Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/148

132 effecting of a reconcilement which expresses an important part of the mission of both.

And this thought leads us into a domain that is larger than the psychological, even where psychology as an empirical science and as the philosophy of the Self unite to extend and to cultivate this domain. There is a problem which lies behind and underneath all the assumptions of the Kantian criticism, and which, when answered, profoundly modifies all the conclusions of this criticism. This problem may be brought before the reflective thinker in the form of the following question: What is it in human experience that has ontological value? To this question, neither the scepticism and agnoticism of Kant, nor that of his forerunners or followers in the same line, proposes a wholly satisfactory answer. In the Critique of Pure Reason it is assumed that those formal, or a priori, or pure ways of the functioning of intellect, which bear the marks of universality and necessity, alone impart objectivity to the experience of man. But this objectivity has no ontological value, in the stricter meaning of the word, whether for things or for the Ego itself. The intellect creates a system of phenomenal actualities; but it affords no cognition that penetrates the reality of either the Self, or the World, or the Absolute. The answer to this same question which is given in the Critique of Practical Reason, as Kant himself understood it, whatever his admiring apologists may claim, does not depart in respect of his fundamental positions one hair's breadth from the point established in the earlier work. But it does claim to show that the moral law, as it appears in consciousness and calls forth the feelings of obligation to and respect for itself, not only justifies but demands that we should act as though certain ideals of human reason had the desired ontological value.

Now it is just this perplexing, this apparently contradictory character of the assumptions with which Kant answers the inquiry, What is it in human experience that has ontological value? which has prevented his philosophy from doing more than it has done to fulfill for the last century the truest and highest mission of philosophy. No one, indeed, ever conceived of that mission more nobly than did he, when he defined his own