Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/95

Rh which is at one and the same time regarded in both characters, and which is called upon to subsume under the moral law acts which otherwise derive their character and meaning from the relations of the phenomenal world. That the particular nature of men as phenomenal individuals can be the means of realizing the universal law of reason is implied in all Kant s statements of the latter, and particu larly in his conception of men as constituting together a &quot; kingdom of ends &quot;; for it is difficult to conceive this kingdom otherwise than as an organic unity of society, in Avhich each individual, by reason of his special tendencies and capacities, has a definite office to fulfil in realizing the universal principle that binds all the members of the kingdom to each other. The summum bonum, again, is said to consist in the union of happiness with goodness, i.e., of the empirical conditions of man s individual life as a sensible subject with the pure self-determination of the intelligible self ; and God is postulated as a Dem ex machina to bind together these two unrelated elements, a conception which shows the difficulty into which Kant has brought himself by defining them as unrelated. Still more obvious is the effort of Kant to get beyond the dualism of his first view of things in the Critique of Judgment. For in that work he maintains that the con sciousness of the beautiful and the sublime is or involves a harmony of the understanding or the reason with sense ; i and, what is still more important, he points out that the idea of organic unity, without which we cannot explain the ; phenomena of life, contains in it a possibility of the recon ciliation of freedom and necessity, of the intelligible and the phenomenal. This idea, he argues, we are authorized by our moral consciousness to apply to the whole course of the things in the phenomenal world, and so to regard it as a process to realize the moral ideal. No doubt he again partially retracts this view when he declares that we must treat the idea of final causality as merely a subjective principle of judgment, which, even in the case of living beings, is to be regarded only as necessary for us as finite intelligences. But such saving clauses, in which Kant recurs to the dualism with which he started, cannot hide from us how near he has come to the renunciation of it. When we regard Kant in this way as asserting from one point of view an absolute limit which from another point of view he permits us to transcend, it becomes obvious that his philosophy is in an unstable equilibrium, which cannot but be disturbed by any one who attempts to develop or even to restate his ideas. Hence we need not wonder that those who take in earnest his denunciations of any attempt to transcend experience generally, like Professor Huxley, reject as worthless all Kant s later work; and that, on the other side, those who take in earnest his ideas of freedom, of organic unity, of an intuitive under standing, and of a summum bonum in which freedom and necessity meet together, are compelled to break through the arbitrary line which he drew between knowledge and belief. In favour of the former course it is easy in many places to appeal to the letter of Kant. In favour of the latter it need only be pointed out that, in Kant s view, all experience rests upon, or is in its development guided by, those ideas which yet he will not permit us to treat as sources of knowledge. Hence the principles of the Critique cannot legitimately be used against metaphysic, except by those who are prepared to admit the ideas of reason, up to the point to which he admits them, as ideas that limit and direct our experience, while rejecting all use of them to cast light upon that which is beyond experience. In other words, they must maintain the possibility of a purely negative knowledge, of the knowledge of a limit by one who yet cannot go beyond it. They must show how we can have an ideal of knowledge which enables us to criticize 85 experience without enabling us to transform it ; they must show how ideas of the supersensible can so far be present to our thought as to make visible the boundaries of the prison of sense in which we are confined, without in any way enabling us to escape from it. Is this possible 1 ? We may gather up the Kantian antithesis in the assertion that experience is the imperfect realization of an ideal of knowledge, derived from reason, with materials, derived from sense and understanding, the nature of which is such that they can never be brought into correspondence with the ideal. But this ideal, in all its three forms, as we have seen, is simply the idea of a pure unity or identity in which all differences are lost or dissolved whether they be the differences of the inner or of the outer life, or finally the difference of inner and outer, subjective and objective, from each other. Kant s view therefore is, in effect, this, that thought carries with it the consciousness of an identity or unity, to which our actual experience in none of its forms fully corresponds. On the other hand, Kant does not hesitate equally to con demn the identity of thought as &quot;empty&quot; and subjective, because it does not contain in itself nor can evolve from itself the complex matter of experience. But this alternate condemnation of experience as unreal from the point of view of the ideas, and of the ideas as unreal from the point of view of experience, seems to show that both are unreal, as being abstract elements, which have no value save in their relation to each other, and which lose all their mean ing when separated from the unity to which they belong. According to this view, ideas and experience, noumena and phenomena, if they are opposed, are also necessarily related to each other. If our empirical consciousness of the world of objects in space and time, as determined by the categories, does not correspond to the unity or identity of thought which is our ideal of knowledge, yet that idea of unity or identity is set up by thought in relation to experience, and cannot, therefore, be essentially irrecon cilable with it. The two terms may be opposed, but their opposition cannot be absolute, seeing that they are in essential relation to each other. It is a great logical error not to discern that a negative relation is still a relation, i.e., that it has a positive unity beyond it. This positive unity may not, indeed, be consciously present to us in our immediate apprehension of the relation in question, but it is necessarily implied in it. Now it is just because, in his separation of noumena and phenomena, Kant omits to note their essential relativity that he is forced to regard the former as a set of abstract identities of which nothing can be known, and the latter as the imperfect products of a synthesis which can never be completed or brought to a true unity. Yet the value of his whole treatment of the ideas of reason in relation to our intellectual and moral experience arises from the fact that in practice he does not hold to this abstract separation of the two elements. Ideas absolutely incommensurable with experience could neither stimulate nor guide our empirical synthesis ; they could not even be brought into any connexion with it. When, therefore, Kant brings them into this connexion, he necessarily alters their meaning. Hence the pure abstract identity which excludes all difference is changed, in its application, into the idea of an organic unity, of which the highest type is found in self-consciousness, with its trans parent difference of the subjective and objective self. It would be absurd and meaningless to say that science seeks to reduce experience to an abstract identity, in which there is no difference, unless for this were tacitly substituted what is really an entirely different proposition, that science seeks to find in the infinitely diversified world of space and time that unity in difference of which self-consciousness has in itself the pattern. It is in reference to the former kind