Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/653

 RETROSPECT. 631 nitz ; similarly the antithesis between the sensational- ism of Locke and Condillac and the rationalism of Spinoza and Leibnitz), but also a progressive deepening of prob- lems, mediated by party strife which puts every energy to the strain. What a tremendous step from the empiricism of Bacon to the skepticism of Hume, from the innate ideas of Descartes to the potential a priori of Leibnitz ! From the moment when the negative and positive culminations of the pre-Kantian movement in thought — Hume and Leib- nitz — came together in one mind, the conditions of the Kantian reform were given, just as the preparation for the Socratic reform had been given in the skepticism of the Sophists and the vov<i principle of Anaxagoras. Kant, who dominates the second period of modern philoso- phy down to the present time, is related to his predecessors in a twofold way. In his criticism he completes the noetical tendency, and at the same time overcomes naturalism, by limiting the mechanical explanation (and with it certain knowledge, it is true) to phenomena and opposing moral- ism to intellectualism. Nature must be conceived from the standpoint of the spirit (as its product, for all conformity to law takes its origin in the spirit), the spirit from the stand- point of the will. Metaphysics, as the theory of the a priori conditions of experience, is raised to the rank of a science, while the suprasensible is removed from the region of proof and refutation and based upon the rock of moral will. In the positive side of the Kantian philosophy — the spirit the law- giver of nature, the will the essence of spirit and the key to true reality — we find its kernel, that in it which is forever valid. The conclusions on the absolute worth of the moral disposition, on the ultimate moral aim of the world, on the intelligible character, and on radical evil, reveal the energy with which Kant took up the mission of furnishing the life- forces opened up by Christianity — which the Middle Ages had hidden rather than conserved under the crust of Aristotelian conceptions entirely alien to them, and the pre-Kantian period of modern times had almost wholly ignored — an entrance into philosophy, and of transform- ing and enriching the modern view of the world from this standpoint. Kant's position is as opposite and superior