Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/575

No. 5.] only in a 'more destructive use of utility' he is underestimating the importance of this distinction. Hume is sufficiently distinguished from the moral sense school by his use of the principle of utility as a means of rationalizing the pronouncements of the moral sense, even though he does not regard benevolence as psychologically a derivative from self-love.

This work assumes that philosophy begins with the problem of knowledge and that all philosophers, in their effort to solve this problem, have been forced to start from a logical dualism,—such as the dualism of sense and reason, idea and fact, subject and object,—the resolution of which constitutes the philosopher's theory of knowledge. Since most philosophers have been dogmatists, in the sense that they believed it to be the business of knowledge to penetrate to the essence of things, their dualism has taken the form of a dilemma or an antinomy. Being forced therefore to choose between them, philosophers have attempted to reduce sense to reason or reason to sense, or, after Kant, to find a reconciliation of the two. Hence the endless controversy between the intellectualists and the anti-intellectualists, a divergence of theory which is at once fundamental and insoluble. The author undertakes, however, to show that it is insoluble only because the problem has been incorrectly stated. His method is historical; that is, he examines logical dualism in its latest chief manifestation, the philosophy of Kant and contemporary Kantians, criticises the efforts of these philosophers to resolve the antinomy of sense and reason, and gives a solution of his own more satisfactory than these. As presenting the chief types of solution that have been offered, he chooses the phenomenalism of Benno Erdmann, the idealism of Cohen, the logicism of Husserl, the realism of Riehl, and the psychologism of Jerusalem. Husserl insists upon a pure, a priori logic and therefore upon the necessity of knowledge, while Jerusalem, in opposition to Husserl, denies the existence of a priori principles and therefore insists upon the relativity of knowledge. In fact, knowledge is both necessary and relative and hence each of these opposed views is forced tacitly to admit the legitimacy of the other. Erdmann, Cohen, and Riehl all, in one way or another, attempt a reconciliation of the two opposed phases of knowledge, but they succeed no better than Kant; their solutions amount substantially to extending to the object that combination of sense and reason which Kant had found in the understanding. The author regards as the chief discovery of Kant himself the thoroughgoing distinction between sense and reason made in the Dissertation. The mediation between the two by a third faculty, the understanding, which Kant attempted in the Critique, is both contradictory and inadequate, since they refuse to coalesce and the coalescence, even if possible, would not explain the actual nature of human knowledge.