Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/42

 Therefore, even if we are not in a position to recognise a single thing by itself, if our faculties of knowledge are in respect to that faculties of ignorance, we can yet recognise the real differences between things. These distinctions are no mere appearances, even if our conception of them is conveyed to us by means of appearances, they exist outside of us, and can be recognised by us, though only under certain forms.

Kant, on the other hand, was of opinion that not simply are space and time forms of conception for us, but that even the temporal and spacial differences of phenomena spring solely from our heads, and notify nothing real. If that were really so, then would all phenomena spring simply from our heads, since they all take the form of temporal and spacial differences, then we could know absolutely nothing about the world outside of us, not even that it existed. Given that a world outside of us exists then, owing to the ideality of space and time, our faculty of knowledge would be not an imperfect, one-sided mechanism which communicated to us only a one-sided knowledge of the world, but, of its kind, a complete mechanism, namely, one to which nothing was lacking to cut us off from all knowledge of the world. Certainly a mechanism which can hardly be described as a "faculty of knowledge."

Thus in spite of Kant's energetic attack on the mystical idealism of Berkeley, which he had hoped to replace by his own critical idealism, his criticism took a turn which nullified his own assumption that the world is real and only to be known through experience, and thus mysticism, cast out from the one side, found on the other a wide, triumphal doorway open, through which it can enter with a flourish of trumpets.

Kant assumed as his starting-point that the world is really external to us, and does not simply exist in our own heads, and that knowledge about it is only to be attained through experience. His philosophical achievement was to be the examination of the conditions of experience, of the boundaries of our knowledge. But just