Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/94

80 with outward things, but am busy with myself. I have found that the will is free, and that not happiness, but worthiness, is the end of our being." It is particularly fortunate, too, that a translation of the Kritik of the Æsthetical Judgment should have appeared at this time, when there seems to be a revival of interest in Esthetics throughout the English-speaking world. For what Kant has done in this field is scarcely less important historically than the results which he reached in his Critiques of the theoretical and practical reason. To quote from Eduard von Hartmann: "Kant's achievements in the domain of Æsthetics call for our fullest admiration. They prove that empirical material is not essential to the inductions of a great thinker. For Kant had seen and heard little of art, but nevertheless became the founder of scientific æsthetics. All the more important theories which are represented in modern æsthetics are foreshadowed in Kant's system, although partly only in embryo. The Æthetical Formulism of Herbert and his school, the Feeling Æsthetic of J. H. von Kirchmann, the Æsthetical Idealism of Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and the Hegelian school, are one and all founded upon Kant, and rightly appeal to his authority." (Die Deutsche Æsthetik seit Kant, p. 23.)

The translation — judging from the passages which I have compared with the original — gives evidence of no small amount of patience and skill on the part of the translator. Smoothness and elegance of expression are oftentimes sacrificed to literalness, but I have always found Dr. Bernard's rendering clear and precise. He gives (p. xlviii) a list of the English equivalents which he has used for Kant's more technical terms, and though they do not always seem happy, they are at least accurate and have been consistently adhered to.

The translator's introduction is a fairly good presentation of the point of view of the work, and its relation to Kant's other Kritiken. The author does not agree with Kant's position, that the Teleological Judgment does not deserve the name of theoretical knowledge, although, like the Ideas of Reason, it forms a necessary regulative principle of our experience. Since, he argues, we can, from the behavior of other men, infer by analogy a consciousness like our own, we have equally valid grounds for postulating Mind or Intelligence as the ground of the universe. But it seems to me that the fact that the terms are unlike, that the objects differ so widely from each other, greatly weakens, if it does not entirely destroy, the argument from analogy. One cannot but approve and admire Kant's fairness and caution in refusing to draw a conclusion upon such grounds. The antithesis between the theoretical and the practical sphere, between reason and faith, which remains to the end in Kant's system, is, as both Professor Caird and Dr. Bernard tell us, the result of that opposition of sense and understanding with which he set out.