Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/170

156 contains originally the principles of various notions and doctrines." Whoever, therefore, denies the universality and necessity of judgments, whether the so-called vérités de fait or the vérités de raison, must find Kant's Critique in large part superfluous and irrelevant. This was felt alike by early Kantians and anti-Kantians. If there are no a priori principles either within experience or apart from it, what, in all the world, is the use of an inquiry into their origin, extent, and validity? And followers like Metz and Reinhold were free to admit that the actuality of universal and necessary knowledge and experience was nowhere demonstrated by Kant, for whom it was, on the other hand, simply an assumption, a petitio principii as Herbart did not hesitate later to describe it. No wonder, then, if Selle and other empiricists poured their concentrated attacks upon this weak point, till even Kant himself became conscious of the danger. His reply, which is contained in the preface of the Critique of Practical Reason, is remarkable only as evidence of Kant's incapacity to put himself at the objectors' point of view. He simply repeats in a self-confident tone his unproven assertion of the existence of a priori knowledge. "What worse," he exclaims, "could happen to these our efforts than that somebody should make the unexpected discovery that there is no a priori knowledge at all, and can be none. But there is no ground for anxiety. That would be to prove by reason that there is no reason. For we say that we know anything by reason only when we are conscious that we could have known it, even if it had not been given us in experience; so that knowledge through reason and knowledge a priori are the same. To wish to squeeze necessity out of a proposition taken from experience (ex pumice aquam) or to find in it true universality .... is downright contradiction. To substitute for objective necessity, which is found only in a priori judgments, subjective necessity or custom is to deny to reason the faculty of making assertions about the object, that is, of knowing it and what belongs to it. Thence it would follow, for example, that you could not say, in the case