Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/538

524 The constant demand for keeping to experience in the course of ethical investigation, which characterizes Schopenhauer's procedure in The Basis of Morality, is in itself a welcome sign. He rightly insists that it is impossible for Kant's moral laws and imperatives to have any meaning at all, unless connected in some way with experience ; on the other hand, that it is impossible for them to have the least connection with experience, with actual human consciousness, without contradicting Kant's own standpoint and method. Kant's first and foremost error consists in the way he mapped out his campaign. And Schopenhauer, criticizing as he is Kant's fundamental point of view, is concerned first and foremost with his solution of the problem set in the Grundlegung: How can a moral philosophy be established on a purely a priori basis? The significant results which Kant does reach in his theory of morals by contradicting himself, only strengthen the argument against his own method. Schopenhauer is not intent on showing that no good can come out of Kant's ethics of obligation. His task is rather to show that Kant's attempted a priori basis of morality is inadequate and false.

The dialectical conclusions of the Critique of Pure Reason, having made impossible any phenomenal basis upon which 'practical principles' could be established, and having ruled out from experience all that endows man's aesthetic, ethical, and religious ideas and ideals with concrete significance, necessitated an over-experiential, an a priori formulation of the ethical problem, and an abstract method for its solution. The world of phenomena, which for Kant exhausts experience, is a material world of space and time, for which an immaterial soul is an empty phantom; a world of determinism and strict necessity, which allows of no 'freedom' to interfere with the inevitable sequence in the causal series, and of no absolute, unconditioned Being, no God conceived as its First Cause over and above experience. Kant's theoretical philosophy handed the entire world of phenomena over to the mechanical categories, and thus left the deepest concerns of man outside of the pale of experience, declaring Reality, the Ding-ansich, to be at best but a problematical notion, essentially