Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/223

 KANT'S ANTITHESIS OF DOGMATISM AND CRITICISM. 209 Kant, however, neither .fully grasps nor long remembers the significance and bearings of his own admissions ; and he attempts, furthermore, to save the originality of his doctrine by insisting upon two additional points in regard to these " judgments in which the predicates are inseparably connected with the subject, though not a part of its logical essence ". To these two points the whole distinction between the ' dog- matic ' and the ' critical ' method now reduces itself. (1) In the first place, Kant contends, Eberhard was wrong in regarding all judgments per attributa as synthetical. They may, he urges, be analytical ; the distinction between ' ana- lytic ' and ' synthetic ' runs, so to say, crosswise through them. Eberhard had supposed that any a priori judgment of which the predicate is an attributum expressing, in Kant's words, something necessarily belonging to the subject, " yet only as a rationatum of the essence, not the essence itself nor any part of it " is ipso facto shown to be synthetical in character. But in reality, Kant declares, "this shows no- thing more than that the predicate (mediately, it is true, yet still as a consequence of the principle of contradiction) is drawn out from (hergeleitet aus) the concept of the subject ; so that the proposition, notwithstanding the fact that it expresses an attributum, may still be analytic, and therefore lacks the distinguishing mark of a synthetical proposition ". In thus arguing that some judgments of this sort are ana- lytical, and are authorised by nothing less than the principle of contradiction, Kant commits himself to a still more thorough- going admission. He succeeds, indeed, in establishing a point of verbal opposition to Eberhard ; but he at the same time gives up all grounds of real opposition to the substance of, the Wolffian theory of a priori knowledge. For it now turns out that judgments in which, by virtue of some necessary connexion between the concepts, predicates (as Kant else- where puts it) are "developed out of" (entwickelt aus) the subject may be analytical, and have the sanction of "the highest principle of all analytical judgments ". But there is, as we have seen, nothing that Kant asserts more emphat- ically and more unequivocally than that all analytical judg- ments, involving the principle of contradiction, are valid a the concept (vom Begriffe unabtrennlich), and capable of being deduced from the essence of the concept as a necessary consequence thereof. Paulsen's error, however, is doubtless chiefly due to a characteristic awkwardness in Kant's own use of these technical terms. As Kant employs it, the term essentialia is not, as one would expect, the antonym to extra-essentialia, and the equivalent of ad essentiam pertinentia ; but is merely a species under the latter genus, the other species consisting of attributa.