days of Hume and Kant, than it is now, when each country seems to go its own way. It is really painful to read the sweeping condemnation of so-called German metaphysics, and still more to see a man like Kant lectured like a schoolboy, and most frequently not from any difference on philosophical principles, but from sheer ignorance. One may differ from Kant, as one differs from Plato or Aristotle, from Berkeley and Hume, but those who know Kant's writings, and the position which he holds in the historical development of philosophic thought, are not likely to speak of him without respect.

The blame, however, does by no means attach to the English side only. There are many philosophers in German Universities who think that, since the days of Berkeley and Hume, England has ceased to be a great philosophic power, and who imagine they may safely ignore the work that has been achieved by the living representatives of British philosophy. I confess I almost shuddered when, in a work by an eminent German professor of Strassburg, I saw John Stuart Mill put down as an anti-diluvian philosopher, anti-diluvian, I suppose, in the sense of antiKantian. But this is not the language which any one would use who has really read Mill's works, and I am afraid that this philosophic Chauvinism is really beginning to be mischievous. If nationality must still narrow our sympathies in other spheres of thought, surely philosophy ought to stand on a loftier pinnacle.

The point we have now reached in our argument is this: We found that the constituent elements of thought were sensations, percepts, concepts, and names, and that these four, though distinguishable, were never

really separate from each other. We found, secondly, that the mere impressions of the senses would leave us simply in a confusion of sensation, and that the first real percept presupposed on our side receptive conditions, namely the forms of intuition, commonly called space and time, and the forms of our intellect, commonly called the categories. So far we followed Kant. Here, however, Kant left us, and it became our object to show what Kant had never shown, namely that, not only were percepts impossible without a conceptual interpretation, but that concepts likewise were impossible without names.

Here was the position where we made bold to withstand the onset of the advocates of promiscuous evolution. We had, first of all, to make it clear to ourselves what was really meant by genus, species, and individuals, and we arrived at the conclusion that individualisation was the true cause of variation, and, within proper limits, of evolution. We then returned to our former position. We had to admit that as we know nothing, except by analogy, of the mind of animals, we could not with the weapons that Kant has placed in our hands, make head against the assertion that they might possess, for all we know, the same forms of sensuous intuition and the same categories of the understanding which we possess. Nothing therefore could have been said, from the purely philosophical point of view, against treating man as a mere variety of some other genus of animals. But if concepts are impossible without names, our position becomes very different. We have then a right to say that the whole genus man possesses something, namely language, of which no trace can be found even in the most highly developed

animal, and that therefore a genealogical descent of man from animal is an impossible assumption. In order, however, to make it quite safe for us to advance so far beyond Kant, it will be necessary to define, as shortly as possible, the position which he took and maintained in the philosophical warfare of the last century. This will be the object of our next chapter. After we have clearly seen why percepts, as Kant has shown, are impossible without concepts, we shall be better able to understand why concepts, and in fact all conceptual thought, is impossible without names, and why the first word may be called the first step in the intellectual evolution of the human race.

CHAPTER III.

ON KANT'S PHILOSOPHY.

Causes of

Kant's

success.

THE circumstances under which Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason show that his enormous success was due, not only to his own qualifications, great as they were, but to the fact that the tide of materialism was on the turn, that a reaction was slowly setting in in the minds of independent thinkers, and that he was but lending the most powerful expression to the silent convictions of the world's growing minority. Unless we keep this in view, the success of Kant's philosophy would be almost inexplicable. He was a professor in a small university town of Eastern Prussia, he had never been out of his native province, never but once out of his native town, Königsberg. He began to lecture at Königsberg as a Privat-docent, in 1756, just a year before the beginning of the Seven Years' War, where other questions rather, and not the possibility of synthetic judgments à priori, would seem to have interested the public mind of Germany. Kant worked on for sixteen years as an unpaid university lecturer. In 1766 he took a librarianship which yielded him about £10 a year, and it was not till he was forty-six years of age (1770) that he succeeded in obtaining a professorship of Logic and Metaphysics with a salary of about £60 a year. He lectured indefatigably

on a great variety of subjects-on Mathematics, Physics, Logic, Metaphysics, Natural Law, Morals, Natural Religion, Physical Geography, and Anthropology. He enjoyed no doubt a high reputation in his own university, but not much more than many other professors in the numerous universities of Germany. His fame had certainly never spread beyond the academic order of his own country, when in the year 1781, at the age of fifty-seven, he published at Riga his Critik der reinen Vernunft, a work which in the onward stream of philosophic thought has stood, and will stand for ever, like the rocks of Niagara. There is nothing attractive in that book, nothing startling, far from it. It is badly written, in a heavy style, full of repetitions, all grey in grey, with hardly a single ray of light and sunshine from beginning to end. And yet that book soon became known all over Europe, at a time when literary intelligence travelled much more slowly than at present. Lectures were given in London on Kant's new system. Even at Paris the Philosopher of Königsberg became an authority, and for the first time in the history of human thought, the philosophical phraseology of the age became German.

Kant had spoken the word which the world was waiting for, and hence his sudden success. No philosopher has ever told, has ever taken and held his place in the history of philosophy whose speculations, however abstruse in appearance, however far removed at first sight from the interests of ordinary mortals, have not answered some deep yearning in the hearts of his fellow-men. What makes a philosopher great, or what makes him at all events really powerful, is what soldiers call his touch with the