Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 11.djvu/437

* KANT. 395 KANT. tention of Kant is that these categories must be principles employed in the construction of the world of experience if they are to be legitimately employed in the cognition of that world. This is the idealistic element in his system ; the world we know- is, in its form, a perceptual and intel- lectual creation, the work of the mind. He calls this idealism transcendental, i.e. it relates only to the conditions of the possibility of knowledge; it is not transcendent, i.e. it does not relate to any existences lying behind experience, and there- fore beyond the reach of knowledge. And yet, though the system is transcendental idealism, it is an empirical realism, i.e. it maintains that the real world of experience is a world really con- stituted in accordance with principles which science discovers. Thus, time is empirically real because the world ue knoir is really a time-world. Sut along with this empirical realism and tran- scendental idealism there goes hand in hand an agnosticism which denies the possibility of know- ing anything whatever of another world of being — the world of things-in-themselves. These things- in-themselves affect our sensibility and thus give rise to sensations, which fall into the forms of perception and are organized by the categories into the world of experience. But what these things-in-themselves are we can never know. If reason attempts to make any aissertion with regard to them, it falls into hopeless inconsisten- cies and inextricable confusions, paralogisms, and antinomies. And yet reason is ever striving to go beyond experience. The world of experience is never complete; it is a progressus and a regressus ad in/initiim. But reason craves completeness. It has ideas which find no embodiment in experi- ence, because "they demand a certain complete- ness which is beyond the reach of all possible empirical knowledge." But neither may these ideas be thought to find embodiment in things-in- themselves, for in this case judgment would tran- scend its proper experiential limits. Tlicy are not (nipirically or transcendentally real : but neither are they transcendentally ideal, for they are not conditions of the possibility of knowledge. Thus excluded from all these clas.ses. Kant finds a func- tion for them as regulative principles for the conduct of the understanding in its search for knowledge, telling us not to be satisfied in our attempts to reduce experience to order unless we should complete the systematization. But com- plete it we never 'can. The ideas are warnings "not to regard any single determination relating to the existence of things as ultimate." But we may not substantiate the ideas by claiming that the completeness unattainable in experience is actual beyond experience. This would be tran- scendental subreption; and though natural and impossible to avoid, it may be understood to be fallacious when it is seen that thus a regulative principle is changed into a constitutive principle. There are three such ideas — that of 'the absolute or Jinconditioned unity of the thinking subject,' that of "the absolute unity of the series of condi- tions of phenomena.' and that of 'the absolute unity of the condition of all objects of thought whatever.' These ideas, when substantiated and individualized, become the transcendental ideal, i.e. 'the idea of a totality of .reality (omnitudo renlitafis) ,' an 'ens realissimum,' 'ens origina- rium,' 'ens summiim,' 'ens entium.' all of which are epithets given by scholastic theology to Ood. "By such a use of the transcendental idea, Vol. XI.— 26. however, theology oversteps limits set to it by its veiy nature." All traditional proofs for the being of God, which Kant reduces to three — the ontological, the cosmological and the physico- theological jjroofs (see GoD)^he criticises as fal- lacious: "The Supreme Being is for purely specu- lative reason a mere ideal, but still a perfectly faultless ideal, which completes and crowns the whole of human knowledge. And if it should turn out that there is a moral theology', «hich is able to supply what is deficient in "speculative thecjlogj', we should then find that transcendental theology is no longer proljlematic, but is indis- pensable in the determination of the conception of a Supreme Being" ( Watson's trans. ). In his ethical works, Kant does finally arrive at such a moral theology as the final "postulate of mo- rality. His ethics is frequently called rigoristic, i.e. it refuses to recognize the moral value of natural inclinations. Xothing is good but the good will, and the good will is the will to do an act because it is in accordance with duty. ''Duty is the obliga- tion to act from reverence for law." The law is that "I must act in such a way that I can at the same time will that my maxim should become a universal law." The obligation to obey this law is unconditional. The moral imperative is cate- gorical. There are no ifs and huts in the case. H does not even depend upon the peculiar 'con- stitution of human nature. It is a necessary law for all rational beings, and as such a priori. "Its foundation is this, that rational nature exists as an end in itself." Man thus imposes upon him- self the universal system of laws to which he is subject and "he is only under obligation to act in conformity with his own will." This constitutes the autonomy of the will. But this autonomy is not correctly conceived unless correlated withthe conception of a 'kingdom of ends.' i.e. 'the sys- tematic combination of different rational beings through the medium of common laws.' The au- tonomy of any will is thus not capricious, but rational; its rationality consists in its ordered and systematic connection with other autonomous wills. "Morality, then, consists in the relation of all action to the system of laws which alone makes possible a kingdom of ends." This whole conception of the categorical imperative is pos- sible, says Kant, only if man's will is not a mere phenomenon conditioned by causal laws. Free- dom is thus a postulate of the moral order. We do not know ourselves to be free; for knowledge is possible only within the limit of experience. But we must think ourselves as free. "In think- ing itself into the intelligible world, prac- tical reason does not transcend its proper limits, as it would do if it tried to know itself directly by means of perception. In so thinking itself, reason merely conceives of itself negatively as not belonging to the world of sense." "There is but a single point in which it is positive, namely, in the thought that freedom, though it is a negative determination, is yet bound up with a positive faculty, and. indeed, with a causality of reason which is called will." This free causality of the will cannot be ex- plained, for "we can explain nothing but that which we can reduce to laws, the object of which can be presented in a possible experience." "^^lile. therefore, it is true that we cannot comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, it is also true that we can com-