Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/289

 GOING BACK TO KANT. 277 is by Kant, still less is the synthesis involved in such knowledge explained by him. That is, it is assumed from the outset, not explained in its origin. Kant's problem was, How can we know a synthetical truth a priori and independent of experience ? Kant's answer is, that the synthesis lies in the knowing, and that in the process of experience we think it into nature. Very good : when we thus think it into nature in experience we can certainly extract it again from our experience of nature ; but the whole of this process is analytical. The real question is, Whence comes the synthesis in the first instance as it is in the intellect ? How can a thought go out from beyond itself to the thought of some- thing more than itself? How is the synthetic movement of thought to be accounted for? Kant only brings forward the synthesis in thought to explain the synthesis in fact, but the synthesis in itself either in thought or fact is unexplained. The same remarks apply to Kant's criteria of h priori knowledge, Necessity and Universality. However universal and necessary the knowledge in question may be, we repeat, Kant's theory of its origin makes it to be neither the one nor the other. In the first place the knowledge is not necessary. The judgments in which it is expressed are derived from the forms, categories and other elements which constitute for Kant the machinery of intellect, but that the machinery is so constituted is simply matter of fact. The only necessity involved is that of identity, viz., that the facts and relations involved in this machinery be permanent, i.e., the necessity of themselves being as they are when met in experience. Similarly with universality. Kant's a priori truths are not really universal, for they are only true of objects of experience. They do not apply to nouniena. And the reason is, because only in objects of experience can the forms of sense and notions of the understanding make themselves good. His universality is merely the recurrence of the same relation involved in our mental struc- ture. In other words, an a priori truth is in Kant only the same individual fact or relation in all cases and is in no true sense universal. It may be said that the nerve of these criticisms resides in what has been long ago observed and overcome, in the fact that Kant's system is individualistic, rests apparently upon empirical psychology, that its component parts seem to be taken by obser- vation from experience, that he has not deduced his categories from the act of thought but gathered them empirically from the forms of the proposition, that in short he was unacquainted with that dialectical movement of thought in itself which was dis- covered by Fichte and perfected by Hegel. Be it so. Let us see then what this dialectical movement is and what it can accom- plish ; whether it can give us synthesis and synthesis d, priori ; whether it can account for truths which shall be both universal and necessary. Now, in the first place, it is to be observed that the objection