Critique of Pure Reason

“ That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect—which I may call the logic of space—another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny—the logic of time—is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinction to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the “Critique of Pure Reason” investigates. ”

“ But, by way of parenthesis, there is no reason to boast in a general way of the sincere aim at truth and the pure mind for the ideal, alleged to prevail in the modern literature of our times, especially in philosophical literature. ”

“ Our present duty is to make ourselves perfectly acquainted with the transcendental use made of pure reason, its principles and ideas, that we may be able properly to determine and value its influence and real worth. ”

“ Few people would realise that it is much harder to write one of Owen Seaman's "funny" poems in Punch than to write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermons. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a greater work than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Charles Dickens's creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race—I say it in all seriousness—than Cardinal Newman's Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it. ”

“ All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought. ”

“ We are, however, bound by the "conscience of reason," and by what might be called reason's sense of honour to articulate as clearly as we can all these movements of pure thought working in the void; but we certainly are forbidden by the original revelation of the complex vision to accept them as the starting point of our philosophical enquiry. ”

“ And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer that he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and all philosophies. Other peoples have left principally institutions, books—we have left souls. St. Teresa is worth any institution, any “Critique of Pure Reason.” ”

“ To pretend that truth has its source in the subjective me, is to begin by supposing the me to be an absolute, infinite being, the origin of all truths, and the reason of all beings; which is equivalent to making philosophy commence by deifying the human understanding. ”

“ I shall therefore endeavor to treat grave topics with as little gravity as the nature of the case may admit of; drawing my reasons less from authority than from common sense and the nature of things, and addressing them to the untaught feelings of the heart, rather than to what is falsely contradistinguished as reason and judgment. I say falsely, because when the mind is once broken in by the discipline of a spurious philosophy, it is too apt to throw out its view all considerations incapable of being established by any regular chain of reasoning. ”

“ Is not every moral theory dependent in truth on a theory of things? Is it possible for us to make for ourselves our ideal, and only afterwards to go to the real world and to see if our ideal is realized? ”

“ The so-called axiom of causation, or even the more generally stated “principle of sufficient reason,” is only one of the forms in which the Idea gets partially embodied in our thought about things. And the only warrant for believing in such a principle at all is the Ought, whose deepest basis lies in our fundamental assurance that all reality embodies purpose. ”

“ The dry, logical spirit which was thus fostered created a purely intellectual, one-sided philosophy, which must end in pure scepticism, by blinding men to those great truths which lie above the sphere of reasoning and logic. ”

“ Reason, sole judge and umpire of itself.’ We own that if man were this pure, abstracted essence,—if he had not senses, passions, prejudices,—if custom, will, imagination, example, opinion, were nothing, and reason were all in all;—if the author, in a word, could establish as the foundation, what he assumes as the result of his system, namely, the omnipotence of mind over matter, and the triumph of truth over every warped and partial bias 397of the heart—then we see no objection to his scheme taking place, and no possibility of any other having ever been substituted for it. ”

“ And the real, although common sense thus often opposes it to the merely desirable, remains to the end that which, if present, would, as we say, satisfy reason, and thereby give us the greatest fulfilment possible to our type of consciousness. ”

“ One such source of confusion seems to lie in the failure to distinguish between the proposition 'This is good,' when it means 'This existing thing is good,' and the same proposition, when it means 'The existence of this kind of thing would be good'; 118 71.
and another seems to lie in the failure to distinguish between that which suggests a truth, or is a cause of our knowing it, and that upon which it logically depends, or which is a reason for believing it: in the former sense fiction has a more important bearing on Ethics than Metaphysics can have. ”

“ Sense, in fact, still remained the criterion of truth; all that can be affirmed is, that there was a tendency to rise to a different standard, the standard of thought and reason, in the settlement of philosophical questions—the tendency to find something which should be true for all intellect, and not merely for our intellect; and this tendency showed itself unmistakably in the reduction of all sensible phenomena to one sensible principle—to wit, water, or moisture. ”

“ Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self, and so on. Why not take heed to the meaning of what is said ? When we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make. ”

“ The inevitable defects of philosophical study are to nobody clearer than to one who, sincerely loving philosophy, devotes his life, as best he can, to seeking clearness of thought and a soul-stirring vision of the truth. ”

“ Thou'lt find That from the senses first hath been create Concept of truth, nor can the senses be Rebutted. For criterion must be found Worthy of greater trust, which shall defeat Through own authority the false by true; What, then, than these our senses must there be Worthy a greater trust? Shall reason, sprung From some false sense, prevail to contradict Those senses, sprung as reason wholly is From out the senses?—For lest these be true, All reason also then is falsified. Or shall the ears have power to blame the eyes, Or yet the touch the ears? ”

“ How, in fact, shall you maintain that Reality is independent of ideas which refer to it, while at the same time these ideas are other than itself, — how shall you maintain this, when the least reflection shows you that you are using ideas at every step of your discussion of reality, and that whatever you assert of the reality, you can give warrant to the assertion only by first showing reason for regarding your ideas as valid? ”

“ As a result we shall soon find that, just as our first statement of the insight of reason, if indeed it is a true statement, transforms our view of the sense in which the world is real, so a deeper study of the relations of insight to action transforms our first cruder notion of the reason itself, of its office in life, and of the truth that it reveals. ”

“ But, be that as it may, the view which I take of the subject is to the following effect. In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is the limit of our enquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the source of all that is bright and beautiful,—in the visible world giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and reason;—and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes. ”

“ Therefore we subjoin:—And this pursuit is conducted under the direction of the universal faculty in man; in other words, is conducted under the direction of necessary thinking. Man's faculty of necessary thought is properly called his Reason. So that the definition expressed shortly is this: Philosophy is the pursuit of absolute truth conducted under the direction of reason. But the definition under this compendious form expresses a mere vague truism unless you keep in mind what we mean by absolute truth, and also what we mean by reason. ”

“ When the adherents of the Positive Philosophy proceed to define matter as merely "a permanent possibility of sensations,"21 faith in the reliability of our knowledge of the realities about us, as true for those realities, is thoroughly undermined. ”

“ If 'absolute truth' is our ideal and acquaintance with 'absolute reality' our aim, then, in view of the persistent illusions on both these points to which the human mind is liable, it seems necessary to recognize the hopelessness of our search. Thus the last dilemma of dogmatism is reached. ”

“ Whether we turn our attention to the forces and the laws that animate and govern matter without belonging to it, or as the order of our labors calls us to do, reflect upon the universal and necessary truths which our mind discovers but does not constitute, the least systematic use of reason makes us naturally conclude from the forces and laws of the universe that there is a first intelligent mover, and from necessary truths that there is a necessary being who alone is their substance. ”

“ But the reason, which is the faculty of the logical connection of ideas, and of the logical necessity which rules in that connection, often quits this safe and solid ground of reality, as presented to it in triple experience, whether of revelation and history, or of natural science, and resting entirely on itself, tries to build exclusively on its own foundation. ”

“ It is certain that the principles which, in all the orders of knowledge, discover to us absolute and necessary truths, constitute part of our reason, which surely makes its dwelling in us, and is intimately connected with personality in the depths of intellectual life. It follows that the truth, which reason reveals to us, falls thereby into close relation with the subject that perceives it, and seems only a conception of our mind. ”

“ In time we thus come to hold, in the world of finite common sense, that much is real and inevitable, that thwarts our desires. Yet it still remains true that what we usually call reason, namely, the search for the truth as such, gets placed at the head, in our wiser daily life, and gets even opposed to the search for ordinary satisfaction, just because there is, in the long run, more true satisfaction in being rational, i.e., in our recognition of the facts of common sense, than there is in striving irrationally. ”

“ Any man of sense has only to open his eyes, or to observe himself within, to appreciate how all original knowledge is of the concrete, the definite, the individual. This, I say, is what the traditional method in logic seems to imply. ”

“ The various kinds of knowing exercised by the undivided and indivisible self are plainly arranged in an ascending order, till at their summit they are crowned with the intuitional power which we may term, as we here do, the reason—the power of discerning necessary universal truths. But it is equally clear that of the powers below the reason—sense-perception and consciousness furnishing facts objective and subjective, memory restoring them before the mental eye, and the logical power rushing to necessary conclusions—none, either singly or together, can stand for the conscience. ”

“ For when, by a comparison of the reason, the mind ascends from those things which are according to reason, then it arrives at a notion of good. And this good we are speaking of, we both feel to be and call good, not because of any addition made to it, nor from its growth, nor from comparing it with other things, but because of its own proper power. ”

“ Let us now consider the explanation of error offered by the idealist philosophy. In this view only the whole truth is wholly true; the Absolute, as a perfect, concrete, individual system, is the ideal, and all that falls short of it can only possess a degree of truth—a degree which is greater or less according as it approximates to the ideal. The degrees of truth are not quantitative, not a mixture of truth and error, but a nearer or more distant approach to the ideal. ”

“ If the person that I am, if the individual me does not, perhaps, explain the whole of reason, how could it explain truth, and absolute truth? Man, limited and passing away, perceives necessary, eternal, infinite truth; that is for him a privilege sufficiently high; but he is neither the principle that sustains truth, nor the principle that gives it being. Man may say, My reason ”

“ Suppose, further, that Reason maintains in reply that it does indeed contemplate the object of both Sense and Imagination under the form of universality, while Sense and Imagination cannot aspire to the knowledge of the universal, since their cognizance cannot go beyond bodily figures, and that in the cognition of reality we ought rather to trust the stronger and more perfect faculty of judgment. In a dispute of this sort, should not we, in whom is planted the faculty of reasoning as well as of imagining and perceiving, espouse the cause of Reason? ”

“ Must we not, in fact, say alike to the followers of Logic, of Ethics, of Religion, and of Art, “Your claims on the world are ultimately all of the same kind; they are made with equal right, and so long as any one of you is content to advance his postulate as a postulate, and at his own personal risk, no one of you has any pretension to criticise or reject the postulates of the others”? ”

“ And reason not only has been, but now is, such a source of insight. And this is the case whenever you try to apply the "rule of reason" to any problem of your life, and hereby gain a confidence that, by being as reasonable and fair as you can, you are learning to conform your life to the view which, as you suppose, an all-wise God takes of its meaning. My philosophy simply tries to tell you why you have a right to hold that an all-wise being is real. ”