Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/205

 202 Kierkegaard is a "subjective thinker" in the sense in which he used that word (in the book Unwissenschaftliche Nachschrift, 1846, Kierkegaard's chief philosophical work). The ideas of the subjective thinker are determined by the interplay of all the elements of psychic life,:—by emotion and reflection, by hope and fear, by tragic and comic moods. ''And this thinking takes place in the midst of the stream of life, whose boundaries we cannot see and whose direction we can never know, at least not in the fantastical and impersonal world of abstraction. Kierkegaard is the Danish Pascal, and his position in relation to the philosophy of his age possesses a certain analogy to Pascal's relation to Cartesianism.''—This predominantly personal character of his thought however does not preclude the possibility of his making valuable contributions to epistemology and ethics (or better, to a comparative philosophy of life) as he has actually done.

Sibbern had already observed that the fruitful ideas of Kant had not received their just dues at the hands of his successors. Kierkegaard renews the problem of knowledge with still greater definiteness, and declares that Hegel had not solved the Kantian problem. We can arrange our thoughts in logical order and elaborate a consistent system. It is possible to elaborate a logical system, but a finite thinker will never be able to realize a complete system of reality. We deduce the fundamental ideas from experience and experience remains forever imperfect. We understand only what has already taken place; ''knowledge comes after experience. We cognize towards the past—but we live towards the future. ''This opposition between the past and the future accounts for the tension of life and impresses us with the irrationality of being. The denial of the reality of time by abstract speculation