining portions of the Dialectic, so that in passing to the Ideal of Pure Reason he is not proceeding to the treatment of a new set of problems, but to the restatement and to the more adequate solution of the fundamental conflict between understanding and Reason.

The observations which closed our comment upon the Paralogisms are thus again in order. The teaching of the sections on the Antinomies, no less than that of those on the Paralogisms, is incomplete, and if taken by itself is bound to mislead. The Ideas of an unconditioned self and of an unconditioned ground of nature have thus far been taken as at least conceptually possible, and as signifying what may perhaps be real existences. These Ideas are in certain of the remaining sections of the Dialectic called in question. They are there declared to be without inherent meaning. They are useful fictions--heuristische Fiktionen--and in their psychological nature are simply schemata of regulative principles. Their theoretical significance consists merely in their regulative and limitative functions. They must not be regarded, even hypothetically, as representing real existences. In the practical (i.e. ethical) sphere they do indeed acquire a very different standing. But with that the Critique of Pure Reason is not directly concerned. The reader may therefore be warned not to omit the chapter on the Ideal of Pure Reason, on the supposition that it embodies only a criticism of the Cartesian and teleological proofs of God’s existence. It is an integral part of Critical teaching, and carries Kant’s entire argument forward to its final conclusions. Only in view of the new and deeper considerations, which it brings to light, can his treatment even of the Antinomies be properly understood. Its main opening section (Section II.) is, indeed, among the most scholastically rationalistic in the entire Critique; but in the later sections it unfolds, with a boldness and consistency to which we find no parallel in the treatment of the Paralogisms and of the Antinomies, the full consequences of the more sceptical of Kant’s alternating standpoints. It disintegrates the concepts of the unconditioned, which have hitherto been employed without analysis and without question; and upon their elimination from among the legitimate instruments of Reason, the situation undergoes entire transformation, the two points of view appearing for the first time in the full extent of their divergence and conflict. For Kant’s Idealist view of Reason and of its Ideas still continues to find occasional statement, showing that he has not been able decisively to commit himself to this more sceptical interpretation of the function of Reason; that he is conscious that the Idealist view alone gives adequate expression to certain fundamental considerations which have to be reckoned with; and that unless the two views can in some manner be reconciled with one another, a really definitive and satisfactory solution of the problem has not been reached. When, therefore, we speak of Kant’s final conclusions, we must be taken as referring to the twofold tendencies, sceptical and Idealist, which to the very last persist in competition with one another. The greater adequacy of Kant’s argument in the chapter on the Ideal of Pure Reason and in the important Appendix attached to the Dialectic consists in its forcible and considered exposition of both attitudes. Most of the sections on the Antinomies must, as we have seen, be dated as among the earliest parts of the Critique. Their teaching is correspondingly immature. The chapter on the Ideal and the Appendix, on the other hand, were among the latest to be written, and contain, together with the central portions of the Analytic, our most authoritative exposition of Kant’s Critical principles.

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III. THE IDEAL OF PURE REASON

SECTIONS I and II

THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAL[1601]

The statements of the first section cannot profitably be commented upon at this stage; they are of a merely general character.[1602] I pass at once to Section II., which, as above stated, is quite the most archaic piece of rationalistic argument in the entire Critique. It is not merely Leibnizian, but Wolffian in character. For Kant the Wolffian logic had an old-time flavour and familiarity that rendered it by no means distasteful; and he is here, as it were, recalling, not altogether without sympathy, the lessons of his student years. They enable him to render definite, by way of contrast, the outcome of his own Critical teaching.

As Kant here restates the Wolffian notion of the Ens realissimum in such fashion as is required to make it conform to his deduction of the theological Idea from the disjunctive syllogism, a preliminary statement of the more orthodox formulation will help to set Wolff’s doctrine in a clearer light. In so doing, I shall follow Baumgarten, whose Metaphysica Kant used as a class text-book. Briefly summarised Baumgarten’s statement is as follows.[1603] The Ens perfectissimum is that Being which possesses as many predicates, i.e. perfections, as can possibly exist together in a single thing, and in which every one of its perfections is as great as is anywhere possible. This most perfect Being must be a real Being, and its reality must be the greatest possible. It is that in which the most and the greatest realities are. But all realities are affirmative determinations, and no denial is a reality. Accordingly no reality can contradict another reality, and all realities can exist together in the same thing. The Ens perfectissimum, in possessing all the realities that can exist together, must therefore possess all realities without exception, and every one of them in the highest degree. The notion of an individual existence that is at once perfectissimum and also realissimum is thus determinable by pure Reason from its internal resources. It is the ground and condition of all other existences; all of them arise through limitation of its purely positive nature.

Kant seeks to justify his metaphysical deduction of the Ideal from the disjunctive syllogism, by recasting the above argument in the following manner. Since everything which exists is completely determined, it is subject to the principle of complete determination, according to which one of each of the possible pairs of contradictory predicates must be applicable to it. To be completely determined the thing must be compared with the sum total of all possible predicates. Although this idea of the sum total of all possible predicates, through reference to which alone any concept can be completely determined, seems itself indeterminate, we find nevertheless on closer examination that it individualises itself a priori, transforming itself into the concept of an individual existence that is completely determined by the mere Idea, and which may therefore be called an Ideal of pure Reason. That is proved as follows. No one can definitely think a negation unless he founds it on the opposite affirmation. A man completely blind cannot frame the smallest conception of darkness, because he has none of light. All negations are therefore derivative; it is the realities which contain the material by which a complete determination of anything becomes possible. The source, from which all possible predicates may be derived, can be nothing but the sum total of reality. And this concept of the omnitudo realitatis is the Idea of a Being that is single and individual. As all finite beings derive the material of their possibility from it, they presuppose it, and cannot, therefore, constitute it. They are imperfect copies (ectypa), of which it is the sole Ideal. The Idea is also individual. Out of each possible pair of contradictory predicates, that one which expresses reality belongs to it. By these infinitely numerous positive predicates it is determined to absolute concreteness; and as it therefore possesses all that has reality, not only in nature but in man, it must be conceived as a personal and intelligent Primordial Being. The logical Ideal, thus determining itself completely by its own concept, appears not only as ideal but also as real, not only as logical but also as divine.

Kant so far anticipates his criticism of the ontological argument as to give, in the remaining paragraphs of this second section, a preliminary criticism of this procedure. For the purpose for which the Ideal is postulated, namely, the determination of all finite and therefore limited existences, Reason does not require to presuppose an existence corresponding to it. Its mere Idea will suffice.

“All manifoldness of things is only a correspondingly varied mode of limiting the concept of the highest reality which forms their common substratum, just as all figures are only possible as so many different modes of limiting infinite space.”[1604]

This relation is not, however, that of a real existence to other things but of an Idea to concepts. The Idea is a mere fiction, necessary for comprehending the limited, not a reality that can be asserted, even hypothetically,[1605] as given along with the limited. None the less, owing to a natural transcendental illusion, the mind inevitably tends to hypostatise it, and so generates the object of rational theology.

=Comment.=--The explanation of this illusion, which Kant proceeds to give in the two concluding paragraphs, is peculiarly confusing. Though the concept of an all-comprehensive reality may, he argues, be required for the definition of sensible objects, such a concept must not for that reason be taken as representing a real existence. The teaching of the section on Amphiboly is here entirely ignored; and the reader is bewildered by the assumption, which Kant apparently makes, that something analogous to the Leibnizian Ideal is a prerequisite of possible experience.

These last remarks indicate the kind of criticism to which the argument of this section lays itself open. In expounding the teaching of the Leibnizian science of rational theology, Kant strives to represent its Ideal as being an inevitable Idea of human Reason; and in order to make this argument at all convincing he is constrained to treat as valid the presupposed ontology, though that has already been shown in the discussion of Amphiboly to be altogether untenable.[1606] Limitation is not merely negative; genuine realities may negate one another. Though the objects of sense presuppose the entire system to which they belong, the form of this presupposition is in no respect analogous to that which Wolff would represent as holding between finite existences and the Ens realissimum. The passage in the Analytic[1607] in which Kant directly controverts the above teaching is as follows:

“The principle, that realities (as pure assertions) never logically contradict each other ... has not the least meaning either in regard to nature or in regard to any thing-in-itself.... Although Herr von Leibniz did not, indeed, announce this proposition with all the pomp of a new principle, he yet made use of it for new assertions, and his followers expressly incorporated it in their Leibnizian-Wolffian system. According to this principle all evils, for instance, are merely consequences of the limitations of created beings, i.e. negations, because negations alone conflict with reality.... Similarly his disciples consider it not only possible, but even natural, to combine all reality, without fear of any conflict, in one being, because the only conflict which they recognise is that of contradiction, whereby the concept of a thing is itself removed. They do not admit the conflict of reciprocal injury in which each of two real grounds destroys the effect of the other--a process which we can represent to ourselves only in terms of conditions presented to us in sensibility.”

Thus the Ideal which Kant here declares to be a necessary Idea of Reason is denounced in the Analytic as based on false principles peculiar to the Leibnizian philosophy, and as “without the least meaning in regard either to nature or to any thing in itself.” The teaching of the Analytic will no more combine with this scholastic rationalism than oil with water. The reader may safely absolve himself from the thankless task of attempting to render Kant’s argumentation in these paragraphs consistent with itself. Fortunately, in the next section, Kant returns to the standpoint proper to the doctrine he is expounding, and lays bare, with remarkable subtlety and in a very convincing manner, the concealed dialectic by which the conclusions of this metaphysical science are really determined.[1608]

SECTION III

THE SPECULATIVE ARGUMENTS IN PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF A SUPREME BEING[1609]

=Statement.=--Though the Ideal is not arbitrary, but is presupposed in every attempt to define completely a finite concept, Reason would feel hesitation in thus transforming what is merely a logical concept into a Divine Existence, were it not that it is impelled from another direction to derive reality from such a source. All existences known in experience are contingent, and so lead us (owing to the constitution of our Reason) to assume an absolutely necessary Being as their ground and cause. Now when we examine our various concepts, to ascertain which will cover this notion of necessary existence, we find that there is one that possesses outstanding claims, namely, that Idea which contains a therefore for every wherefore, which is in no respect defective, and which does not permit us to postulate any condition. The concepts of the Ideal and of the necessary alone represent the unconditioned; and as they agree in this fundamental respect, they must, we therefore argue, be identical. And to this conclusion we are the more inclined, in that, by thus idealising reality, we are at the same time enabled to realise our Ideal.

This line of argument, which starts from the contingent, is as little valid as that which proceeds directly from the Ideal. But since these arguments express certain tendencies inherent in the human mind, they have a vitality which survives any merely forensic refutation. Though the conclusions to which they lead are false, they are none the less inevitably drawn. Our acceptance of them is due to a transcendental illusion which may be detected as such, but which, like the ingrained illusions of sense-experience, must none the less persist.

The opening paragraph of Section V[1610] is the natural completion of the above analysis. The ontological argument, in starting from the concept of the Ens realissimum, inverts the natural procedure. It is “a merely scholastic innovation,” and would never have been attempted save for the need of finding some necessary Being, to which we may ascend from contingent existence. It maintains that this necessary Being must be unconditioned and a priori certain, and accordingly looks for a concept capable of fulfilling this requirement. Such a concept is supposed to exist in the Idea of an Ens realissimum, and this Idea is therefore used to gain more definite knowledge of that which has been previously and independently recognised, namely, the necessary Being,

“This natural procedure of Reason was concealed from view, and instead of ending with this concept, the attempt was made to begin with it, and so to deduce from it that necessity of existence which it was only fitted to complete. Thus arose the unfortunate ontological proof, which yields satisfaction neither to the natural and healthy understanding nor to the more academic demands of strict proof.”[1611]

To return to Section III.: Kant breaks the continuity of his argument, and anticipates his discussion of the cosmological proof, by stopping to point out the illegitimacy of the assumption which underlies the first step in the above argument, namely, that a limited being cannot be absolutely necessary. Though the concept of a limited being does not contain the unconditioned, that does not prove that its existence is conditioned. Indeed each and every limited being may, for all their concepts show to the contrary, be unconditionally necessary.[1612] The above argument is consequently inconclusive, and cannot be relied on to give us any concept whatever of the qualities of a necessary Being. But this is a merely logical defect, and, as already noted, it is not really upon logical cogency that the persuasive force of the argument depends.

In conclusion Kant points out that there are only three possible kinds of speculative (i.e. theoretical) proofs of the existence of God: (1) from definite experience and the specific nature of the world of sense as revealed in experience; (2) from indefinite experience, i.e. from the fact that any existence at all is empirically given; (3) the non-empirical a priori proof from mere concepts. The first is the physico-theological or teleological argument, the second is the cosmological, and the third is the ontological. Kant finds it advisable to reverse the order of the proofs, and to begin by consideration of the ontological argument. This would seem to indicate that the ‘scholastic innovation’ to which he traces the origin of the ontological proof has more justification than his remarks appear to allow.

SECTION IV

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF AN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF[1613]

=Statement.=--Hitherto Kant has employed the concept of an absolutely necessary Being without question. He now recognises that the problem, from which we ought to start, is not whether the existence of an absolutely necessary Being can be demonstrated, but whether, and how, such a Being can even be conceived. And upon analysis he discovers that the assumed notion of an absolutely necessary, i.e. unconditioned Being is entirely lacking in intelligible content. For in eliminating all conditioning causes--through which alone the understanding can conceive necessity of existence--we also remove this particular kind of necessity. A verbal definition may, indeed, be given of the Idea, as when we say that it represents something the non-existence of which is impossible. But this yields no insight into the reasons which make its non-existence inconceivable, and such insight is required if anything at all is to be thought in the Idea.

“The expedient of removing all those conditions which the understanding indispensably requires in order to regard something as necessary, simply through the introduction of the word unconditioned, is very far from sufficing to show whether I am still thinking anything, or not rather perhaps nothing at all, in the concept of the unconditionally necessary.”[1614]

The untenableness of the concept has been in large part concealed through a confusion between logical and ontological necessity, that is, between necessity of judgment and necessity of existence. The fact that every proposition of geometry must be regarded as absolutely necessary was supposed to justify this identification. It was not observed that logical necessity refers only to judgments, not to things and their relations, and that the absolute necessity of the judgment holds only upon the assumption that the conditioned necessity of the thing referred to has previously been granted. If there be any such thing as a triangle, the assertion that it has three angles will follow with absolute necessity; but the existence of a triangle or even of space in general is contingent. In other words, the asserted necessity is only a form of logical sequence, not the unconditioned necessity of existence which is supposed to be disclosed in the Idea of Reason. All judgments, so far as they refer to existence, as distinct from mere possibility, are hypothetical, and serve to define a reality that is only contingently given. In adopting this position, Kant is in entire agreement with Hume. The contradictory of a matter of fact is always thinkable. There has, Kant claims, been no more fruitful source of illusion throughout the whole history of philosophy than the belief in an absolute necessity that is purely logical.[1615] In the ontological argument we have the most striking instance of such rationalistic exaggeration of the powers of thought.

=Comment.=--Had this criticism of the Idea of unconditioned necessity been introduced at an earlier stage in Kant’s argument, much confusion would have been avoided. It involves the thorough revisal of his criticism of the third and fourth antinomies, as well as of the whole account hitherto given of the function of Reason and of its metaphysical dialectic. The principle, that if the conditioned be given, the whole series of conditions up to the unconditioned is likewise given, must no longer be accepted as a basis for argument. Indeed the very terms in which Reason has so far been defined, as the faculty of the unconditioned, become subject to question. In that definition the term unconditioned has tacitly been taken as equivalent to the unconditionally necessary, and on elimination of the element of necessity, it will reduce merely to the concept of totality, which is a pure form of the understanding. Those parts of the Dialectic, which embody the view that Reason is simply the understanding transcendently employed, will thus be confirmed; the alternative view of Reason as a separate faculty will have to be eliminated. But these are questions which Kant himself proceeds to raise and discuss.[1616] Meantime he applies the above results in criticism of the ontological argument.

=Statement.=--In an identical judgment it is contradictory to reject the predicate while retaining the subject. But there is no contradiction if we reject subject and predicate alike, for nothing is then left that can be contradicted. If we assume that there is a triangle, we are bound to recognise that it has three angles, but there is no contradiction in rejecting the triangle together with its three angles. The same holds true of an absolutely necessary Being. ‘God is omnipotent’ is an identical and therefore necessary judgment. But if we say, ‘There is no God,’ neither the omnipotence nor any other attribute remains; and there is therefore not the least contradiction in saying that God does not exist. The only way of evading this conclusion is to argue that there are subjects which cannot be removed out of existence. That, however, would only be another way of asserting that there exist absolutely necessary subjects, and that is the very assertion which is now in question, and which the ontological argument undertakes to prove. Our sole test of what cannot be removed is the contradiction which would thereby result; and the only possible instance which can be cited is the concept of the Ens realissimum. It remains, therefore, to establish the above criticism for this specific case.

At the start Kant points out that absence of internal contradiction, even if granted, proves only that the Ens realissimum is a logically possible concept (as distinguished from the nihil negativum[1617]); it does not suffice to establish the possibility of the object of the concept. But for the sake of argument Kant allows this initial assumption to pass. The argument to be disproved is that as reality comprehends existence, existence is contained in the concept of Ens realissimum, and cannot therefore be denied of it without removing its internal possibility. The really fundamental assumption of this argument is that existence is capable of being included in the concept of a possible being. If that were so, the assertion of its existence would be an analytic proposition, and the proof could not be challenged. (The assumption is partly concealed by alternation of the terms reality and existence: in their actual employment they are completely synonymous.) As the above assumption thus decides the entire issue, Kant sets himself to establish, in direct opposition to it, the thesis, that every proposition which predicates existence is synthetic, and that in consequence its denial can never involve a logical contradiction. Existence can never form part of the content of a conception, and therefore must not be regarded as a possible predicate. What logically corresponds to it in a judgment is a purely formal factor, namely, the copula. The proposition, ‘God is omnipotent,’ contains two concepts, each of which has its object--God and omnipotence. The word ‘is’ adds no new predicate, but only serves to posit the predicate in its relation to the subject. Similarly, when we take the subject together with all its predicates (including that of omnipotence), and say, ‘God is’ or ‘there is a God,’ we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all its predicates as being an object that stands in relation to our concept. In order that the proposition be true, the content of the object and of the concept must be one and the same. If the object contained more than the concept, the concept would not express the object, and the proposition would assert a relation that does not hold. Or to state the same point in another way, the real must not contain more content than the possible. Otherwise it would not be the possible, but something different from the possible, which would then be taken as existing. A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers. Though my financial position is very differently affected by a hundred real thalers than by the thought of them only, a conceived hundred thalers are not in the least increased through acquiring existence outside my concept.

Kant presents his argument in still another form. If we think in a thing every kind of reality except one, the missing reality is not supplied by my saying that this defective thing exists. On the contrary, it exists with the same defect with which I have thought it. When, therefore, I think a Being as the highest reality, without any defect, the question still remains whether it exists or not. For though, in my concept, nothing may be lacking of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is still lacking in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, knowledge of its existence; and such knowledge can never be obtained save in an a posteriori manner. That is owing to the limitations imposed by the conditions of our sense-experience. We never confound the existence of a sensible object with its mere concept. The concept represents something that may or may not exist: to determine existence we must refer to actual experience. As Kant has already stated, the actual is always for us the accidental, and its assertion is therefore synthetic. A possible idea and the idea of a possible thing are quite distinct.[1618] A thing is known to be possible only when presented in some concrete experience, or when, though not actually experienced, it has been proved to be bound up, according to empirical laws, with given perceptions. It is not, therefore, surprising that if we try, as is done in the ontological argument, to think existence through the pure category, we cannot mention a single mark distinguishing it from a merely logical possibility. The concept of a Supreme Being is, in many respects, a valuable Idea, but just because it is an Idea of pure Reason, i.e. a mere Idea, we can no more extend our knowledge of real existence by means of it, than a merchant can better his position by adding a few noughts to his cash account.

There are many points of connection between this section and the first edition Introduction; and in view of these points of contact Adickes has suggested[1619] that the considerations which arose in the examination of the ontological argument may have been what brought Kant to realise that the various problems of the Critique can all be traced to the central problem of a priori synthesis.

SECTION V

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF A COSMOLOGICAL PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD[1620]

=Statement.=--Kant, as already noted, views the ontological proof as ‘a mere innovation of scholastic wisdom’ which restates, in a quite unnatural form, a line of thought much more adequately expressed in the cosmological proof. To discover the natural dialectic of Reason we must therefore look to this latter form of argument. It is composed of two distinct stages. In the first stage it makes no use of specific experience: if anything is given us as existing, e.g. the self, there must exist an absolutely necessary Being as its cause. Then, in the second stage, it is argued that as such a Being must be altogether outside experience, Reason must leave experience entirely aside, and discover from among pure concepts what properties an absolutely necessary Being ought to possess, i.e. which among all possible things contains in itself the conditions of absolute necessity. The requisite enlightenment is believed by Reason to be derivable only from the concept of an Ens realissimum, and Reason therefore at once concludes that this concept must represent the absolutely necessary Being.

Now in that final conclusion the truth of the ontological argument is assumed. If the concept of a Being of the highest reality is so completely adequate to the concept of necessary existence that they can be regarded as identical, the latter must be capable of being derived from the former, and that is all that is maintained in the ontological proof. To make this point clearer, Kant states it in scholastic form. If the proposition be true, that every absolutely necessary Being is at the same time the most real Being (and this is the nervus probandi of the cosmological proof in so far as it is also theological), it must, like all affirmative propositions, be capable of conversion, at least per accidens. This gives us the proposition that some Entia realissima are at the same time absolutely necessary Beings. One Ens realissimum, however, does not differ from another, and what applies to one applies to all. In this case, therefore, we must employ simple conversion, and say that every Ens realissimum is a necessary Being. Thus the cosmological proof is not only as illusory as the ontological, but also less honest. While pretending to lead us by a new road to a sound conclusion, it brings us back, after a short circuit, into the old path. If the ontological argument is correct, the cosmological is superfluous; and if the ontological is false, the cosmological cannot possibly be true.

But the first stage of the cosmological argument, that by which it is distinguished from the ontological, is itself fallacious. A whole nest of dialectical assumptions lies hidden in its apparently simple and legitimate inference from the contingent to the necessary. To advance from the contingent to the necessary, from the relative to the absolute, from the given to the transcendent, is just as illegitimate as the opposite process of passing from Idea to existence. The necessity of thought, which is in both cases the sole ground of the inference, is found on examination to be of merely subjective character. No less than three false assumptions are involved in this inference. In the first place, the principle that everything must have a cause, which can be proved to be valid only within the world of sense, is here applied to the sensible world as a whole; and is therefore employed in the wider form which coincides with the fundamental principle of the higher faculty of Reason. We assume, that if the conditioned be given, the totality of its conditions up to the unconditioned is given likewise. No such principle can be granted. As it is synthetic, it could be established only as a condition of the possibility of experience. But no such proof is offered: the principle is based upon a purely intellectual concept. Secondly, the inference to a first cause rests on the kindred assumption that an infinite series of empirical causes is impossible. That conclusion can never be drawn, even within the realm of experience. How, then, can we rely upon it in advancing beyond experience? Certainly, no one can prove that the empirical series is infinite, but just as little can we establish the opposite. In discussing the third and fourth antinomies Kant has shown that the existence of a first cause or of an absolutely necessary Being, though possible (or rather, possibly possible), is never demonstrable. Thirdly--as has been shown in A 592-3 = B 620-1--in inferring to an unconditioned cause, it is blindly assumed that the removal of all conditions does not at the same time remove the very concept of necessity. Our only notion of necessity is derived from experience, and therefore depends on those finite conditions which the argument would deny to us. The concept of unconditioned necessity is entirely null and void.

The fourth defect, which Kant enumerates, refers to the second stage of the cosmological argument, and has already been considered. He ought also to have mentioned a still further assumption underlying its first stage, namely, that a concept which represents a limited being, as, for instance, that of matter, cannot represent necessary existence. This also is an assumption which it cannot justify. This objection Kant has himself stated in A 586 = B 614 and A 588 = B 616.[1621]

=Comment.=--We are apt to overlook the wider sweep which Kant’s criticism takes in this section, owing to his omission to notify the reader that he is here calling in question a principle which he has hitherto been taking for granted, namely, the principle in terms of which he has in the opening sections of the Dialectic defined the faculty of Reason, that if the conditioned be given the totality of conditions up to the unconditioned is given likewise. The first step in his rejection of this principle occurs as merely incidental to his criticism of the ontological argument. It is there shown that the concept of the unconditionally necessary is without meaning. Now, in this present section, he calls in question the principle itself. It must be rejected not only, as stated in the third of the above objections, because the concept of the unconditioned, which tacitly implies the factor of absolute necessity, is without real significance, but also for two further reasons--those above cited in the first and second objections. How very differently the problems of the Dialectic appear, and how very differently the Ideas of Reason have to be regarded, when this principle, and also the concept of the unconditioned of which it is the application, are thus called in question, will be shown in the sequel.

DISCOVERY AND EXPLANATION OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL ILLUSION IN ALL TRANSCENDENTAL PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF A NECESSARY BEING[1622]

=Statement.=--We do not properly fulfil the task prescribed by Critical teaching in merely disproving the cosmological argument. We must also explain its hold upon the mind. If it is, as Kant insists, more natural to the mind than the ontological, and yet, as we have just seen, is more fallacious; if it has not been invented by philosophers, but is the instinctive reasoning of the natural man, it must rest, like all dialectical illusion, upon a misunderstanding of the legitimate demands of pure Reason. Reason demands the unconditioned, and yet cannot think it.

“Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human Reason the veritable abyss.... We can neither help thinking, nor can we bear the thought, that a Being--even if it be the one which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all Beings--should, as it were, say to itself: ‘I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is through my will; but whence am I?’ All support here fails us; and supreme perfection, no less than the least perfection, is unsubstantial and baseless for the merely speculative Reason....”[1623]

We are obliged to think something as necessary for all existence, and yet at the same time are unable to think anything as in itself necessary--God as little as anything else.

The explanation[1624] of this strange fact must be that which follows as a corollary from the limitation of our knowledge to sense-experience, namely, that our concepts of necessity and contingency do not concern things in themselves, and cannot therefore be applied to them in accordance with either of the two possible alternatives. Each alternative must express a subjective principle of Reason; and the two together (that something exists by necessity, and that everything is only contingent) must form complementary rules for the guidance of the understanding. These rules will then be purely heuristic and regulative, relating only to the formal interests of Reason, and may well stand side by side. For the one tells us that we ought to philosophise as if there were a necessary first ground for everything that exists, i.e. that we ought to be always dissatisfied with relativity and contingency, and to seek always for what is unconditionally necessary. The other warns us against regarding any single determination in things (such, for instance, as impenetrability or gravity) as absolutely necessary, and so bids us keep the way always open for further derivation. In other words, Reason guides the understanding by a twofold command. The understanding must derive phenomena and their existence from other phenomena, just as if there were no necessary Being at all; while at the same time it must always strive towards the completeness of that derivation, just as if such a necessary Being were presupposed. It is owing to a transcendental illusion or subreption that we view the latter principle as constitutive, and so think its unity as hypostatised in the form of an Ens realissimum. The falsity of this substitution becomes evident as soon as we consider that unconditioned necessity, as a thing in itself, cannot even be conceived, and that the “Idea” of it cannot, therefore, be ascribed to Reason save as a merely formal principle, regulative of the understanding in its interpretation of given experience.[1625]

=Comment.=--The reader may observe that, when Kant is developing this sceptical view of the Ideal of Reason, the explanation of dialectical illusion in terms of transcendental idealism falls into the background. The illusion is no longer traced to a confusion between appearances and things in themselves, but to the false interpretation of regulative principles as being constitutive. When it is the cosmological problem with which we are dealing, the two illusions do, indeed, coincide. If we view the objects of sense-experience as things in themselves, we are bound to regard the Ideal completion of the natural sciences as an adequate representation of ultimate reality. But in Rational Theology, which is professedly directed towards the definition of a Being distinct from nature and conditioning all finite existence, it is not failure to distinguish between appearance and things in themselves, but the mistaking of a merely formal Ideal for a representation of reality, that is alone responsible for the conclusions drawn.

In A 617-18 = B 645-6 Kant makes statements which conflict with the teaching of A 586 = B 614 and A 588 = B 616. In the latter passages he has argued that the concept of a limited being may not without specific proof be taken as contradictory of absolute necessity. He now categorically declares that the philosophers of antiquity are in error in regarding matter as primitive and necessary; and the reason which he gives is that the regulative principle of Reason forbids us to view extension and impenetrability, “which together constitute the concept of matter,” as ultimate principles of experience. But obviously Kant is here going further than his regulative principle will justify. It demands only that we should always look for still higher principles of unity, and so keep open the way for possible further derivation; it does not enable us to assert that such will actually be found to exist. Notwithstanding the Ideal demands of the regulative principle, matter may be primordial and necessary, and its properties of extension and impenetrability may not be derivable from anything more ultimate.

In this connection we may raise the more general question, how far the Ideal demand for necessity and unity in knowledge and existence can be concretely pictured. Kant gives a varying answer. Sometimes--when he is emphasising the limitation of our theoretical knowledge to sense-experience--he reduces the speculative Idea of Divine Existence to a purely abstract maxim for the regulation of natural science. When the Ideal occupies the mind on its own account, and so attracts our attention away from our sense-knowledge, it is an unreality, and perverts the understanding; it yields genuine light and leading only as a quite general maxim within the sphere of natural science. From this point of view necessary Being, even as an Ideal, can by no means be identified with a personal God. It signifies only the highest possible system and unity of the endlessly varied natural phenomena in space and time, and can be approximately realised in the most various ways. Its significance is entirely cosmological. It is an Ideal of positive science, and signifies only systematic unity in the object known. In being transformed from a scientific ideal into a subject of theological enquiry, it has inevitably given rise to dialectical illusion. At other times,--when he is concerned to defend the concept of Divine Existence as at least possible, and so to prepare the way for its postulation as implied in the moral law, or when he is seeking, as in the Critique of Judgment, to render comprehensible the complete adaptation of phenomenal nature in its material aspect to the needs of our understanding--Kant insists that we are ultimately compelled, by the nature of our faculties, to conceive the Ideal of Reason as a personal God, as an Intelligence working according to purposes. Only by such a personal God, he maintains, can the demands of Reason be genuinely satisfied.

These two interpretations of the Ideal of Reason are in conflict with one another; and so far as the Critique of Pure Reason is concerned, a very insufficient attempt is made to justify the frequent assertion that the Idea of God is the Ideal of Reason, and not merely one possible, and highly problematic, interpretation of it. If the Idea of God is a necessary Idea, it cannot be adequately expressed through any merely regulative maxim. It demands not only system in knowledge but also perfection in the nature of the known. It is not a merely logical Ideal such as might be satisfied by any rational system, but an Ideal which concerns matter as well as form, man as well as nature, our moral needs as well as our intellectual demands. If Kant is to maintain that the only genuine function of theoretical Reason is to guide the understanding in its scientific application, he is debarred from asserting that a concrete interpretation of its regulative principles is unavoidable. And he is also precluded by his own limitation of all knowledge to sense-experience from seeking to define by any positive predicate the transcendent nature of the thing in itself.

Such justification as Kant can offer in support of his assertion that the Idea of God, of Intelligent Perfection, is an indispensable Idea of human Reason, is chiefly based upon the teleological aspect of nature which is dealt with in the physico-theological proof. Mechanical science implies only the cosmological Idea: teleological unity presupposes the theological Ideal. Further enquiry, then, into the necessity of the Idea of God as a regulative principle, and its dangers as a source of dialectical illusion, we must defer until we have examined the one remaining argument.[1626]

SECTION VI

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE PHYSICO-THEOLOGICAL PROOF[1627]

=Statement.=--The teleological proof starts from our definite knowledge of the order and constitution of the sensible world. The actual world presents such immeasurable order, variety, fitness, and beauty, that we are led to believe that here at least is sufficient proof of the existence of God. Kant’s attitude towards this argument is at once extremely critical and extremely sympathetic. Though he represents it as the oldest, the clearest, and the most convincing, he is none the less prepared to show that it contains every one of the fallacies involved in the other two proofs, as well as some false assumptions peculiar to itself. It possesses overpowering persuasive force, not because of any inherent logical cogency, but because it so successfully appeals to feeling as to silence the intellect. It would, Kant declares, be not only comfortless, but utterly vain to attempt to diminish its influence.

”[The mind is] aroused from the indecision of all melancholy reflection, as from a dream, by one glance at the wonders of nature and the majesty of the universe....”[1628]

Meantime, however, we are concerned with its merely logical force. We have to decide whether, as theoretical proof, it can claim assent on its own merits, requiring no favour, and no help from any other quarter. On the basis of empirical facts the argument makes the following assertions. (1) There are everywhere in the world clear indications of adaptation to a definite end. (2) As this adaptation cannot be due to the working of blind, mechanical laws, and accordingly cannot be explained as originating in things themselves, it must have been imposed upon them from without; and there must therefore exist, apart from the sensible world, an intelligent Being who has arranged it according to ideas antecedently formed. (3) As there is unity in the reciprocal relations of the parts of the universe as portions of a single edifice, and as the universe is infinite in extent and inexhaustible in variety, its intelligent cause must be single, all-powerful, all-wise, i.e. God.

Now, even granting for the sake of argument the admissibility of these assertions, they enable us to infer only an intelligent author of the purposive form of nature, not of its matter, only an architect who is very much hampered by the inadaptability of the material in which he has to work, not a Creator to whose will everything is due. To prove the contingency of matter itself, we should have to establish the truth of the cosmological proof.

But the assumptions implied even in the demonstration that God exists as a formative power, are by no means beyond dispute. Why may not nature be regarded as giving form to itself by its blindly working forces? Can it really be proved that nature is a work of art that demands an artificer as certainly as does a house, or a ship, or a clock? Kant’s argument is at this point extremely brief, and I shall so far digress from the statement of it, which he here gives, as to supplement it from his other writings. Even so-called dead matter is not merely inert. By its inherent powers of gravity and chemical attraction it spontaneously gives rise to the most wonderful forms. When Clarke and Voltaire, in their first enthusiasm over Newton’s great discovery, asserted that the planetary system must have been divinely created, each planet being launched in the tangent of its orbit by the finger of God, just as a wheel must be fixed into its place by the hand of the mechanician, they under-estimated the organising power of blind inanimate nature. As Kant argued in his early treatise,[1629] the planetary system can quite well have arisen, and, as it would seem, actually has come into existence, through the action of blindly working laws. The mechanical principles which account for its present maintenance will also account for its origin and development. But it is when we turn to animate nature, which is the chief source from which arguments for design are derived, that the insufficiency of the teleological argument becomes most manifest. As Kant points out in the Critique of Judgment, the differentia distinguishing the living from the lifeless, is not so much that it is organised as that it is self-organising. When, therefore, we treat an organism as an analogon of art we completely misrepresent its essential nature.[1630] In regarding it as put together by an external agent we are ignoring its internal self-developing power. As Hume had previously maintained in his Dialogues on Natural Religion,[1631] the facts of the organic world not only agree with the facts of the inorganic world in not supporting the argument of the teleological proof, but are in direct conflict with it.

But to return to Kant’s immediate statement of the argument. Setting the above objection aside, and granting for the present that nature may be regarded as the outcome of an external artificer, we can argue only to a cause adequate to its production, i.e. to an extraordinarily wise and wonderfully powerful Being. Even if we ignore the existence of evil and defect in nature, the step from great power to omnipotence, and from great wisdom to omniscience, is one that can never be justified on empirical grounds.[1632] Since the Ideas of Reason, and above all the completely determined, individual Ideal of Reason, transcend experience, experience can never justify us in inferring their reality. The teleological argument can, indeed, only lead us to the point of admiring the greatness, wisdom, and power of the author of the world. In proceeding further it abandons experience altogether, and reasons, not from particular kinds and excellencies of natural design, but from the contingency of all such adaptation to the existence of a necessary Being, exactly in the manner of the cosmological argument. And it ends by assuming, in agreement with the ontological proof, that the only possible necessary Being is the Ideal of Reason. Thus after committing a number of fallacies on its own account, the teleological argument itself endorses all those that are involved in the more a priori proofs. The teleological argument rests on the cosmological, and the cosmological on the ontological, which therefore would be the only proof possible, were the proof of a completely transcendent proposition ever possible at all. The strange fact that the convincing force of the arguments thus varies inversely with their validity shows, Kant maintains, that we are correct in concluding that they do not really depend upon their logical cogency, and merely express, in abstract terms, beliefs deep-rooted in the human spirit.

SECTION VII

CRITICISM OF ALL THEOLOGY BASED ON SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES OF REASON[1633]

=A 631-3 = B 659-66.=--On the distinction between “theist” and “deist,” cf. Encyclopædia Britannica, vii. p. 934:

“The later distinction between ‘theist’ and ‘deist,’ which stamped the latter word as excluding the belief in providence or in the immanence of God, was apparently formulated in the end of the eighteenth century by those rationalists who were aggrieved at being identified with the naturalists.”

=A 633-4 = B 661-2.=--Kant here does no more than indicate that by way of practical Reason it may be possible to postulate, though not theoretically to comprehend, a Supreme Being. On the distinction between postulates and hypotheses, cf. A 769 ff. = B 797 ff., and below, p. 543 ff. Cf. also p. 571 ff.

=A 634 = B 662.=--On relative necessity, cf. below, pp. 555, 571 ff.

=A 635-9 = B 663-7= only summarises points already treated.

=A 639-42 = B 667-70.=--Kant concludes by declaring that the Ideal, in addition to its regulative function, possesses two further prerogatives. In the first place, it supplies a standard, in the light of which any knowledge of Divine Existence, acquired from other sources, can be purified and rendered consistent with itself. For it is “an Ideal without a flaw,” the true crown and culmination of the whole of human knowledge.

“If there should be a moral theology ... transcendental theology ... will then prove itself indispensable in determining its concept and in constantly testing Reason which is so often deceived by sensibility, and which is frequently out of harmony with its own Ideas.”[1634]

And secondly, though the Ideal fails to establish itself theoretically, the arguments given in its support suffice to show the quite insufficient foundations upon which all atheistic, deistic, and anthropomorphic philosophies rest.

=Comment.=--These concluding remarks cannot be accepted as representing Kant’s true teaching. The Ideal, by his own showing, is by no means without a flaw. In so far as it involves the concept of unconditioned necessity, it is meaningless; it is purely logical, and therefore contains no indication of real content; it embodies a false view of the nature of negation, and therefore of the relation of realities to one another. In short, it is constituted in accordance with the false, un-Critical principles of Leibnizian metaphysics, and is found on examination to be non-existent even as a purely mental entity. Reduced to its proper terms, it becomes a mere schema regulative of the understanding in the extension of experience, and does not yield even a negative criterion for the testing of our ideals of Divine Existence. The criterion, which Kant really so employs, is not that of an Ens realissimum, but the concept of an Intuitive Understanding, which, as he has indicated in the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena,[1635] is our most adequate Ideal of completed Perfection. This latter is not itself, however, a spontaneously formed concept of natural Reason, and does not justify the assertion that the Idea of God is a necessary Idea of the human mind. In attempting to defend such a thesis, Kant is unduly influenced by the almost universal acceptance of deistic beliefs in the Europe of his time.[1636] His criticism of the Ideal of Reason and of rational theology is much more destructive, and really allows that theology much less value, even as natural dialectic, than he is willing to admit.[1637] Architectonic forbids that the extreme radical consequences of the teaching of the Analytic should be allowed to show in their full force. These shortcomings are, however, in great part remedied in the elaborate Appendix which Kant has attached to the Dialectic.

APPENDIX TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC

THE REGULATIVE EMPLOYMENT OF THE IDEAS OF PURE REASON[1638]

Before we proceed to deal with this Appendix it will be of advantage to consider the section in the Methodology on the Discipline of Pure Reason in regard to Hypotheses.[1639] That section affords a very illuminating introduction to the problems here discussed, and is extremely important for understanding Kant’s view of metaphysical science as yielding either complete certainty or else nothing at all. This is a doctrine which he from time to time suggests, to the considerable bewilderment of the modern reader.[1640] In discussing it he starts from the obvious objection, that though nothing can be known through Reason in its pure a priori employment, metaphysics may yet be possible in an empirical form, as consisting of hypotheses, constructed in conjectural explanation of the facts of experience. Kant replies by defining the conditions under which alone hypotheses can be entertained as such. There must always be something completely certain, and not only invented or merely “opined,” namely, the possibility of the object to which the hypothesis appeals. Once that is proved, it is allowable, on the basis of experience, to form opinions regarding its reality. Then, and only then, can such opinions be entitled hypotheses. Otherwise we are not employing the understanding to explain; we are simply indulging the imagination in its tendency to dream. Now since the categories of the pure understanding do not enable us to invent a priori the concept of a dynamical connection, but only to apprehend it when presented in experience, we cannot by means of these categories invent a single object endowed with a new quality not empirically given; and cannot, therefore, base an hypothesis upon any such conception.

“Thus it is not permissible to invent any new original powers, as, for instance, an understanding capable of intuiting its objects without the aid of senses; or a force of attraction without any contact; or a new kind of substance existing in space and yet not impenetrable. Nor is it legitimate to postulate any other form of communion of substances than that revealed in experience, any presence that is not spatial, any duration that is not temporal. In a word our Reason can employ as conditions of the possibility of things only the conditions of possible experience; it can never, as it were, create concepts of things, independently of those conditions. Such concepts, though not self-contradictory, would be without an object.”[1641]

This does not, however, mean that the concepts of pure Reason can have no valid employment. They are, it is true, Ideas merely, with no object corresponding to them in any experience; but then it is also true that they are not hypotheses, referring to imagined objects, supposed to be possibly real. They are purely problematic. They are heuristic fictions (heuristische Fiktionen), the sole function of which is to serve as principles regulative of the understanding in its systematic employment. Used in any other manner they reduce to the level of merely mental entities (Gedankendinge) whose very possibility is indemonstrable, and which cannot therefore be employed as hypotheses for the explanation of appearances. Given appearances can be accounted for only in terms of laws known to hold among appearances. To explain natural phenomena by a transcendental hypothesis--mental processes by the assumption of the soul as a substantial, simple, spiritual being, or order and design in nature by the assumption of a Divine Author--is never admissible.

“...that would be to explain something, which in terms of known empirical principles we do not understand sufficiently, by something which we do not understand at all.”[1642]

And Kant adds that the wildest hypotheses, if only they are physical, are more tolerable than a hyperphysical one. They at least conform to the conditions under which alone hypothetical explanation as such is allowable. “Outside this field, to form opinions, is merely to play with thoughts....”[1643]

A further condition, required to render an hypothesis acceptable, is its adequacy for determining a priori all the consequences which are actually given. If for that purpose supplementary hypotheses have to be called in, the force of the main assumption is proportionately weakened. Thus we can easily explain natural order and design, if we are allowed to postulate a Divine Author who is absolutely perfect and all-powerful. But that hypothesis lies open to all the objections suggested by defects and evils in nature, and can only be preserved through new hypotheses which modify the main assumption. Similarly the hypothesis of the human soul as an abiding and purely spiritual being, existing in independence of the body, has to be modified to meet the difficulties which arise from the phenomena of growth and decay. But the new hypotheses, then constructed, derive their whole authority from the main hypothesis which they are themselves defending.

Such is Kant’s criticism of metaphysics when its teaching is based on the facts of experience hypothetically interpreted. In regard to transcendent metaphysics, there are, in Kant’s view, only two alternatives.[1644] Either its propositions must be established independently of all experience in purely a priori fashion, and therefore as absolutely certain; or they must consist in hypotheses empirically grounded. The first alternative has in the Analytic and Dialectic been shown to be impossible; the second alternative he rejects for the above reasons.

But this does not close Kant’s treatment of metaphysical hypotheses. He proceeds to develop a doctrine which, in its fearless confidence in the truth of Critical teaching, is the worthy outcome of his abiding belief in the value of a “sceptical method.”[1645] As Reason is by its very nature dialectical, outside opponents are not those from whom we have most to fear. Their objections are really derived from a source which lies in ourselves, and until these have been traced to their origin, and destroyed from the root upwards, we can expect no lasting peace. Our duty, therefore, is to encourage our doubts, until by the very luxuriance of their growth they enable us to discover the hidden roots from which they derive their perennial vitality.

“External tranquillity is a mere illusion. The germ of these objections, which lies in the nature of human Reason, must be rooted out. But how can we uproot it, unless we give it freedom, nay, nourishment, to send out shoots so that it may discover itself to our eyes, and that we may then destroy it together with its root? Therefore think out objections which have never yet occurred to any opponent; lend him, indeed, your weapons, or grant him the most favourable position which he could possibly desire. You have nothing to fear in all this, but much to hope for; you may gain for yourselves a possession which can never again be contested.”[1646]

In this campaign to eradicate doubt by following it out to its furthermost limits, the hypotheses of pure Reason, “leaden weapons though they be, since they are not steeled by any law of experience,” are an indispensable part of our equipment. For though hypotheses are useless for the establishment of metaphysical propositions, they are, Kant teaches, both admirable and valuable for their defence. That is to say, their true metaphysical function is not dogmatic, but polemical. They are weapons of war to which we may legitimately resort for the maintenance of beliefs otherwise established. If, for instance, we have been led to postulate the immaterial, self-subsistent nature of the soul, and are met by the difficulty that experience would seem to prove that both the growth and the decay of our mental powers are due to the body, we can weaken this objection by formulating the hypothesis that the body is not the cause of our thinking, but only a restrictive condition of it, peculiar to our present state, and that, though it furthers our sensuous and animal faculties, it acts as an impediment to our spiritual life. Similarly, to meet the many objections against belief in the eternal existence of a finite being whose birth depends upon contingencies of all kinds, such as the food supply, the whims of government, or even vice, we can adduce the transcendental hypothesis that life has neither beginning in birth nor ending in death, the entire world of sense being but an image due to our present mode of knowledge, an image which like a dream has in itself no objective reality. Such hypotheses are not, indeed, even Ideas of Reason, but simply concepts invented to show that the objections which are raised depend upon the false assumption that the possibilities have been exhausted, and that the mere laws of nature comprehend the whole field of possible existences. These hypotheses at least suffice to reveal the uncertain character of the doubts which assail us in our practical beliefs.

”[Transcendental hypotheses] are nothing but private opinions. Nevertheless, we cannot properly dispense with them as weapons against the misgivings which are apt to occur; they are necessary even to secure our inner tranquillity. We must preserve to them this character, carefully guarding against the assumption of their independent authority or absolute validity, since otherwise they would drown Reason in fictions and delusions.”[1647]

We may now return to A 642-68 = B 670-96. The teaching of this section is extremely self-contradictory, wavering between a subjective and an objective interpretation of the Ideas of Reason. The probable explanation is that Kant is here recasting older material, and leaves standing more of his earlier solutions than is consistent with his final conclusions. We can best approach the discussion by considering Kant’s statements in A 645 = B 673 and in A 650 ff. = B 678 ff. They expound, though unfortunately in the briefest terms, a point of view which Idealism has since adopted as fundamental. Kant himself, very strangely, never develops its consequences at any great length.[1648] The Idea, which Reason follows in the exercise of its sole true function, the systematising of the knowledge supplied by the understanding, is that of a unity in which the thought of the whole precedes the knowledge of its parts, and contains the conditions according to which the place of every part and its relation to the other parts are determined a priori. This Idea specialises itself in various forms, and in all of them directs the understanding to a knowledge that will be that of no mere aggregate but of a genuine system. Such concepts are not derived from nature; we interrogate nature according to them, and consider our knowledge defective so long as it fails to embody them. In A 650 = B 678 Kant further points out that this Idea of Reason does not merely direct the understanding to search for such unity, but also claims for itself objective reality. And he adds,

“...it is difficult to understand how there can be a logical principle by which Reason prescribes the unity of rules, unless we also presuppose a transcendental principle whereby such systematic unity is a priori assumed to be necessarily inherent in the objects.”

For how could we treat diversity in nature as only disguised unity, if we were also free to regard that unity as contrary to the actual nature of the real?

“Reason would then run counter to its own vocation, proposing as its aim an Idea quite inconsistent with the constitution of nature.”[1649]

Nor is our knowledge of the principle merely empirical, deduced from the unity which we find in contingent experience. On the contrary, there is an inherent and necessary law of Reason compelling us, antecedently to all specific experience, to look for such unity.

“...without it we should have no Reason at all, and without Reason no coherent employment of the understanding, and in the absence of this no sufficient criterion of empirical truth. In order, therefore, to secure an empirical criterion we are absolutely compelled to presuppose the systematic unity of nature as objectively valid and necessary.”[1650] “It might be supposed that this is merely an economical contrivance of Reason, seeking to save itself all possible trouble, a hypothetical attempt, which, if it succeeds, will, through the unity thus attained, impart probability to the presumed principle of explanation. But such a selfish purpose can very easily be distinguished from the Idea. For in the latter we presuppose that this unity of Reason is in conformity with nature itself; and that, although we are indeed unable to determine the limits of this unity, Reason does not here beg but command.”[1651]

This last alternative, that Reason is here propounding a tentative hypothesis, in order by trial to discover how far it can be empirically verified--an alternative which Kant in the above passage rejects as unduly subjective, and as consequently failing to recognise the objective claims and a priori authority of the Ideas of Reason,--is yet a view which he himself adopts and indeed develops at considerable length in this same section. This, as already stated, affords evidence of the composite character and varying origins of the material here presented.

The Dissertation of 1770 gives a purely subjectivist interpretation of the regulative principles, among which, from its pre-Critical standpoint, it classes the principle of causality and the principle of the conservation of matter.

”[We adopt principles] which delude the intellect into mistaking them for arguments derived from the object, whereas they are commended to us only by the peculiar nature of the intellect, owing to their convenience for its free and ample employment. They therefore ... rest on subjective grounds ... namely, on the conditions under which it seems easy and expeditious for the intellect to make use of its insight.... These rules of judging, to which we freely submit and to which we adhere as if they were axioms, solely for the reason that were we to depart from them almost no judgment regarding a given object would be permissible to our intellect, I entitle principles of convenience.... [One of these is] the popularly received canon, principia non esse multiplicanda praeter summam necessitatem, to which we yield our adhesion, not because we have insight into causal unity in the world either by reason or by experience, but because we seek it by an impulse of the intellect, which seems to itself to have advanced in the explanation of phenomena only in the degree in which it is granted to it to descend from a single principle to the greatest number of consequences.”[1652]

This, in essentials, is the view which we find developed in A 646-9 = B 674-8. Reason is the faculty of deducing the particular from the general. When the general is admitted only as problematical, as a mere idea, while the particular is certain, we determine the universality of the rule by applying it to the particulars, and then upon confirmation of its validity proceed to draw conclusions regarding cases not actually given. This Kant entitles the hypothetical use of Reason. Reason must never be employed constitutively. It serves only for the introduction, as far as may be found possible, of unity into the particulars of knowledge. It seeks to make the rule approximate to universality.[1653] The unity which it demands

“...is a projected unity, to be regarded not as given in itself, but as a problem only. This unity aids us in discovering a principle for the manifold and special employment of the understanding, drawing its attention to cases which are not given, and thus rendering it more coherent.”[1654]

The unity is merely logical, or rather methodological.[1655] To postulate, in consequence of its serviceableness, real unity in the objects themselves would be to transform it into a transcendental principle of Reason, and to render

“...the systematic unity necessary, not only subjectively and logically, as method, but objectively also.”[1656]

The above paragraphs are intercalated between A 645 = B 673 and A 650-63 = B 678-91, in which, as we have already seen, the directly opposite view is propounded, namely, that such principles are not merely hypothetical, nor merely logical. In all cases they claim reality, and rest upon transcendental principles; they condition the very possibility of experience; and may therefore be asserted to be a priori necessary and to be objectively valid. To quote two additional passages:

“...we can conclude from the universal to the particular, only if universal qualities are ascribed to things as the foundation upon which the particular qualities rest.”[1657] “The foundation of these laws [cf. below, pp. 550-1] is not due to any secret design of making an experiment by putting them forward as merely tentative suggestions.... It is easily seen that they contemplate the parsimony of fundamental causes, the manifoldness of effects, and the consequent affinity of the parts of nature, as being in themselves both rational and natural. Hence these principles carry their recommendation directly in themselves, and not merely as methodological devices.”[1658]

Thus, in direct opposition to the preceding view of Reason’s function as hypothetical, Kant is now prepared to maintain that the maxims of Reason are without meaning and without application save in so far as they can be grounded in a transcendental principle.[1659]

Let us follow Kant’s detailed exposition of this last thesis. The logical maxim, to seek for systematic unity, rests upon the transcendental principle that the apparently infinite variety of nature does not exclude identity of species, that the various species are varieties of a few genera, and these again of still higher genera. This is the scholastic maxim: entia praeter necessitatem non esse multiplicanda. Upon this principle rests the possibility of concepts, and therefore of the understanding itself. It is balanced, however, by a second principle, no less necessary, the transcendental law of specification, namely, that there must be manifoldness and diversity in things, that every genus must specify itself in divergent species, and these again in sub-species. Or as it is expressed in its scholastic form: entium varietates non temere esse minuendas. This principle is equally transcendental. It expresses a condition no less necessary for the possibility of the understanding, and therefore of experience. As the understanding knows all that it knows by concepts only, however far it may carry the division of genera, it can never know by means of pure intuition, but always again by lower concepts. If, therefore, there were no lower concepts, there could be no higher concepts;[1660] the gap existing between individuals and genera could never be bridged; or rather, since neither individuals nor universals could then be apprehended, neither would exist for the mind. As the higher concepts acquire all their content from the lower, they presuppose them for their own existence.

“Every concept may be regarded as a point which, in so far as it represents the standpoint of a spectator, has its own horizon.... This horizon must be capable of containing an infinite number of points, each of which again has its own narrower horizon; that is, every species contains sub-species, according to the principle of specification, and the logical horizon consists exclusively of smaller horizons (sub-species), never of points which possess no extent (individuals).”[1661]

Combining these two principles, that of homogeneity and that of specification, we obtain a third, that of continuity. The logical law of the continuum formarum logicarum presupposes the transcendental law, lex continui in natura. It provides that homogeneity be combined with the greatest possible diversity by prescribing a continuous transition from every species to every other, or in other words by requiring that between any two species or sub-species, however closely related, intermediate species be always regarded as possible. (The paragraph at the end of A 661 = B 689, with its proviso that we cannot make any definite empirical use of this law, is probably of later origin; it connects with the concluding parts of the section.) That this third law is also a priori and transcendental, is shown by the fact that it is not derived from the prior discovery of system in nature, but has itself given rise to the systematised character of our knowledge.[1662]

The psychological, chemical, and astronomical examples which Kant employs to illustrate these laws call for no special comment. They were taken from contemporary science, and in the advance of our knowledge have become more confusing than helpful. The citation in A 646 = B 674 of the concepts of “pure earth, pure water, pure air” as being “concepts of Reason” is especially bewildering. They are, even in the use which Kant himself ascribes to them, simply empirical hypotheses, formulated for the purposes of purely physical explanation; they are in no genuine sense universal, regulative principles.

In passing to A 663-8 = B 691-6 we find still another variation in the substance of Kant’s teaching. He returns, though with a greater maturity of statement, and with a very different and much more satisfactory terminology, to the more sceptical view of A 646-9 = B 674-7.[1663] The interest of the above principles, Kant continues to maintain, lies in their transcendentality. Despite the fact that they are mere Ideas for the guidance of understanding, and can only be approached asymptotically, they are synthetic a priori judgments, and would seem to have an objective, though indeterminate, validity. So far his statements are in line with the preceding paragraphs. But he proceeds to add that this objective validity consists exclusively in their heuristic function. They differ fundamentally from the dynamical, no less than from the mathematical, principles of understanding, in that no schema of sensibility can be assigned to them. In other words, their object can never be exhibited in concreto; it transcends all possible experience. For this reason they are incapable of a transcendental deduction.[1664] They are among the conditions indispensably necessary to the possibility, not of each and every experience, but only of experience as systematised in the interest of Reason. In place of a schema they can possess only what may be called the analogon of a schema, that is, they represent the Idea of a maximum, which the understanding in the subjective interest of Reason--or, otherwise expressed,[1665] in the interest of a certain possible perfection of our knowledge of objects--is called upon to realise as much as possible. Thus they are at once subjective in the source from which they arise, and also indeterminate as to the conditions under which, and the extent to which, they can obtain empirical embodiment. The fact that in this capacity they represent a maximum, does not justify any assertion either as to the degree of unity which experience on detailed investigation will ultimately be found to verify, or as to the noumenal reality by which experience is conditioned.

In A 644-5 = B 672-3 Kant employs certain optical analogies to illustrate the illusion which the Ideas, in the absence of Critical teaching, inevitably generate. When the understanding is regulated by the Idea of a maximum, and seeks to view all the lines of experience as converging upon and pointing to it, it necessarily regards it, focus imaginarius though it be, as actually existing. The illusion, by which objects are seen behind the surface of a mirror, is indispensably necessary if we are to be able to see what lies behind our backs. The transcendental illusion, which confers reality upon the Ideas of Reason, is similarly incidental to the attempt to view experience in its greatest possible extension.

ON THE FINAL PURPOSE OF THE NATURAL DIALECTIC OF HUMAN REASON[1666]

This section is thoroughly unified and consistent in its teaching. Its repetitious character is doubtless due to Kant’s personal difficulty either in definitively accepting or in altogether rejecting the constructive, Idealist interpretation of the function of Reason. He at least succeeds in formulating a view which, while not asserting anything more than is required in the scientific extension of experience, indicates the many possibilities which such experience fails to exclude. As the Ideas of Reason are not merely empty thought-entities (entia rationis ratiocinantis[1667]), but have a certain kind of objective validity (i.e. are entia rationis ratiocinatae[1668]), they demand a transcendental deduction.[1669] What this deduction is, and how it differs from that of the categories, we must now determine. Its discovery will, Kant claims, crown and complete our Critical labours.

Kant begins by drawing a distinction between representing an object absolutely, and representing an object in the Idea.

“In the former case our concepts are employed to determine the object, in the latter case there is in truth only a schema for which no object, not even a hypothetical one, is directly given, and which only enables us to represent to ourselves indirectly other objects in their systematic unity, by means of their relation to this Idea.”[1670]

An Idea is only a schema (Kant in terms of A 655 = B 693 ought rather to have said analogon of a schema) whereby we represent to ourselves, as for instance in the concept of a Highest Intelligence, not an objective reality but only such perfection of Reason as will tend to the greatest possible unity in the empirical employment of understanding.

With this introduction, Kant ushers in his famous “als ob” doctrine. We must view the things of the world as if they derived their existence from a Highest Intelligence. That Idea is heuristic only, not expository. Its purpose is not to enable us to comprehend such a Being, or even to think its existence, but only to show us how we should seek to determine the constitution and connection of the objects of experience. The three transcendental Ideas do not determine an object corresponding to them, but, under the presupposition of such an object in the Idea, lead us to systematic unity of empirical knowledge. When they are thus strictly interpreted as merely regulative of empirical enquiry, they will always endorse experience and never run counter to it. Reason, which seeks completeness of explanation, must therefore always act in accordance with them. Only thereby can experience acquire its fullest possible extension. This is the transcendental deduction of which we are in search. It establishes the indispensableness of the Ideas of Reason for the completion of experience, and their legitimacy as regulative principles.

We may here interrupt Kant’s exposition so far as to point out that this argument does not do justice to the full force of his position. The true Critical contention--and only if we interpret the passage in the light of this contention can the proof be regarded as transcendental in the strict sense--is that the Ideas are necessary to the possibility of each and every experience, involved together with the categories as conditions of the very existence of consciousness. They are not merely regulative, but are regulative of an experience which they also help to make possible.[1671] They express the standards in whose light we condemn all knowledge which does not fulfil them; and we have consequently no option save to endeavour to conform to their demands. In other words, they are not derivative concepts obtained by merely omitting the restrictions essential to our empirical consciousness, but represent a presupposition necessarily involved in all consciousness. Some such restatement of the argument is demanded by the position which Kant has himself outlined in A 645 = B 673 and in A 650 ff. = B 678 ff. Unfortunately he does not return to it. The more sceptical view which he has meantime been developing remains dominant. The deduction is left in this semi-Critical form.

A 672-6 = B 700-4 give a fuller statement of the “als ob” doctrine. In psychology we must proceed as if the mind were a simple substance endowed with personal identity[1672] (in this life at least), not in order to derive explanation of its changing states from the soul so conceived, but to derive them from each other in accordance with the Idea. In cosmology and theology (we may observe the straits to which Kant is reduced in his attempt to distinguish them) we ought to consider all phenomena both in their series and in their totality as if they were due to a highest and all-sufficient unitary ground. In so doing we shall not derive the order and system in the world from the object of the Idea, but only extract from the Idea the rule whereby the understanding attains the greatest possible satisfaction in the connecting of natural causes and effects.

In A 676-7 = B 704-5 Kant resorts to still another distinction--between suppositio relativa and suppositio absoluta. This distinction is suggested by the semi-objectivity of principles that are merely regulative. Though we have to recognise them as necessary, such necessity does not justify the assertion of their independent validity. When we admit a supreme ground as the source of the order and system which the principles demand, we do so only in order to think the universality of the principles with greater definiteness. Such supposition is relative to the needs of Reason in its empirical employment: not absolute, as pointing to the existence of such a being in itself.

“This explains why, in relation to what is given to the senses as existing, we require the Idea of a primordial Being necessary in itself, and yet can never form the slightest concept of it or of its absolute necessity.”[1673]

This last statement leads to the further problem to which Kant here gives his final solution, how if, as has been shown in the Dialectic, the concepts of absolute necessity and of unconditionedness are without meaning, the Ideas of Reason can be entertained at all, even mentally. What is their actual content and how is it possible to conceive them? Kant’s reply is developed in terms of the semi-Critical subjectivist point of view which dominates this section. The Ideas are mere Ideas. They yield not the slightest concept either of the internal possibility or of the necessity of any object corresponding to them. They only seem to do so, owing to a transcendental illusion. On examination we find that the concepts which we employ in thinking them as independently real, are one and all derived from experience. That is to say, we judge of them after the analogy of reality, substance, causality, and necessity in the sensible world.[1674]

”[They are consequently] analoga only of real things, not real things in themselves. We remove from the object of the Idea the conditions which limit the concept of the understanding, but which at the same time alone make it possible for us to have a determinate concept of anything. What we then think is, therefore, a something of which, as it is in itself, we have no concept whatsoever, but which we none the less represent to ourselves as standing in a relation to the sum-total of appearances analogous to that in which appearances stand to one another.”[1675]

They do not carry our knowledge beyond the objects of possible experience, but only extend the empirical unity of experience. They are the schemata of regulative principles. In them Reason is concerned with nothing but its own inherent demands; and as their unity is the unity of a system which is to be sought only in experience,[1676] qualities derived from the sensible world can quite legitimately be employed in their specific determination. They are not inherently dialectical; their demands have the rationality which we have a right to expect in the Ideals of Reason. When Critically examined, they propound no problem which Reason is not in itself entirely competent to solve.[1677] It is to their misemployment that transcendental illusion is due. In the form in which they arise from the natural disposition of our Reason they are good and serviceable.[1678]

To the question what is the most adequate form in which the regulative schema can be represented,[1679] Kant gives an answer which shows how very far he is from regarding the Leibnizian Ens realissimum as the true expression of the Ideal of Reason. It is through the employment of teleological concepts that we can best attain the highest possible form of systematic unity.

“The highest formal unity ... is the purposive unity of things. The speculative [i.e. theoretical] interest of Reason makes it necessary to regard all order in the world as if it had originated in the purpose of a Supreme Reason. Such a principle opens out to our Reason, as applied in the field of experience, altogether new views as to how the things of the world may be connected according to teleological laws, and so enables it to arrive at their greatest systematic unity. The assumption of a Supreme Intelligence, as the one and only cause of the universe, though in the Idea alone, can therefore always benefit Reason and can never injure it.”[1680]

For so long as this assumption is employed only as a regulative principle, even error cannot be really harmful. The worst that can happen is that where we expected a teleological connection, a merely mechanical or physical one is met with. If, on the other hand, we leave the solid ground of experience, and use the assumption to explain what we are unable to account for in empirical terms, we sacrifice all real insight, and confound Reason by transforming a concept, which is anthropomorphically determined for the purposes of empirical orientation, into a means of explaining order as non-natural and as imposed from without on the material basis of things.

This is a point of sufficient importance to call for more detailed statement. Hume in his Dialogues points out that the main defect in the teleological proof of God’s existence is its assumption that order and design are foreign to the inherent constitution of things, and must be of non-natural origin. The argument is therefore weakened by every advance in the natural sciences. It also runs directly counter to the very phenomena, those of animal life, upon which it is chiefly based, since the main characteristic of the organic in its distinction from the inorganic is its inner wealth of productive and reproductive powers. With these criticisms Kant is in entire agreement. From them, in the passage before us, he derives an argument in support of a strictly regulative interpretation of his “als ob” doctrine. The avowed intention of the teleological argument is to prove from nature the existence of an intelligent supreme cause. If therefore its standpoint be held to with more consistency than its own defenders have hitherto shown, it will be found to rest upon the regulative principle, that we must study nature as if an inherent order were native to it, and so seek to approach by degrees, in proportion as such natural unity is empirically discovered, the absolute perfection which inspires our researches. But if we transform our Ideal into an instrument of explanation, beginning with what ought properly to be only our goal, we delude ourselves with the belief that what can only be acquired through the slow and tentative labours of empirical enquiry is already in our possession.

“If I begin with a supreme purposive Being as the ground of all things, the unity of nature is really surrendered, as being quite foreign and accidental to the nature of things, and as not to be known from its own general laws. There thus arises a vicious circle: we are assuming just that very point which is mainly in dispute.”[1681]

Such a method of argument is self-destructive, since if we do not find order and perfection in the nature of things, and therefore in their general and necessary laws, we are not in a position to infer such a Being as the source of all causality.

To the question whether we may not interpret natural order, once it has been discovered by empirical investigation, as due to the divine will, Kant replies that such procedure is allowable only on the condition that it is the same to us whether we say that God has wisely willed it or that nature has wisely arranged it. We may admit the Idea of a Supreme Being only in so far as it is required by Reason as the regulative principle of all investigation of nature;

“...and we cannot, therefore, without contradicting ourselves, ignore the general laws of nature in view of which the Idea was adopted, and look upon the purposiveness of nature as contingent and hyper-physical in its origin. For we were not justified in assuming above nature a Being of those qualities, but only in adopting the Idea of it in order to be able to view the appearances, according to the analogy of a causal determination, as systematically connected with one another.”[1682] “Thus pure Reason, which at first seemed to promise nothing less than the extension of knowledge beyond all limits of experience, contains, if properly understood, nothing but regulative principles....”[1683]

CONCLUDING COMMENT ON THE DIALECTIC

I may now summarise Kant’s answer to the three main questions of the Dialectic: (1) Whether, or in what degree, the so-called Ideas of Reason are concepts due to a faculty altogether distinct from the understanding, and how far, as thus originating in pure Reason, they allow of definition; (2) how far they are capable of a transcendental deduction; (3) what kind of objective validity this deduction proves them to possess.

These questions are closely interconnected; the solution of any one determines the kind of solution to be given to all three. Kant, as we have found, develops his final position through a series of very subtle distinctions by which he contrives to justify and retain, though in a highly modified form, the more crudely stated divisions between Ideas and categories, between Reason and understanding, upon which the initial argument of the Dialectic is based.

The answer amounts in essentials to the conclusion that understanding, in directing itself by means of Ideals, exercises a function so distinct from that whereby it conditions concrete and specific experience, that it may well receive a separate title; that the Ideas in terms of which it constructs these Ideals, though schematic (i.e. sensuous and empirical in content), are not themselves empirical, and so far from being merely extended concepts of understanding, express transcendental conditions upon which all use of the understanding rests.

Now if this position is to be justified, Kant ought to show that the fundamental Idea of Reason, that of the unconditioned, is altogether distinct from any concept of the understanding, and in particular that it must not be identified with the category of totality, nor be viewed as being merely the concept of conditioned existence with its various empirical limitations thought away. Needless to say, Kant does not fulfil these requirements in any consistent manner. The Critique contains the material for a variety of different solutions; it does not definitively commit itself to any one of them.

If the argument of A 650 ff. = B 678 ff. were developed we should be in possession of what may be called the Idealist solution. It would proceed somewhat as follows. Consciousness as such is always the awareness of a whole which precedes and conditions its parts. Such consciousness cannot be accounted for on the assumption that we are first conscious of the conditioned, and then proceed to remove limitations and to form for ourselves, by means of the more positive factors involved in this antecedent consciousness, an Idea of the totality within which the given falls. The Idea of the unconditioned, distinct from all concepts of understanding, is one of the a priori conditions of possible experience, and is capable of a transcendental deduction of equal validity with, and of the same general nature as, that of the categories. It is presupposed in the possibility of our contingently given experience.

As this Idea conditions all subordinate concepts, it cannot be defined in terms of them. That does not, however, deprive it of all meaning; its significance is of a unique kind; it finds expression in those Ideals which, while guiding the mind in the construction of experience, also serve as the criteria through which experience is condemned as only phenomenal.

But this, as we have found, is not a line of argument which Kant has developed in any detail. The passages which point to it occur chiefly in the introductory portions of the Dialectic; in its later sections they are both brief and scanty. When he sets himself, as in the chapter on the Ideal of Pure Reason and in the subsequent Appendix, to define his conclusions, it is a much more empirical, and indeed sceptical, line that he almost invariably follows. There are, he then declares, strictly no pure, a priori Ideas. The supposed Ideas of unconditionedness and of absolute necessity are discovered on examination to be without the least significance for the mind. The Ideas, properly defined, are merely schemata of regulative principles, and their whole content reduces without remainder to such categories as totality, substance, causality, necessity, transcendently applied. As Ideas, they are then without real meaning; but they can be employed by analogy to define an Ideal which serves an indispensable function in the extension of experience. From this point of view, the transcendental deduction of the Ideas is radically distinct from that of the categories. The proof is not that they are necessary for the possibility of experience, but only that they are required for its perfect, or at least more complete, development. And as Kant is unable to prove that such completion is really possible, the objective validity of the Ideas is left open to question. They should be taken only as heuristic principles; the extent of their truth, even in the empirical realm, cannot be determined by the a priori method that is alone proper to a Critique of Pure Reason.

The first view is inspired by the fundamental teaching of the Analytic, and is the only view which will justify Kant in retaining his distinction between appearance and things in themselves. All that is positive in the second view can be combined with the first view; but, on the other hand, the negative implications of the second view are at variance with its own positive teaching. For when the Ideas are regarded as empirical in origin no less than in function, their entire authority is derived from experience, and cannot be regarded as being transcendental in any valid sense of that term. In alternating between these two interpretations of the function of Reason, Kant is wavering between the Idealist and the merely sceptical view of the scope and powers of pure thought. On the Idealist interpretation Reason is a metaphysical faculty, revealing to us the phenomenal character of experience, and outlining possibilities such as may perhaps be established on moral grounds. From the sceptical standpoint, on the other hand, Reason gives expression to what may be only our subjective preference for unity and system in the ordering of experience. According to the one, the criteria of truth and reality are bound up with the Ideas; according to the other, sense-experience is the standard by which the validity even of the Ideas must ultimately be judged. From the fact that Kant should have continued sympathetically to develop two such opposite standpoints, we would seem to be justified in concluding that he discerned, or at least desiderated, some more complete reconciliation of their teaching than he has himself thus far been able to achieve, and that no solution which would either subordinate the Ideal demands of thought, or ignore the gifts of experience, could ever have been definitively accepted by him as satisfactorily meeting the issues at stake. The Idealist solution is that to which his teaching as a whole most decisively points; but he is as conscious of the difficulties which lie in its path as he is personally convinced of its ultimate truth. His continuing appreciation of the value of sceptical teaching is a tacit admission that the Idealist doctrines, in the form which he has so far been able to give to them, are not really adequate to the complexity of the problems. As further confirmation of the tentative character of Kant’s conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason, we have his own later writings. In the Critique of Judgment, published nine years later, in teaching less sceptical and more constructive, though still delicately balanced between the competing possibilities, and always, therefore, leaving the final decision to moral considerations, Kant ventures upon a restatement of the problems of the Dialectic. To this restatement both of the above tendencies contribute valuable elements.

APPENDIX A[1684]

TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF METHODS

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I. THE DISCIPLINE[1685] OF PURE REASON

Kant is neither an intellectualist nor an anti-intellectualist. Reason, the proper duty of which is to prescribe a discipline to all other endeavours, itself requires discipline; and when it is employed in the metaphysical sphere, independently of experience, it demands not merely the correction of single errors, but the eradication of their causes through “a separate negative code,” such as a Critical philosophy can alone supply. In the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements this demand has been met as regards the materials or contents of the Critical system; we are now concerned only with its methods or formal conditions.[1686]

This distinction is highly artificial. As already indicated, it is determined by the requirements of Kant’s architectonic. The entire teaching of the Methodology has already been more or less exhaustively expounded in the earlier divisions of the Critique.

SECTION I

THE DISCIPLINE OF PURE REASON IN ITS DOGMATIC EMPLOYMENT

In dealing with the distinction between mathematical and philosophical knowledge, Kant is here returning to one of the main points of his Introduction to the Critique.[1687] His most exhaustive treatment of it is, however, to be found in a treatise which he wrote as early as 1764, his Enquiry into the Clearness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals. The continued influence of the teaching of that early work is obvious throughout this section, and largely accounts for the form in which certain of its tenets are propounded.

“...one can say with Bishop Warburton that nothing has been more injurious to philosophy than mathematics, that is, than the imitation of its method in a sphere where it is impossible of application....”[1688]

So far from being identical in general nature, mathematics and philosophy are, Kant declares, fundamentally opposed in all essential features. For it is in their methods, and not merely in their subject-matter, that the essential difference between them is to be found.[1689] Philosophical knowledge can be acquired only through concepts, mathematical knowledge is gained through the construction of concepts.[1690] The one is discursive merely; the other is intuitive. Philosophy can consider the particular only in the general; mathematics studies the general in the particular.[1691] Philosophical concepts, such as those of substance and causality, are, indeed, capable of application in transcendental synthesis, but in this employment they yield only empirical knowledge of the sensuously given; and from empirical concepts the universal and necessary judgments required for the possibility of metaphysical science can never be obtained.

The exactness of mathematics depends on definitions, axioms, and demonstrations, none of which are obtainable in philosophy. To take each in order.

I. =Definitions.=--To define in the manner prescribed by mathematics is to represent the complete concept of a thing. This is never possible in regard to empirical concepts. We are more certain of their denotation than of their connotation; and though they may be explained, they cannot be defined. Since new observations add or remove predicates, an empirical concept is always liable to modification.

“What useful purpose could be served by defining an empirical concept, such, for instance, as that of water? When we speak of water and its properties, we do not stop short at what is thought in the word water, but proceed to experiments. The word, with the few marks which are attached to it, is more properly to be regarded as merely a designation than as a conception. The so-called definition is nothing more than a determining of the word.”[1692]

Exact definition is equally impossible in regard to a priori forms, such as time or causality. Since they are not framed by the mind, but are given to it, the completeness of our analysis of them can never be guaranteed. Though they are known, they are known only as problems.

“As Augustine has said, ‘I know well what time is, but if any one asks me, I cannot tell.’”[1693]

Mathematical definitions make concepts; philosophical definitions only explain them.[1694] Philosophy cannot, therefore, imitate mathematics by beginning with definitions. In philosophy the incomplete exposition must precede the complete; definitions are the final outcome of our enquiry, and not as in mathematics the only possible beginning of its proofs. Indeed, the mathematical concept may be said to be given by the very process in which it is constructively defined; and, as thus originating in the process of definition, it can never be erroneous.[1695] Philosophy, on the other hand, swarms with faulty definitions, which are none the less serviceable.

“In mathematics definition belongs ad esse, in philosophy ad melius esse. It is desirable to attain it, but often very difficult. Jurists are still without a definition of their concept of Right.”[1696]

II. =Axioms.=--This paragraph is extremely misleading as a statement of Kant’s view regarding the nature of geometrical axioms. In stating that they are self-evident,[1697] he does not really mean to assert what that phrase usually involves, namely, absolute a priori validity. For Kant the geometrical axioms are merely descriptions of certain de facto properties of the given intuition of space. They have the merely hypothetical validity of all propositions that refer to the contingently given. For even as a pure intuition, space belongs to the realm of the merely factual.[1698] This un-Critical opposition of the self-evidence of geometrical axioms to the synthetic character of such “philosophical” truths as the principle of causality is bound up with Kant’s unreasoned conviction that space in order to be space at all, must be Euclidean.[1699] Kant’s reference in this paragraph to the propositions of arithmetic is equally open to criticism. For though he is more consistent in recognising their synthetic character, he still speaks as if they could be described as self-evident, i.e. as immediately certain. The cause of this inconsistency is, of course, to be found in his intuitional theory of mathematical science. Mathematical propositions are obtained through intuition; those of philosophy call for an elaborate and difficult process of transcendental deduction. When modern mathematical theory rejects this intuitional view, it is really extending to mathematical concepts Kant’s own interpretation of the function of the categories. Concepts condition the possibility of intuitional experience, and find in this conditioning power the ground of their objective validity.[1700] Here, as in the Aesthetic,[1701] Kant fails adequately to distinguish between the problems of pure and applied mathematics.

=III. Demonstrations.=--Kant again introduces his very unsatisfactory doctrine of the construction of concepts:[1702] and he even goes so far as to maintain, in complete violation of his own doctrine of transcendental deduction, that where there is no intuition, there can be no demonstration. Apodictic propositions, he declares, are either dogmata or mathemata; and the former are beyond the competence of the human mind. But no sooner has he made these statements than he virtually withdraws them by adding that, though apodictic propositions cannot be established directly from concepts, they can be indirectly proved by reference to something purely contingent, namely, possible experience. Thus the principle of causality can be apodictically proved as a condition of possible experience. Though it may not be called a dogma, it can be entitled a principle! In explanation of this distinction, which betrays a lingering regard for the self-evident maxims of rationalistic teaching, Kant adds that the principle of causality, though a principle, has itself to be proved.

“...it has the peculiarity that it first makes possible its own ground of proof, namely, experience....”[1703]

This, as we have noted,[1704] is exactly what mathematical axioms must also be able to do, if they are to establish their objective validity.

SECTION II

THE DISCIPLINE OF PURE REASON IN ITS POLEMICAL EMPLOYMENT

This section contains an admirable defence of the value of scepticism.

“Even poisons have their use. They serve to counteract other poisons generated in our system, and must have a place in every complete pharmacopeia. The objections against the persuasions and complacency of our purely speculative Reason arise from the very nature of Reason itself, and must therefore have their own good use and purpose, which ought not to be disdained. Why has Providence placed many things which are closely bound up with our highest interests so far beyond our reach, that we are only permitted to apprehend them in a manner lacking in clearness and subject to doubt, in such fashion that our enquiring gaze is more excited than satisfied? It is at least doubtful whether it serves any useful purpose, and whether it is not, indeed, perhaps even harmful to venture upon bold interpretations of such uncertain appearances. But there can be no manner of doubt that it is always best to grant Reason complete liberty, both of enquiry and of criticism, so that it may be without hindrance in attending to its own proper interests. These interests are no less furthered by the limitation than by the extension of its speculations; and they will always suffer when outside influences intervene to divert it from its natural path, and to constrain it by what is irrelevant to its own proper ends.”[1705] “Whenever I hear that a writer of real ability has demonstrated away the freedom of the human will, the hope of a future life, and the existence of God, I am eager to read the book, for I expect him by his talents to increase my insight into these matters.”[1706]

SECTION IV[1707]

THE DISCIPLINE OF PURE REASON IN REGARD TO ITS PROOFS[1708]

This section merely restates the general nature and requirements of transcendental proof. The exposition is much less satisfactory than that already given in the Analytic and Dialectic. The only really new factor is the distinction between apagogical and direct proof. The former may produce conviction, but cannot enable us to comprehend the grounds of the truth of our conviction. Also, outside mathematics, it is extremely dangerous to attempt to establish a thesis by showing its contradictory to be impossible.[1709] This is especially true in the sphere of our Critical enquiries, since the chief danger to be guarded against is the confounding of the subjectively necessary with the independently real. In this field of investigation it is never permissible to attempt to justify a synthetic proposition by refuting its opposite. Such seeming proofs can easily be secured, and have been the favourite weapons of dogmatic thinkers.

“Each must defend his position directly, by a legitimate proof that carries with it transcendental deduction of the grounds upon which it is itself made to rest. Only when this has been done, are we in a position to decide how far its claims allow of rational justification. If an opponent relies on subjective grounds, it is an easy matter to refute him. The dogmatist cannot, however, profit by this advantage. His own judgments are, as a rule, no less dependent upon subjective influences; and he can himself in turn be similarly cornered. But if both parties proceed by the direct method, either they will soon discover the difficulty, nay, the impossibility, of showing reason for their assertions, and will be left with no resort save to appeal to some form of prescriptive authority; or the Critique will the more easily discover the illusion to which their dogmatic procedure is due; and pure Reason will be compelled to relinquish its exaggerated pretensions in the realm of speculation, and to withdraw within the limits of its proper territory--that of practical principles.”[1710]

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II. THE CANON[1711] OF PURE REASON

SECTION I

THE ULTIMATE END OF THE PURE USE OF OUR REASON[1712]

The problems of the existence of God, the freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul have, Kant declares, little theoretical interest. For, as he has already argued, even if we were justified in postulating God, freedom, and immortality, they would not enable us to account for the phenomena of sense-experience, the only objects of possible knowledge. But the three problems are also connected with our practical interests, and in that reference they constitute the chief subject of metaphysical enquiry.[1713] The practical is whatever is possible through freedom; and the decision as to what we ought to do is the supreme interest of pure Reason in its highest employment.

“...the ultimate intention of Nature in her wise provision for us has indeed, in the constitution of our Reason, been directed to our moral interests alone.”[1714]

This is the position which Kant endeavours to establish in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, and in the Critique of Practical Reason. The very brief outline which he here gives of his argument is necessarily incomplete; and is in consequence somewhat misleading. He first disposes of the problem of freedom; and does so in a manner which shows that he had not, when this section was composed, developed his Critical views on the nature of moral freedom. He is for the present content to draw a quite un-Critical distinction between transcendental and practical freedom.[1715] The latter belongs to the will in so far as it is determined by Reason alone, independently of sensuous impulses. Reason prescribes objective laws of freedom, and the will under the influence of these laws overcomes the affections of sense. Such practical freedom can, Kant asserts, be proved by experience to be a natural cause. Transcendental freedom,[1716] on the other hand, i.e. the power of making a new beginning in the series of phenomena, is a problem which can never be empirically solved. It is a purely speculative question with which Reason in its practical employment is not in the least concerned. The canon of pure Reason has therefore to deal only with the two remaining problems, God and immortality. Comment upon these assertions can best be made in connection with the argument of the next section.[1717]

SECTION II

THE IDEAL OF THE HIGHEST GOOD, AS A DETERMINING GROUND OF THE ULTIMATE END OF PURE REASON[1718]

Reason in its speculative employment transcends experience, but solely for the sake of experience. In other words, speculative Reason has a purely empirical function. (This is the explanation of the somewhat paradoxical contention, to which Kant has already committed himself, that the problems of God and immortality, though seemingly speculative in character, really originate in our practical interests.) But pure Reason has also a practical use; and it is in this latter employment that it first discloses the genuinely metaphysical character of its present constitution and ultimate aims. The moral consciousness, in revealing to us an Ideal of absolute value, places in our hands the only available key to the mysteries of existence. As this moral consciousness represents the deepest reality of human life, it may be expected to have greater metaphysical significance than anything else in human experience; and since the ends which it reveals also present themselves as absolute in value, and are indeed the only absolute values of which we can form any conception, this conclusion would seem to be confirmed.

Happiness has natural value; morality, i.e. the being worthy to be happy, has absolute value. The means of attaining the former obtain expression in prudential or pragmatic laws that are empirically grounded. The conditions of the latter are embodied in a categorical imperative of an a priori character. The former advise us how best to satisfy our natural desire for happiness; the latter dictates to us how we must behave in order to deserve happiness.

Kant’s further argument is too condensed to be really clear, and if adequately discussed would carry us quite beyond the legitimate limits of this Commentary. I shall therefore confine myself to a brief and free restatement of his general position. The Critical teaching can be described as resulting in a new interpretation of the function of philosophy.[1719] The task of the philosopher, properly viewed, does not consist in the solution of speculative problems; such problems transcend our human powers. All that philosophy can reasonably attempt is to analyse and define the situations, cognitive and practical, in which, owing to the specific conditions of human existence, we find ourselves to be placed. Upon analysis of the cognitive situation Kant discovers that while all possibilities are open, the theoretical data are never such as to justify ontological assertions.[1720] When, however, he passes to the practical situation, wider horizons, definitely outlined, at once present themselves. The moral consciousness is the key to the meaning of the entire universe as well as of human life. Its values are the sole ultimate values, and enable us to interpret in moral terms (even though we cannot comprehend in any genuinely theoretical fashion) the meaning of the dispensation under which we live. The moral consciousness, like sense-experience, discloses upon examination a systematic unity of presupposed conditions. In the theoretical sphere this unity cannot be proved to be more than a postulated Ideal of empirical experience; and it is an Ideal which, even if granted to have absolute validity, is too indefinite to enable us to assert that ultimate reality is spiritual in character, or is teleologically ordered. The underlying conditions, on the other hand, of practical experience have from the start a purely noumenal reference. They have no other function than to define, in terms of the moral consciousness, the ultimate meaning of reality as a whole. They postulate[1721] a universe in which the values of spiritual experience are supported and conserved.

But the main difference in Kant’s treatment of the two situations, cognitive and practical, only emerges into view when we recognise the differing modes in which the transcendental method of proof is applied in the two cases. The a priori forms of sensibility, understanding, and Reason are proved by reference to possible experience, as being its indispensable conditions. In moral matters, however, we must not appeal to experience. The actual is no test of the Ideal; “what is” is no test of what ought to be. And secondly, the moral law, if valid at all, must apply not merely within the limits of experience, but with absolute universality to all rational beings. The moral law, therefore, can neither be given us in experience, nor be proved as one of the conditions necessary to its possibility. Its validity, in other words, can be established neither through experience nor through theoretical reason.

Though such is Kant’s own method of formulating the issue, it exaggerates the difference of his procedure in the two Critiques, and is very misleading as a statement of his real position. In one passage, in the Critique of Practical Reason,[1722] Kant does, indeed, assert that the moral law requires no deduction. It is, he claims, a fact of which we are a priori conscious: so far from itself requiring proof, it enables us to prove the reality of freedom. Yet in the very same section he argues that the deduction of freedom from the moral law is a credential of the latter, and is a sufficient substitute for all a priori justification. According to the first statement we have an immediate consciousness of the validity of the moral law; according to the second statement the moral law proves itself indirectly, by serving as a principle for the deduction of freedom. The second form of statement alone harmonises with the argument developed in the third section of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, and more correctly expresses the intention of Kant’s central argument in the Critique of Practical Reason. For the difference between the two transcendental proofs in the two Critiques does not really consist in any diversity of method, but solely in the differing character of the premisses from which each starts. The ambiguity of Kant’s argument in the second Critique seems chiefly to be caused by his failure clearly to recognise that the moral law, though a form of pure Reason, exercises, in the process of its transcendental proof, a function which exactly corresponds to that which is discharged by possible experience in the first Critique. Our consciousness of the moral law is, like sense-experience, a given fact. It is de facto, and cannot be deduced from anything more ultimate than itself.[1723] But as given, it enables us to deduce its transcendental conditions. This does not mean that our immediate consciousness of it as given guarantees its validity. The nature of its validity is established only in the process whereby it reveals its necessary implications. The objects of sense-experience are assumed by ordinary consciousness to be absolutely real; in the process of establishing the transcendental conditions of such experience they are discovered to be merely phenomenal. The pure principles of understanding thus gain objective validity as the conditions of a given experience which reveals only appearances. Ordinary consciousness similarly starts from the assumption of the absolute validity of the moral law. But in this case the consciousness of the law is discovered on examination to be explicable, even as a possibility, only on the assumption that it is due to the autonomous activity of a noumenal being. By its existence it proves the conditions through which alone it is explicable. Its mere existence suffices to prove that its validity is objective in a deeper and truer sense than the principles of understanding. The notion of freedom, and therefore all the connected Ideas of pure Reason, gain noumenal reality as the conditions of a moral consciousness which is incapable of explanation as illusory or even phenomenal. Since the consciousness of the moral law is thus noumenally grounded, it has a validity with which nothing in the phenomenal world can possibly compare. It is the one form in which noumenal reality directly discloses itself to the human mind.[1724]

Obviously the essential crux of Kant’s argument lies in the proof that the moral consciousness is only explicable in this manner, as the self-legislation of a noumenal being. Into the merits of his argument we cannot, however, here enter; and I need only draw attention to the manner in which it conflicts with the statement of the preceding section, that the possibility of transcendental freedom is a purely speculative question with which practical Reason is not concerned. The reality of freedom, as a form of noumenal activity, is the cardinal fact of Kant’s metaphysics of morals. For though our consciousness of the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom, transcendental freedom is the ratio essendi of the moral law.[1725]

“With this faculty [of practical Reason], transcendental freedom is also established; freedom, namely, in that absolute sense in which speculative Reason required it, in its use of the concept of causality, in order to escape the antinomy into which it inevitably falls, when in the chain of cause and effect it tries to think the unconditioned.... Freedom is the only one of all the Ideas of the speculative Reason of which we know the possibility a priori (without, however, understanding it), because it is the condition of the moral law which we know.”[1726] ”[Freedom] is the only one of all the Ideas of pure Reason whose object is a thing of fact and to be reckoned among the scibilia.”[1727] “It is thus very remarkable that of the three pure rational Ideas, God, freedom, and immortality, that of freedom is the only concept of the supersensible which (by means of the causality that is thought in it) proves its objective reality in nature by means of the effects it can produce there; and thus renders possible the connection of both the others with nature, and of all three with one another so as to form a Religion.... The concept of freedom (as fundamental concept of all unconditioned practical laws) can extend Reason beyond those bounds within which every natural (theoretical) concept must inevitably remain confined.”[1728]

Thus freedom is for Kant a demonstrated fact, and in that respect differs from the Ideas of God and immortality, which are merely problematic conceptions, and which can be postulated only as articles of “practical faith.”

This brings us to the final question, upon what grounds Kant ascribes validity to the Ideas of God and immortality. At this point in his argument Kant introduces the conception of the Summum Bonum. Reason, in prescribing the moral law, prescribes, as the final and complete end of all our actions, the Summum Bonum, i.e. happiness proportioned to moral worth. Owing to the limitations of our faculties, the complete attainment of this supreme end is conceivable by us only on the assumption of a future life wherein perfect worthiness may be attained, and of an omnipotent Divine Being who will apportion happiness in accordance with merit.

”[This Divine Being] must be omnipotent, in order that the whole of nature and its relation to morality ... may be subject to his will; omniscient, that he may know our innermost sentiments and their moral worth; omnipresent, that he may be immediately present for the satisfying of every need which the highest good demands; eternal, that this harmony of nature and freedom may never fail, etc.”[1729]

The moral ideal thus supplies us with a ground[1730] for regarding the universe as systematically ordered according to moral purposes, and also with a principle that enables us to infer the nature and properties of its Supreme Cause. In place of a demonology, which is all that physical theology can establish, we construct upon moral grounds a genuine theology.

The concepts thus obtained are, however, anthropomorphic; and for that reason alone must be denied all speculative value. This is especially evident in regard to the Idea of God. Owing to our incapacity to comprehend how moral merit can condition happiness, we conceive them as externally combined through the intervention of a supreme Judge and Ruler. As Kant indicates,[1731] we must not assert that this represents the actual situation. He himself seems to have inclined to a more mystical interpretation of the universe, conceiving the relation of happiness to virtue as being grounded in a supersensuous but necessary order that may, indeed, be bodied forth in the inadequate symbols of the deistic creed, but which in its true nature transcends our powers of understanding. So far as the Ideas of God and immortality are necessary to define the moral standpoint, they have genuine validity for all moral beings; but if developed on their own account as speculative dogmas, they acquire a definiteness of formulation which is not essential to their moral function, and which lays them open to suspicion even in their legitimate use.

These considerations also indicate Kant’s further reason for entitling the Summum Bonum, God and immortality, Ideas of faith. Though they can be established as presuppositions of the moral situation in which we find ourselves, such demonstration itself rests upon the acceptance of the moral consciousness as possessing a supersensuous sanction; and that in turn is determined by features in the moral situation not deducible from any higher order of considerations.

“Belief in matters of faith is a belief in a pure practical point of view, i.e. a moral faith, which proves nothing for theoretical, pure, rational cognition, but only for that which is practical and directed to the fulfilment of its duties; it in no way extends speculation.... If the supreme principle of all moral laws is a postulate, the possibility of its highest Object ... is thereby postulated along with it.”[1732] “So far, as practical Reason has the right to yield us guidance, we shall not look upon actions as obligatory because they are the commands of God, but shall regard them as divine commands because we have an inward obligation to them.... Moral theology is thus of immanent use only. It enables us to fulfil our vocation in this present world by showing us how to adapt ourselves to the system of all ends, and by warning us against the fanaticism and indeed the impiety of abandoning the guidance of a morally legislative Reason in the right conduct of our lives, in order to derive guidance directly from the Idea of the Supreme Being. For we should then be making a transcendent employment of moral theology; and that, like a transcendent use of pure speculation, must pervert and frustrate the ultimate ends of Reason.”[1733]

SECTION III

OPINING, KNOWING, AND BELIEVING[1734]

Kant first distinguishes between conviction (Ueberzeugung) and persuasion (Ueberredung). A judgment which is objectively grounded, and which is therefore valid for all other rational beings, is affirmed with conviction. When the affirmation is due only to the peculiar character of the subject, the manner in which it is asserted may be entitled persuasion. Persuasion is therefore “a mere illusion.”[1735] Conviction exists in three degrees, opinion, belief, and knowledge. In opinion we are conscious that the judgment is insufficiently grounded, and that our conviction is subjectively incomplete. In belief the subjective conviction is complete, but is recognised as lacking in objective justification. In knowledge the objective grounds and the subjective conviction are alike complete.

After pointing out that opinion is not permissible in judgments of pure Reason,[1736] Kant develops the further distinction between pragmatic or doctrinal belief and moral belief. When a belief is contingent (i.e. is affirmed with the consciousness that on fuller knowledge it may turn out to be false), and yet nevertheless supplies a ground for the employment of means to certain desired ends, it may be called pragmatic belief. Such belief admits of degree, and can be tested by wager or by oath.[1737] What may be called doctrinal belief is analogous in character, and is taken by Kant, in somewhat misleading fashion, as describing our mode of accepting such doctrines as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.[1738] They are adopted as helpful towards a contingent but important end, the discovery of order in the system of nature. This account of the nature of Ideas is in line with Kant’s early view of them as merely regulative. Taken in connection with his repeated employment of the term ‘moral sentiments’ (moralische Gesinnungen), it tends to prove that this section is early in date of writing.

In moral belief the end, the Summum Bonum, is absolutely necessary, and as there is only one condition under which we can conceive it as being realised, namely, on the assumption of the existence of God and of a future life, the belief in God and immortality possesses the same certainty as the moral sentiments.

“The belief in a God and another world is so interwoven with my moral sentiment that as there is little danger of my losing the latter, there is equally little cause for fear that the former can ever be taken from me.”[1739]

As I have just suggested, this basing of moral belief upon subjective sentiments, which, as Kant very inconsistently proceeds to suggest, may possibly be lacking in certain men, marks this section as being of early origin. But in concluding the section, in reply to the objection that, in thus tracing such articles of faith to our “natural interest” in morality, philosophy admits its powerlessness to advance beyond the ordinary understanding, Kant propounds one of his abiding convictions, namely, that in matters which concern all men without distinction nature is not guilty of any partial distribution of her gifts, and that in regard to the essential ends of human nature the highest philosophy cannot advance beyond what is revealed to the common understanding.[1740] The reverence which Kant ever cherished for the memory of his parents, and for the religion which was so natural to them, must have predisposed him to a recognition of the widespread sources of the spiritual life. But Kant has himself placed on record his sense of the great debt which in this connection he also owed to the teaching of Rousseau.

“I am by disposition an enquirer. I feel the consuming thirst for knowledge, the eager unrest to advance ever further, and the delights of discovery. There was a time when I believed that this is what confers real dignity upon human life, and I despised the common people who know nothing. Rousseau has set me right. This imagined advantage vanishes. I learn to honor men, and should regard myself as of much less use than the common labourer, if I did not believe that my philosophy will restore to all men the common rights of humanity.”[1741]

The sublimity of the starry heavens and the imperative of the moral law are ever present influences on the life of man; and they require for their apprehension no previous initiation through science and philosophy. The naked eye reveals the former; of the latter all men are immediately aware.[1742] In their universal appeal they are of the very substance of human existence. Philosophy may avail to counteract the hindrances which prevent them from exercising their native influence; it cannot be a substitute for the inspiration which they alone can yield.

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III. THE ARCHITECTONIC OF PURE REASON[1743]

Adickes[1744] very justly remarks that “this is a section after Kant’s own heart, in which there is presented, almost unsought, the opportunity, which he elsewhere so frequently creates for himself, of indulging in his favourite hobby.” The section is of slight scientific importance, and is chiefly of interest for the light which it casts upon Kant’s personality. Moreover the distinctions which Kant here draws are for the most part not his own philosophical property, but are taken over from the Wolffian system.

The distinctions may be exhibited in tabular form as follows:[1745]

KNOWLEDGE

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Historical| | | or | | | empirical | Rational (cognitio ex principiis) | | (cognitio | | | ex datis) |-------------------------------------------------------------| |-----------|Mathe- |Philosophical[1746] (based on pure concepts):--meta- | | | |matics,| physics in the widest sense. | |Empi-|Empi-|based |-------------------------------------------------------| |rical|rical|on the |Prop- |System of pure reason, both practical and | |phys-|anth-|constr-|aedeu-|speculative: metaphysics in the wider sense. | |iolo-|ropo-|uction |tic: |------------------------------------------------| |gy |logy |of con-|Cri- |Metaph-|Metaphysics (in a more limited sense) of| | | |cepts. |tique.|ysics | nature,[1747] i.e. of all that is. | | | | | |of mor-|----------------------------------------| | | | | |als, i.e.|Trans- |Physiology of pure reason. | | | | | |of all |cend- |--------------------------------| | | | | |ought |ental | Immanent. | Transcendent. | | | | | |to be. |phil- |------------+-------------------| | | | | | |osophy |Rat- |Rat- |Cosmology| Theology| | | | | | |of pure|ional|ional | | | | | | | | | | |reason:|phy- |psych-| -----|----- | | | | | | |ontol- |sics.|ology.|Metaphysics in the | | | | | | |ogy.[1748]| most limited sense.| +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Kant further distinguishes between the “scholastic” and the “universal” or traditional meaning of the term philosophy.[1749] In the former sense philosophy is viewed from the point of view of its logical perfection, and the philosopher appears as an artist of Reason.[1750] Philosophy in the broader and higher sense is “the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human Reason.”[1751] The philosopher then appears as the lawgiver of human Reason. Of the essential ends, the ultimate end is man’s moral destiny; to this the other essential ends of human Reason are subordinate means. For though the legislation of human Reason concerns nature as well as freedom, and has therefore to be dealt with by a philosophy of nature, i.e. of all that is, as well as by a philosophy of morals, i.e. of that which ought to be, the former is subordinate to the latter in the same degree in which in human life knowledge is subordinate to moral action. Whereas speculative metaphysics serves rather to ward off errors than to extend knowledge,[1752] in the metaphysics of morals “all culture [Kultur] of human Reason”[1753] finds its indispensable completion.

Empirical psychology is excluded from the domain of metaphysics. It is destined to form part of a complete system of anthropology, the pendant to the empirical doctrine of nature.[1754]

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