Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/61

Rh which I am about to bring to your notice, will be found, I hope, to yield an answer to these questions.

The disintegration of philosophy seemed to have reached a crisis when, towards the middle of the last century, Hume declared that he could frame no idea whatever of power, or of the causal nexus, either between things or thoughts, except so far as custom or habit, founded on a de facto but quite inexplicable order of events, was a partial explanation of the latter. For himself, he said, he should continue thinking, because he enjoyed the exercise, but as to thereby reaching anything like truth, of that he saw little or no hope. This was virtually a challenge to the conception of substantial agency ; Hume virtually taxed it with being an unfounded assumption.

The crisis thus marked issued in a more complete disintegration of philosophy than before, a result which seems at present to justify Hume's position, and entitle him at least to the glory of being a true prophet, far in advance of his age. For, as I need not remind you, there stepped forward now some hundred years ago, to meet on the one hand the growing disintegration and scepticism, of which Hume was the chief mouth-piece, and at the same time, 011 the other hand, to disintegrate still farther that offshoot of Scholasticism which was then current in Germany, the Leibniz-Wolfian philosophy, that man from whom the modern period of philosophy is dated, Immanuel Kant. He is generally supposed to have gone to the very root of matters. He made it his first question—How is experience itself possible? He thought he had laid the foundations of philosophy in an enduring manner. In this there were many who agreed with him, particularly Germans, and several of them, together with others who were not Germans, proceeded to build on the Kantian foundations. But with what result up to the present time? Si documentum requiris, eireuuupice. Philosophies are legion, philosophy nowhere. Kant indeed disintegrated the Leibniz-Wolfian system, but, to judge by the results hitherto, he did not lay the positive foundations for a philosophy capable of commanding universal assent.

If we ask for the causes of this second, post-Kantian, disintegration, the answer may be given in a single word Assumptions. The Critick of Pure Reason contains several assumptions. One is, that the various forms of judgment specified in the Aristotelian logic are immediately and severally derived from processes essential to the thinking faculty. Kant built on this assumption by making it the key to his theory of the twelve Categories. With what result? Why,