KANT'S POSITION IN PHILOSOPHY.

The three great epochs in modern philosophy are characterised respectively by the names of Descartes, Locke and Kant. Of these epochs, that inaugurated by Kant is the one to which the thought of our own day may be said to belong, and this in more than a special sense, for the influence of Kant is almost as deeply visible in the general current of speculation as in philosophy proper. There is, indeed, scarcely a doctrine or portion of modern science or controversy, the germ of which is not to be found in Kant, hazarded, it may be, in the form of a mere idle fancy, but unmistakably there. Kant was a Titan alike in the range and depth of his knowledge, as in his almost unequalled and certainly unsurpassed intellectual grasp. The only other thinker in the world's history who can be deemed worthy of a place beside him for this all-but unique combination of qualities is perhaps Aristotle. But the results of the Königsberg philosopher's labour have been incomparably richer than even those of the Stagirite. The works of the latter thinker may constitute an encyclopædia of ancient thought, but neither his own successors nor the ancient world generally showed any capacity for developing the hints and speculations thrown out by him. They became an oracle of appeal for his followers, of which the meaning was to be elucidated, but so far as any capacity for organic assimilation is concerned they fell upon barren ground. Ancient philosophy practically reached high-water mark in Plato and Aristotle. No real advance was made upon these thinkers. With Kant the case is different. He stands at

the commencement instead of the culmination of an epoch. Though he also brought to a focus the speculation and research of his predecessors; the intellectual ferment of the 19th century lay before him, and it was in this fruitful soil that his doctrines were destined to germinate. With none but 18th-century materials he founded 19thcentury thought. The Kantian system, as propounded by Kant, is too full of contradictions ever to become petrified into a code of phosophical dogma. It steadily refuses to crystallise. Many positions equally insisted upon fail to blend with one another, notwithstanding the profusion of ingenuity that has been lavished in the attempt to make them do so. This applies almost as much to the general bearings of the system as to its special points and technical details. Idealist and realist, theist and agnostic, severally draw from Kant's writings arguments and expressions of approval for their respective standpoints; but no one has yet succeeded in placing the Kantian system as a whole beyond the reach of criticism. Hence, no two Kantians can be found to agree in its interpretation, one accentuating one line of thought and one another. The reason of this lies in the untrodden nature of the ground he was exploring.

There is no trace of Kant's ever having studied Spinoza at first hand, though he unquestionably took up the mantle of the author of the Tractatus theologicopoliticus, in matters concerning Biblical criticism and the free expression of opinion in theology and politics. The thinker with whom Kant was most in contact at the outset of his philosophical career was Leibnitz, especially through the medium of the Leibnitzians Wolff and Baumgarten. He subsequently entered on a thorough study of the English philosophic dynasty--Locke, Berkeley and Hume. He appears also to have had some acquaintance with the Scotch psycholo

gists, Reid, Beattie, etc. Thus he became versed no less in the English empiricist, than in the dogmaticmetaphysical school then uppermost on the continent. It was Hume, he says, who first broke his dogmatic slumber with his statement of the causation problem. With no one is it more important than with Kant to bear in mind the sources whence the start was made on the philosophical voyage of discovery, a neglect of this rendering many elements of Kant's thought well nigh incomprehensible. It cannot be too much insisted upon that in the 'Critique' two distinct lines of philosophic thought meet, but fail to coalesce satisfactorily.

The phenomenalism and scepticism of the British school appear uppermost at one time, while at another, repudiation of Berkeleyan idealism, and protestations as to the necessary existence of a world of things-in-themselves reveal the former disciple of Leibnitz and Wolff. A few words on the philosophy then dominant in Germany may be desirable to facilitate an appreciation of the influences under which Kant started.

Leibnitz had sought to bridge over the Cartesian dualism between matter and spirit by his hypothesis of an intelligible world as expounded in the Monadology,' and by the celebrated doctrine of a "Pre-established harmony.” The monads of Leibnitz may be described as spiritual atoms in contradistinction to the material atoms of the ordinary atomistic doctrine. They were infinite in number, unextended and possessed of various degrees of consciousness. These immaterial essences were thus subjects capable of receiving impressions, the differences between them consisting in the relative clearness or confusion of these impressions. A material body is an aggregate of monads, which, owing to our confused consciousness, is presented as a continuous whole. Minerals and plants consist, so to speak, of sleeping monads, whose

impressions do not reach the niveau of consciousness, The order of impressions or presentations, i.e., the subjec tive order, in each monad is determined by an immanent causality; but the objective relations of the monads among each other by a purely mechanical causality, the system of pre-established harmony, effecting and regulating the correspondence of these two orders with one another. Christian Wolff, while adopting the Leibnitzian positions in the main, endeavoured to reconcile them with the older Aristotelian system of the schools, and to reduce their somewhat confused statement to scholastic form and precision. This endeavour, if successful in its immediate object, was so at the sacrifice of all that gave to the system its plausibility and attractiveness in the hands of its author. Wolff is nevertheless saved from oblivion by Kant's employment of his terminology and classification. Wolff divided philosophy into Ontology, or the science of being in general; Psychology, or the science of the soul as a simple substance; Cosmology, or the science of the material universe; and Theology, or the science of the existence and attributes of the Deity. The traces of this division in the Transcendental Dialectic are apparent on its very surface.

While Wolff, Baumgarten and their disciples in Germany were thus engaged in developing the principles and following the abstract and dogmatic method propounded by Descartes, on the lines of Leibnitz (Spinoza's monism remaining a dead letter to his immediate successors no less than his contemporaries, except for an occasional polemic) another and very different view was being worked out in this country. Hobbes and Locke had successfully applied the inductive method laid down by Bacon to the problems of empirical psychology, and more than hinted at the nescience of human knowledge of all save the phenomena immediately present in consciousness. Berkeley

had carried these principles to their logical issue on the one side, in denying a matter other than the qualities known to us, and the existence of which is equivalent to their perception by a mind; while Hume had developed the equally logical thesis on the other side that the word "mind" itself merely denoted a succession of impressions and ideas, and had thence argued that our notion of causality is solely the result of habit, and therefore limited in its application to experience.

In France the great materialist and sensationalist school held sway, and its echoes probably reached the shores of the Baltic. The reason Kant makes little direct allusion to it, is not unlikely to be that he regarded it as an extreme one-sided off-shoot of Lockeian empiricism. The German Aufklärung of Basedow, Reimarus, etc., affected the current of philosophy proper but slightly. Two fundamental lines of thought were thus at this time visible the German dogmatic-metaphysical, and the English empirist-sceptical, with its dogmatic pendant, the French materialist.* These two principal lines met in Kant, and their respective doctrines were destined to be resolved in his critical crucible. Idealism and Materialism, supposed to be irreconcilable, were to be exhibited as merely diverse aspects of one problem, the solution of which, if to be found at all, must be sought for in a higher synthesis. Their respective pretensions to "pluck out the heart" of the mystery of existence were to be disposed of; dogmatism of every kind was to receive its death-blow, and the first real attempt (because the first which adequately recognised the strength of its position) be made to grapple with philosophic scepticism. Kant's system is comprised in three treatises, the 'Critique of the Pure Reason,' the Critique of the Practical Reason,' * Berkeleyan idealism and French materialism may be regarded equally as antithetical dogmatic offshoots of English Empiricism,