Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/163

 IV. INTRODUCTION TO KANT

T IS generally admitted that Kant is one of the great epoch-making philosophers, like Socrates and Descartes. There are two things that are universally true of intellectual epoch-makers: first, they embody in themselves certain general tendencies of their age, which are usually due to a reaction against the more pronounced tendencies of the previous age; second, their thought is peculiarly germinal, and among their followers assumes a maturer form, in which the originators would scarcely recognize it as their own. Let us consider these two aspects of the philosophy of Kant.

From among the pronounced tendencies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries I shall select two for special emphasis. In the first place, it was characteristic of these two centuries to isolate and over-emphasize either one or the other of the two great sources of human knowledge, sense-perception or reason. Locke and his followers attempted to convert reason into a mere echo of sense; while for Descartes and his followers, sense was always viewed with suspicion as confusing the intellect, or as supplying only an inferior sort of knowledge which must yield precedence to "rational science." Extreme sensationalism or empiricism seemed to have reached an impasse in Hume; while rationalism degenerated into formalism and word-making in Wolff. Thus Kant's greatest work, the "Critique of Pure Reason" (1789), was an attempt to correct these extreme views by making the necessary provision for both sense-perception and reason. Perception without conception, he said, is blind; while conception without perception is empty. Kant's critique was aimed first at excessive emphasis on sense-perception. He showed that the bare sequence of sense-impressions can never yield the connections, necessities, unities, laws, etc., which are required for science. The