Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/94

Rh METAPHYSIC before us as the goal of an ideal psychology, to which we may approximate in so far as we can trace unity of faculty through all the differences of mental phenomena, but to which we can never attain owing to the nature of the matter with which we deal. Again, in our scientific attempts to explain our external experience, the unity of reason takes the form of an idea of the world as a completed infinite whole, which contains all the objects known to us and all other possible objects ; but this cannot be realized in an experience which is conditioned by space and time, and is, therefore, ever incomplete. The idea of totality is, therefore, an ideal, which guides and stimulates our scientific progress, without which such a thing as science could not exist, but which at the same time can never be realized by science. Lastly, the unity of reason takes a third form in which identity and totality are combined, as the idea of a unity in which all differences, even the difference of subject and object, are transcended, the idea of a unity of all things with each other and with the mind that knows them. This idea also is one which science can neither surrender nor realize. It cannot surrender it without giving up that striving after unity without which science would not exist ; and it cannot realize it, for the difference between the world, as it is presented to us in actual experience, and the subjective determination of our thinking consciousness cannot be overcome. We can, indeed, use the idea that the world is an organic whole, determined in relation to an end which consciousness sets for itself, as an heuristic principle to guide us in following the connexion of things with each other ; but, as we cannot by means of any such idea anticipate what the facts of external experience will be, so we cannot prove that for a mind other than ours the unity of things which we repre sent in this way might not take a quite different aspect. Indeed we have reason to think it would ; for, while we always think of a designing mind as using materials which have an existence and nature independent of the purposes to which they are put, the absolute mind must be conceived as creating the materials themselves by the same act whereby they are determined to an end. We must con ceive it, in short, as an intuitive understanding for which end and means, objective and subjective, are one, or, in other words, as an intelligence whose consciousness of itself is or contains the existence of all that is object for it. This new view of the things in themselves as noumena or ideals of reason involves a new attitude of thought towards them different from that dogmatic attitude which is provisionally adopted in the Analytic. Accordingly, we now find Kant speaking of them, not as things which exist independently of their being conceived, but as &quot;prob lematical conceptions &quot; of which we cannot even determine whether they correspond to any objects at all. They are &quot; limitative &quot; notions which have a negative value, in so far as they keep open a vacant space beyond experience, but do not enable us to fill that space with any positive realities. They are like dark lanterns which cast light upon the empirical world, and show what are its boundaries, but leave their own nature in obscurity. All that we can say of the noumenal self or subject is that it corresponds to the unity implied in all knowledge, but whether there is such a self, independent of the process of empirical synthesis and the self-consciousness which accompanies that process, we cannot tell. All that we can say of the noumenal reality of the objective world is that it corresponds to the idea of the objects of experience as a completed whole in them- .selves apart from the process whereby we know them, but whether there is any such real world independent of the process of experience it is impossible to say. Lastly, all that we can say of God is that He corresponds to the idea of the unity of all things with the mind that knows them, an ideal which is involved in all knowledge, but whether the realization of this idea in an intuitive understanding is even possible we have no means of determining, how ever we may suspect that understanding and sensibility are &quot; branches springing from the same unknown root.&quot; The Criticism of Pure Reason ends, therefore, in a kind of seesaw between two forms of consciousness a thinking consciousness, which transcends experience and sets before us an idea of absolute reality, but which cannot attain to any knowledge or even certitude of any object corresponding to this idea, and an empirical conscious ness, which gives us true knowledge of its objects, but whose objects are determined as merely phenomenal and not absolutely real. The equipoise thus maintained between the empirical and the intelligible world is, however, in the Critique of Practical Reason, overbalanced in favour of the latter. What the theoretical reason could not do &quot;in that it was weak through the flesh,&quot; through its dependence on the very empirical consciousness which it sought to transcend, is possible to the practical reason, because it is primarily determined by itself. In our moral consciousness we find ourselves under a law which calls upon us to act as beings who are absolutely self-determined or free, and which, therefore, assures us that our intelligible self is our real self, and conclusively determines our empirical self in contrast with it as phenomenal. Thus the moral law gives reality to the intelligible world ; or, as Kant expresses it, &quot; the idea of an intelligible world is a point of view beyond the phenomenal which the reason sees itself compelled to take up, in order to think of itself as practical.&quot; In other words, the moral law presupposes freedom or determination in the rational being as such, and makes him regard him self, not merely as a link in the chain of conditioned existences in time and space, but as the original source of his own life. The blank space beyond the phenomenal thus begins to be filled up by the idea of a free causality which again postulates a world adequate and conform able to itself. And the man who, as an empiric individu ality, is obliged to regard himself merely as an individual being determined by other individual beings and things is authorized as a moral being to treat this apparent necessity as having its reality in freedom, and to look upon himself as the denizen of a spiritual world where nothing is determined for him from without which is not simply the expression of his own self-determination from within. &quot;Thus we have found, what Aristotle could not find, a fixed point on which reason can set its lever, not in any present or future world, but in its own inner idea of freedom, a point fixed for it by the immovable moral law, as a secure basis from which it can move the human will, even against the opposition of all the powers of nature.&quot; x Starting from this idea of freedom, therefore, Kant proceeds to reconstruct for faith the unseen world, which in the Critiqiie of Pure Reason he had denied as an object of knowledge. Nor is he content to leave the two worlds in sharp antithesis to each other, but even in the Critique of Practical Reason, and still more in the Critique of Judgment, he brings them into relation to each other, and so gives to theoretical reason a kind of authority to use for the explanation of the phenomenal world those ideas which of itself it might be inclined to regard as illusive. In all this, however, it is difficult to avoid seeing a partial retractation of Kant s first viewas to the irreconcilable opposition of the phenomenal and the noumenal. For, in the first place, the moral imperative is addressed to a self 1 Kant, i. 638 (Rosenkranz s edition).