Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/286

 274 GEOEGE J. STOKES : cal, biological, moral, and social sciences represent so many phases of a continuous process, which advances from the simple to the complex. Social phenomena presuppose thought and sensation, these presuppose life, life presupposes physical and chemical conditions, physical and chemical facts presuppose mathematical conditions, time, space, and quantity, which are simply the most vague and general conditions of existence. In this series of an increasing complexity, and of a decreasing comprehensiveness, it would be folly to imagine that the superior sciences could exist before the inferior sciences were constituted. But quantitative determination exists only in mathematics, and to some extent in physics. It has not yet pene- trated into biology. How, then, could it have attained to the moral and social sciences ? It is, perhaps, doubtful if it will ever reach them." As we understand M. Eibot, he would make Mathematics not concomitant, but constitutive, with the sciences ; and this is also the opinion, if we mistake not, of W. K. Clifford. This principle of aggregates, which ve have sought to apply on a suggestive principle in the classification of the sciences, does, of course, assume ordinary scientific realism, and rests upon ordi- nary inductive interpretation. It is according to the ascending method in philosophy, the method of working up to man, rather than the descending method, that of working out and down from man, and it is subject to all the defects of that method; still the principle is, we believe, fertile and suggestive. GOING BACK TO KANT. By GEORGE J. STOKES. In the present day a cry is frequently raised, that it is neces- sary to go back to Kant. The later German philosophers appear to many to have led into a visionary realm of fiction, a region of absolute illusionism. But from the idealistic extravagance of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Kant is free. His world has a solid basis of given fact supporting it, and the reader feels that he is on terra firma. It is scarcely worth inquiring whether this con- viction does not rest more on instinct than insight. A more im- portant question is, whether it admits of justification. Can we retain the first principle of the Kantian philosophy and at the same time maintain the existence of a thing-in-itself distinct from and over against thought upon which thought in experience depends ? The answer must be Yes and No. If we accept the fundamental thought of the Kantian Philosophy, the principle upon which he explains the possibility of a priori synthesis, as that principle //'/* been stated by Kant, then it is perfectly true that the Critical Philosophy is no possible halting-place of thought and we must advance to the full development of the idealistic principle from which it starts. But if, on the other hand, we modify the funda- mental thought of Kant by demonstrating the presence of the