“ But obviously we cannot think of space as a separate thing existing by itself; for space without things would have no determination or possibility of determination, and would be to us just nothing, whereas, as it is, it is something to us. The same holds of time. The Newtonian doctrine, Kant says, "forces us to assume two eternal, infinite, and self-subsisting non-realities, which are there, without any reality in them, only that they may comprehend all reality." Just because things are in space and time, space and time are not themselves things. ”

“ But when we consider our moral judgments we seem to be in a different world, for there are some actions which we think we or others ought to have done or ought not to have done, and this obligation has nothing to do with our likes and dislikes. If we look back upon a past action of our own, we may see why we did it, understand how the temptation to it appealed with peculiar strength to something in our nature, yet nevertheless we may say that we ought not to have done it, and with that judgment goes the conviction that we need not have done it. ”

“ In applying the principle we are trying to understand reality as though the relation of all the different things in it were like the relation of the parts of an organism or a picture. But this principle, like the principle of mechanism, does not carry us further than the facts we have examined, for an organism or a work of art can only be understood by study of the individual relations of all its parts. We can never know the universe as an organism, for we can never know all its parts. We can understand and put together more and more of them, but we never come to the end. ”

“ How, then, can there be any concepts which are not got from the empirical differences of things we perceive? Let us take such a concept as substance, and see whether we can discover where it comes from. Locke had been puzzled by discovering that he could not, in any object, find anything which was its substantiality. Calling anything a substance is not like saying that it is hard, or green, or heavy; we are not concerned with specific differences in things, but we are not therefore saying what is meaningless. ”

“ In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant finds the necessity of criticism in the contrast between certain rational sciences and metaphysics. Mathematics and physics, he observes, are obviously certain sciences. They are not empirical, they make steady progress, the results they have reached are secure and unanimously accepted, and have a certainty which no mere empirical investigation could attain. Metaphysics, on the other hand, though as ancient an inquiry, seems incapable of any settled results. ”

“ Scientific knowledge was possible, he thought, only by apprehending the real or primary qualities of things which were mathematical, in contradistinction to their secondary qualities--their colour, smell, &c.--which were less real. Thence he came to think that the real world was mathematical in nature, like a huge, intricate geometrical figure. The elements of mere fact, in our present knowledge, its dependence on observation and experiment, he thought of as temporary defects which the progress of science would remove. ”

“ This power of acting in accordance with a law that comes from the nature of man as a rational, responsible being, and not as a member of the world of causes and effects, is moral freedom; it is the assumption of all moral judgment and action. It cannot, Kant holds, be explained. For all explanation is the work of the understanding, and that can explain only phenomena. It is enough that the first Critique has shown that phenomenal causality is not inconsistent with the possibility of another causality. In the moral sphere we act and judge as if we were free. ”

“ The relation of the beautiful object to our purposes is irrelevant to its beauty. The judgment of beauty cannot, therefore, be determined by rules of any kind. It is always individual and immediate, and the immediate feeling of beauty counts for more than any rules or canons of taste. Kant therefore vindicates art as independent of either science or morality. Yet, once we realise its independence, the nature of art throws light upon both science and morality; for the judgment of beauty, although free and not determined by concepts, claims universal validity. ”

“ For, though the empiricist thought of empirical knowledge as synthesis, the synthesis was not ascribed to the mind, but to associating ideas; the mind only observed, and knowledge was merely the apprehension of objects by the senses. We see what is before our eyes, and notice the differences and similarities in what is before us. The rationalist conceived of thought as simply apprehending the nature of the real, freed from the illusions of sense perception. The mathematician has before his thought the nature of a triangle, and sees intellectually what that nature implies. ”

“ Kant names the book the Critique of Judgment, or, more exactly, the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment. Judgment is distinguished from understanding, whose principles are more peculiarly the subject of the first Critique. The understanding, according to Kant, is the faculty of rules. Judgment is shown in the application of rules to individual instances. It is the element of individuality and spontaneity in all thinking, for which no rules can be discovered. Judgment cannot be taught, different men possess it in different degrees; it is akin to genius. ”

“ We cannot follow the whole history of a change from A to B, we can only say that, if our experience is to have any consistency, we must think that the fact that we first saw A and then saw B implies in this case that the change from A to B is part of the continuous system of change in time, that it is determined in time. But to think of an event as determined in time is not to think of it as determined by time, for time in itself could not produce one thing more than another. ”

“ Kant's conception of knowledge, then, is something like this. Each of us is in direct contact with reality, but we perceive directly only a small part of it, and, as our consciousness moves on in time, and as we change our position in space, we are directly conscious of different small portions of reality. A part of the whole is illumined by direct perception, but the whole stretches beyond that indefinitely in space and time. ”

“ Now if reality did not change, and we were conscious of our own movements, we could go from one point to another of reality and back again, and could be aware that the changes in our perception were all due, not to change in reality, but to us--were our history. We should know that the different things we saw were co-existing all the time, and we should, in describing them, try to describe them, as in a map, as we should perceive them if we saw them all at once. The succession would be subjective, the co-existence objective. ”

“ We can show that knowledge is only possible if the self has a unity other than that of a spatial whole, but we cannot therefore argue that it must be exactly like a spatial whole, in the sense that death in it can only be brought about by dissolution, but unlike a spatial whole in that in it there is nothing to be dissolved. The real nature of the unity of the self, Kant argues, cannot be known. ”

“ Anyone who reflects on the process of fast reading will realise that we do not perceive or notice all the letters on a page; we fill in from our imagination, as we discover when we read words that are not on the page. It is a very hard thing, giving up all interpretation and inference, to describe faithfully just what is there to see.
Passive perception, then, does not exist, and our thought affects our perception. Yet, at the same time, the distinction between thought and perception, although not simple, is real. ”

“ Such a reference indeed, implies thought and what is ordinarily called a concept; but our knowledge of concepts used in science always means that, if we know what is meant e.g. by calling anything gold, we know how it will behave under such-and-such conditions. The concept, in Kant's words, is a function of unity in our representations. The task of thought, then, is not to turn the mind away from what we perceive, but to help us to transcend some of the limitations of our perceptions, or, to speak more accurately, to set somewhat further back the limits of our perception ”

“ We can tell that only on the assumption that we are having fragmentary views of a whole that is continuous. The only continuity we know is the continuity of our own experience made possible by memory, and we try to interpret that experience in the light of the larger continuity of the world which our experience breaks up. As we go from one place to another, notice now this thing, now that, we can test interpretations made on this assumption. Wrong interpretations are those which make our experience inconsistent. ”

“ Science, therefore, can never rest content with its achievements, but must always demand that the investigation of conditions should be pushed further back and on. From this sense of the incompleteness of all actual knowledge, and of all there is that might be but is not known, arises what Kant calls an ideal of reason, a demand that, in all investigation into the conditioned, we should go on till we come to the totality of conditions. ”

“ The characteristic of thought, according to Kant, is synthesis, or putting together, and all synthesis is the work of the mind. When we begin to describe and classify the contents of our perception, we pick out separate qualities from the continuous whole we perceive, and group them together. This grouping is, of course, determined by the likenesses and differences which we perceive everywhere, but we do not, in judging, confine ourselves to noticing likeness and difference. For any content of our perception has some point of resemblance, and some of difference with any other. ”

“ Newton, on the other hand, held that space could not be explained away, that astronomy implied an absolute space in which things existed, that the spatial relations of things could not be explained by the nature of the things themselves, but only by a reference to absolute space in which they all were. This meant that observation or perception was something of which you could not hope and should not wish to get rid, and that an ideal of knowledge in which all applied mathematics should have been transmuted into pure mathematics was a vain one. ”

“ Now, if we held that the objects of mathematics were independent entities quite separate from the things we perceive, it would be impossible to explain how we might assume that the things we perceive would be subject to the rules of mathematics. If, on the other hand, we held that in mathematics we were simply concerned with the various objects of the senses, it would be impossible to explain how mathematics can have a generality and necessity which no statements can have which rest on observation of the various things we see. ”

“ Astronomy implied both mere observation and apprehension of necessary relations. Here was a science which seemed to employ both methods together. Galileo, in fact could not have made his discovery without observation but men had observed bodies falling for ages without discovering the laws of motion. Further, the laws of motion, once discovered, made men in some degree independent of observation, made them able to say of actual concrete things not only what had happened, but what must happen. ”

“ If we are to understand Kant's philosophy, we must know what he means by idealism, and wherein his idealism differs from that of his predecessors.
The word idealism is, naturally, contrasted with realism. It suggests an assertion that something is not real, but only an idea. If we know it to be combined with a distinction between things in themselves, and phenomena, or appearances, it seems to suggest that the objects of knowledge are somehow illusions, or only appearances in the mind, as contrasted with real things. ”

“ It is only by following such imperatives that we can rise above the promptings of circumstance, for only thus is the will self-legislative. In obeying such an imperative our will is self-determined, for it is following a principle that is derived from man's nature as independent and transcendent of the world of phenomena. Hence in moral action we are in contact with the reality of things more truly than in any understanding of phenomena. ”