KANT
14
KANT
ter. By tliis regularity and moderation he reached ful- ness of years with liealth, cheerfulness, and perfect se- renity. He seems to have been deficient in i)oetic sen- sibihty and poetic imajjinatiou. To this defect may be ascribed several imperfections in the exposition of his philosophy, and his total want of religious sentiment. Shortly before his death he declared that he had no de- terminate notion of a future state, but was inclined to believe in metempsychosis. This was the Haw in his mental and moral constitution which produced many flaws in his speculation.
Like his illustrious contemporary Hume, whom he sur\ived nearly thirty years, Kant Avas never married. He gave no '' hostages to fortune," but illustrated Ba- con's dictum, that " the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from unmarried or child- less men." Of the works constituting Kant's bequest to posterity, the most noted and important are those that expountl the " Critical Philosophy," and of this philoso- phy a brief notice remain.* to be given.
Philosophy — Kant's scheme of speculation is so com- prehensive, so extensive, so intricate, so systematic, so full of divisions and subdivisions, that it is impossible to attempt any complete summary of it within the limits al- lowed by this article. Not the fullest, but the most com- pact mode of exposition is required. Hence the notice of tlie numerous treatises not directly employed in the construction of the " Critical Philosophy" has been in- troduced into the biographical sketch. Hence, too, the reader wlio desires a formal outline of the system must be referred to some of the numerous synoptical views presented in German, French, English, and Latin. All that can be aimed at here will be to give a cursory ac- count of the distinctive peculiarities of Kant's scheme. To do this, it may suffice to explain his relation to pre- vious philosophy, to point out his characteristic method, and to note the cliief developments and applications of that method.
To show the exact relation of Kant to antecedent and contemporary modes of spocidation woidd require a detailed account of the fortunes of philosophy from Ba- con, and Gassondi, and Des Cartes. This is'more than has been attempted by Rosenkranz. It must suffice to state that in the middle of the 18th century the Wolfian deyeloiiment and systematization of the philosophy of Leibnitz was predominant in Germany; the scepticism of Hume perplexed and alarmed Britain ; and the mate- rialism of D'Alembert, Diderot, and Condillac was fash- ionable in France. The philosophy of Leibnitz was an effort to escape the pantheistic tendencies of Cartesian- ism as evolved in the idealism of Spinoza and the the- osophism of JNLalebranche. Hume's philosophy was the sceptical evolution of the sensationalism of Locke, gener- ated by the collision between the mechanicism of Hartley and the Pyrrhonism of Berkeley. The infidel doctrine of the school of the French Eiicyclopnsdia was the superfi- cial deduction of the French intellectual anarchists from the partial appreciation of the tenets of Locke, whose own princii>les were vague and incoherent. The prob- lem presented for solution was to find some ground of conciliation between all these divergent opinions, to de- tect and expose the fallacies on which they rested, to avoid the mischiefs caused or portended by them, and to discover a trustworthy and intelligible basis for human knowleilge. The situation was in many respects anal- ogous to that which characterized the Hellenic world at the time of Socrates. Kant undertook the investiga- tion of this arduous and urgent problem, and, like Soc- rates, he proceeded by the critical investigation of the nature of knowledge and of the intellectual faculties of man. By this procedure he was gradually led to the determination of the conditions of the problem, and to the discovery of a solution partially true, and which ap- peared to himself complete and irrefragable. In meta- physics the method is the philosophy, and Kant's jneth- od gave to his system the appropriate name of the Crit- ical I'hilosophy.
It must be remembered that Kant's early guide was Schultz, an earnest partisan of "Wolf; that Kant pro- ceeils from the Wolfian, that is, from the methodical LeibniJ;zian School; that he slowly emerges from the Wolfian circle, and that Wolfian characteristics may be traced throughout the whole construction of his scheme.
The response made by Leibnitz to the thesis of Locke
— " Nihil est in intellectu (juod non prius in sensu" a
dogma by no means Aristotle's, and only virtually Locke's —furnishes the key-note to the whole philosophy of Kant. " Nisi intellectus ipse," replied Leibnitz ; "thus distinguishing the faculty of thought from the impres- sions it receives, and offering a refutation at once of both the sceptical and the materialistic followers of Locke. The same just discernment may be found in Aristotle, though it has been little noticed (.1 nul/jt. Post. ii, xix). What was required was the discovery of some principle of intelligence, some interjiretation of the pro- cess of human thought, which woidd withdraw the mind of man from the arbitrary government of a ProA-idential compulsion, a blind necessity, or a mechanical regula- tion by material constitution or by external chance. Kant sought this principle in the constitution and limi- tations of the human mind. He analyzed the products and the processes of thought. He found that in every pcrcejition, in every judgment, in every generalization, the mind communicated something of its own to what was presented as the object of knowledge ; that in every apprehension, what was apprehended was moulded and determined by the intelligence which apprehended it. To use the language of the school, the form of knowl- edge was necessarily imposed by the constitution of the cognizant mind. This* seems to have been the doctrine of Aristotle (jriv ■ipi'XJjv tlvai totzov tlSuv, Be Anhn, iii, iv), and was deduced from his teachings by his scho- liast, Asclepius.