ideals, by emphasizing the separation between these and scientific knowledge. And the separation can be effected by insisting, with Kant, upon the entirely phenomenal character of the world which knowledge gives us. So far as our human understandings are able to penetrate, we can reach no more than conditioned objects in space and time; science and its laws represent here the final word. But we are more than thinking beings. And if we once recognize that the processes of thought do not sum up in any final way the inner nature of the universe, then there is left the possibility of a realm in which these other sides of our nature may find a refuge, undisturbed by the fear of contradiction from reason. It is true that we must people this realm, not with objects of knowledge in the strict sense, but rather with ideals, symbols, constructs of the creative imagination. God is a term of poetry, not of science. But though we cannot suppose that these ideals of ours are in any sense literal copies of what really exists, still we may have faith that the real world is not hostile to our aspirations, but rather is in some true way symbolized in them - a faith which the scientific reason cannot throw doubt upon, since we now are moving in a sphere to which reason cannot hope to attain.

We are left, then, with a gap between the results of reason and the postulates of the spiritual life. Kant himself recognized to some extent the unsatisfactoriness of this complete separation, and in a third work, the Critique of Judgment, he tried to make it a little less absolute. There are two facts in particular which seem to suggest that the world in space and time, and the ideal world, the world of purpose and meaning, are after all not so divorced from one another as the previous results might go to show. In the aesthetic experience, where the natural world shows itself, alike in the beautiful object, and in the workings of artistic genius, in unconscious harmony with the ideal requirements of the mind; and in the biological organism, where we find ourselves constrained to use the concept of

end, or teleology, in any adequate definition, we have suggestions of an inner unity and identity. But with Kant these facts, though they are suggestive, do not lead to any real reconstruction of his position. Such judgments still represent no objective reality; they cannot be imported into the absolutely real world in their human form.

A criticism of Kant cannot be attempted here. But there is one distinction to which attention may be called — a distinction implied in his contrast between God as an object of reason, and God as a postulate. What Kant has most convincingly shown is, that God cannot be demonstrated conclusively, in the rationalistic fashion, by merely extending the use of the abstract categories which introduce order into our experience. But even though we cannot demonstrate God, it is possible that we might attain to a reasonable belief in him by another path. We might avail ourselves of the process of analogical reasoning; we might, that is, reach a probable knowledge about the nature of the real world, by using the analogy of the human self, the human experience, which we know, without pretending that our proof possesses theoretical necessity. And yet, unless we subscribe to the rationalistic prejudice, which Kant shares, that nothing is knowledge unless it bears the stamp of certainty, we should still be moving in the sphere of mind and of the intellectual processes. The use of the analogy will no doubt be backed by other than theoretical needs; but still it will not thereby be cut off absolutely from the life of reason.

If, then, we admit that reason is not confined to the field of demonstration, the question that may still be asked is this is the nature of the human self, and human experience, such that it can be applied intelligibly and without self-contradiction to the idea of God? Granted that our belief in God is probable rather than demonstrative knowledge, and granted, also, that it cannot be used to explain the particular facts of the world, but only to interpret its general nature, is it still not possible that the

idea has an intelligible content, is capable of being thought by the human mind? This is a question to which Kant's answer is much less clear and convincing than it might be. That science and its laws cannot be regarded as a final statement about the world, that there is possible an inner and more intimate interpretation, and that here the needs of the spiritual life have a right to play their part in determining our attitude— to have shown this, may be regarded as Kant's most solid achievement. In what terms we have a right to talk about this inner reality, and in what relation it stands to the laws of the phenomenal world, are, on the contrary, questions left by Kant in a shape which can hardly be regarded as final

LITERATURE

Kant, Chief Works: Critique of Pure Reason (1781); Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic (1783); Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785); Critique of Practical Reason (1788); Critique of Judgment (1790); Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason (1794). Translations: Meiklejohn (Critique of Pure Reason); Max Müller (Critique of Pure Reason); Watson (Selections); Abbott (Critique of Practical Reason); Bernard (Critique of Judgment); Mahaffy and Bernard (Prolegomena); Goerrvitz (Dreams of a Spirit Seer); Hastie (Kant's Cosmogony); Carus (Prolegomena); Semple (Metaphysic of Ethics).

Mahaffy and Bernard, Paraphrase and Commentary.

Stirling, Text Book to Kant.

Wenley, An Outline Introductory to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Abbott, Kant's Theory of Ethics.

Caird, Critical Philosophy of Kant.

Adamson, Philosophy of Kant.

Wallace, Kant.

Fischer, Kant.

Schurman, Philosophical Review, 1898, 1900.

Schurman, Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution.

Watson, Kant and his English Critics.

Seth, From Kant to Hegel.

Seth, Scottish Philosophy.
Jackson, Seneca and Kant.

Stuckenberg, Life of Kant.

Sidgwick, Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant.
Paulsen, Immanuel Kant.

Everett, Fichte's Science of Knowledge.

Watson, Schelling's Transcendental Idealism.

Porter, Kant's Ethics.

Morris, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Green, Lectures.

§ 37. The Idealistic Development. Fichte and

Schelling

1. The Idealistic Development.- In order to understand the point of view of the development of Idealism in Germany, it will be well to try to distinguish two different attitudes that may be adopted with reference to the term thought,' or reason.' We may, on the one hand, regard thought as the work of some individual thinker. Thinking thus becomes a fact of psychology, something distinct from other realities which exist alongside of it. And this conception of thought as 'thinking' is a natural, and indeed an inevitable one. We commonly should incline to say that there can be no thought which some one does not think. Now when Kant speaks of thought, he certainly has at times this in his mind - thought as a way in which human beings conceive the world. It is only from this standpoint that his distinction between phenomena and noumena, and his consequent agnosticism with reference to things in themselves, have any basis. It is only thought as human thought, that can differ from reality.

But meanwhile, the more immediate result of Kant's work was in a different direction. There is a broader way in which we may take the term 'thought.' We may think of it, namely, on the side of its content, as the system of rational knowledge, which includes all that is capable of being known. From this standpoint, the individual thinker is only one among a vast number of objects of knowledge; he is part of a rational universe which extends far beyond

him. This attitude also is to be found in Kant. His criticism of knowledge is not, or does not intend to be, a matter primarily of psychology. It is rather a logical inquiry into knowledge as a systematic structure, abstracted from its connection with particular individuals. It attempts, that is, to criticise each factor in knowledge by reference to its place in a connected rational whole, as a necessary element in a wider unity, rather than by reference to the relation of any particular man's thought to an external prototype.

Now it is this second attitude which is adopted by the German Idealists. The connection of thought with the psychological human self is almost entirely ignored. The Self, or Ego, means for the Idealists not the individual 'me,' but the unitary system of thought. One result is that things in themselves immediately drop away. The difficulties in connection with the thing-in-itself are evident. If it is unknowable, what right have we to say anything about it? Kant had tended to look upon it as the cause of our sense experience; but causation applies only within experience, not to the noumenal world. Why not, then, simply let it drop away as a contradiction in terms, which serves absolutely no useful end? Do we consider it necessary in order to furnish the content of knowledge? But the attempt to explain knowledge from what is not knowledge is pure dogmatism, and no explanation at all; whereas, from the other side, as Kant has shown, things may readily be explained as the construction of thought, through the use of the categories.

Reality, then, is the reality of experience, or thought, and not something that lies beyond. And the problem of philosophy is to point out the systematic and logically interdependent character of thought. The starting-point for this development was the gaps left in Kant's theory of knowledge. Kant's endeavor, as we have seen, had been to trace back all experience to the synthetic unity of the self; but he had failed to bring about a complete unifi