Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/157

No. 2.] make an analysis of experience. It is far from a complete analysis (and this is where Kant fails us lamentably at the present day), but it is a considerable advance on the initial assumption that experience was given us by the senses, and as such needed no explanation. The senses, Kant has discovered by following up the problem of a priori knowledge, do not give us all that enters into what we call experience. They do not give us the relations of things. These are added by the understanding, which is the sole source of those principles of combination that render experience in its fullest sense possible. What experience is apart from this system of mind-given synthesis, in what sense if at all it can be spoken of, is a question that will meet us at a later stage. The point now to be emphasized is that Kant, in order to explain the possibility of an a priori knowledge of nature, forms a new conception of experience as a complex of sense materials ordered under categories of the understanding. These categories render experience in this sense possible. They also are the conditions of an a priori knowledge of nature. Accordingly, if you restrict your view to the transcendental deduction, you may say that Kant's problem is, indifferently, How are a priori synthetic judgments (about nature) possible? or, How is experience possible? But even then you will have to admit that the last question grows out of the first, that it comes into view in following up the first, and demands an answer only for the sake of the first. And when you extend your view to the other two parts of the Critique, to the æsthetic and dialectic, you see that they take no account of the second question, but devote themselves entirely to the determination of the possibility and validity of synthetic judgments a priori. Their problem is, What and how can reason alone know? This, therefore, remains the essential and actual, as it was also the historically and psychologically predetermined, problem of Kant's great Critique.

Not that from different points of view, and in different connexions, it may not be rendered variously even by Kant himself. And as, after the first edition of the Critique, Kant