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ENGLISH IDEALISM] not a Kantian view; and it is necessary to correct two confusions of Kant and Hegel, which have been imported with Hegelianism by Green and Caird. Ferrier was aware that in Kant’s system “there is no common nature in all intelligence” (Lectures, ii. 568). Green, on the other hand, in deducing his own conclusion that the world is, or is a system of, one eternal intelligence, incautiously put it forward as “what may be called broadly the Kantian view” (Prolegomena, § 36), and added that he follows Kant “in maintaining that a single active conscious principle, by whatever name it be called, is necessary to constitute such a world, as the condition under which alone phenomena, i.e. appearances to consciousness, can be related to each other in a single universe” (§ 38). He admitted, however, that Kant also asserted, beyond this single universe of a single principle, a world of unknowable things in themselves, which is a Kantian not a Hegelian world. But Caird endeavoured to break down even

this second barrier between Kant and Hegel. According to Caird, Kant “reduces the inaccessible thing in itself (which he at first speaks of as affecting our sensibility) to a noumenon which is projected by reason itself” (Essays, ii. 405); and in the Transcendental Dialectic, which forms the last part of Kant’s Kritik, the noumenon becomes the object of an intuitive understanding “whose thought,” says Caird, “is one with the existence of the objects it knows” (ibid. 412, 413). Kant, then, as interpreted by English Hegelians, already believed, before Hegel, that there is one intelligence common to all individuals, and that a noumenon is a thought of this common intelligence, “an ideal of reason”; so that Kant was trying to be a Hegelian, holding that the world has no being beyond the thoughts of one intelligence. But history repeats itself; and these same two interpretations of Kant had already been made in the lifetime of Kant by Fichte, in the two Introductions to the “Wissenschaftslehre,” which he published in his Philosophical Journal in 1797. Now, the curious fact is, that Kant himself wrote a most indignant letter, dated 7th August 1799 (Kant’s Werke, ed. Hartenstein, viii. 600–601), on purpose to repudiate all connexion with Fichte. Fichte’s “Wissenschaftslehre,” he said, is a completely untenable system, and a metaphysics of fruitless apices, in which he disclaimed any participation; his own Kritik he refused to regard as a propaedeutic to be construed by the Fichtian or any other standpoint, declaring that it is to be understood according to the letter; and he went so far as to assert that his own critical philosophy is so satisfactory to the reason, theoretical and practical, as to be incapable of improvement, and for all future ages indispensable for the highest ends of humanity. After this letter it cannot be doubted that Kant not only differed wholly from Fichte, both about the synthetic unity of apperception and about the thing in itself, but also is to be construed literally throughout. When he said that the act of consciousness “I think,” is in allem Bewusstsein ein und dasselbe, he meant, as the whole context shows, not that it is one in all thinkers, but only that it accompanies all my other ideas and is one and the same in all my consciousness, while it is different in different thinkers. Though again in the Transcendental Dialect he spoke of pure reason conceiving “ideals” of noumena, he did not mean that a noumenon is nothing but a thought arising only through thinking, or projected by reason, but meant that pure reason can only conceive the “ideal” while, over and above the “ideal” of pure reason, a noumenon is a real thing, a thing in itself, which is not indeed known, but whose existence is postulated by practical reason in the three instances of God, freedom, and immortality. Consequently, Kant’s explanation of the unity of a thing is that there is always one thing in itself causing in us many phenomena, which as understood by us are objectively valid for all our consciousnesses. What Kant never said and what his whole philosophy prevented his saying, was that a single thing is a single thought of a single consciousness; either of men, as in Fichte’s philosophy, or of God and man, as in Hegel’s. The passage from Kant to Hegel attempted by Green, and the harmony of Kant and Hegel attempted by Green and Caird, are unhistorical, and have caused much confusion of thought. The success, therefore, of the works of Green and Caird must stand or fall by their Hegelianism, which has indeed secured many adherents, partly metaphysical and partly theological. Among the former we may mention W. Wallace, the translator of most of Hegel’s Encyklopädie, who had previously learnt Hegelianism from Ferrier; W. H. Fairbrother, who has written a faithful account of The Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green (1896); R. L. Nettleship, D. G. Ritchie, J. H. Muirhead, J. S. Mackenzie, and J. M. E. M‘Taggart, who closes his acute Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901) with “the possibility of finding, above all knowledge and volition, one all-embracing unity, which is only not true, only not good, because all truth and all goodness are but distorted shadows of its absolute perfection—‘das Unbegreifliche, weil es der Begriff selbst ist.’&#8198;”

There are still to be mentioned two English Hegelians, who have not confused Kant and Hegel as Green did: namely, Simon Somerville Laurie (1829–1909) and F. H. Bradley (b. 1846), fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

Laurie wrote Metaphysica, nova et vetusta, a Return to Dualism, by Scotus Novanticus (1884; 2nd ed., enlarged, 1889). His attitude to Green is expressed towards the end of his book, where he says: “The more recent argument for God which resolves itself into the necessity of a self-distinguishing one basis to which nature as a mere system of relations must be referred, is

simply the old argument of the necessity for a First Cause dressed up in new clothes. Not by any means an argument to be despised, but stopping short of the truth through an inadequate analytic of knowledge.” His aim is to remedy this defect by psychology, under the conviction that a true metaphysics is at bottom psychology, and a true psychology fundamentally metaphysics. His psychology is founded on a proposed distinction between “attuition” and reason. His theory of “attuition,” by which he supposes that we become conscious of objects outside ourselves, is his “return to dualism,” and is indeed so like natural realism as to suggest that, like Ferrier, he starts from Hamilton to end in Hegel. As, however, he does not suppose that we have a direct perception of something resisting the organism, such as Hamilton maintained, it becomes necessary to state exactly what he means by “attuition.” It is, according to him, something more than sensation, but less than perception; it is common to us with lower animals such as dogs; its operation consists in co-ordinating sensations into an aggregate which the subject throws back into space, and thereby has a consciousness of a total object outside itself, e.g. a stone or a stick, a man or a moon. He carries its operation before reason still farther, supposing that “attuition” makes particular inferences about outside objects, and that a man, or a dog, through association “attuites” sequence and invariableness of succession, and, in fact, gets as far in the direction of causation as Hume thought it possible to go at all. Laurie’s view is that a dog who has no higher faculty than “attuition,” can go no farther; but that a man goes farther by reason. He thinks that “attuition” gives us consciousness of an object, but without knowledge, and that knowledge begins with reason. His theory of reason brings him into contact with the German idealists: he accepts from Kant the hypothesis of synthesis and a priori categories, from Fichte the hypothesis that will is necessary to reason, from Schelling and Hegel the hypothesis of universal reason, and of an identity between the cosmic reason and the reason of man, in which he agrees also with Green and Caird. But he has a peculiar view of the powers of reason; that (1) under the law of excluded middle it states alternatives, A or B or C or D; (2) under the law of contradiction it negates B, C, D; (3) under the law of sufficient reason it says “therefore”; and (4) under the law of identity it concludes, A is A. In working out this process he supposes that reason throws into consciousness a priori categories, synthetic predicates a priori, or, as he also calls them, “dialectic percepts.” Of these the most important is cause, of which his theory, in short, is that by this a priori category and the process of reason we go on from sequence to consequence; first stating that an effect may be caused by several alternatives, then negating all but one, next concluding that this one as sufficient reason is cause, and finally attaining the necessity of the causal nexus by converting causality into identity, e.g. instead of “Fire burns wood,” putting “Fire is comburent, wood is combustible.” Lastly, while he agrees with Kant about a priori categories, he differs about the knowledge to be got out of them. Kant, applying them only to sensations, concluded that we can know nothing beyond by their means. But Laurie, applying them to “attuitions” of objects outside, considers that, though they are “reason-born,” yet they make us know the objects outside to which they are applied. This is the farthest point of his dualism, which suggests a realistic theory of knowledge, different in process from Hamilton’s, but with the same result. Not so: Laurie is a Hegelian, using Kant’s categories, as Hegel did, to argue that they are true not only of thoughts but of things; and for the same reason, that things and thoughts are the same. At first in his psychology he speaks of the “attuition”