Kan

“ As is well known, according to the philosophy of Kant, all objects of sensuous perception are mere phenomena. The Categories of the understanding, being bound up with the forms of perception, have no use to us apart from these. Thus, the world in which we live, and all the objects and relations that constitute it, are in the mind alone. With this phenomenal world, which is in and for the mind only, Kant contrasted, or has been generally understood to contrast, the thing which is behind and beyond all phenomena, and which manifests its being, though not its nature, through them. ”

“ I went to my room and sat a while over a volume of Kant, which I always travel with—a sort of philosopher's stone on which to whet the mind's tools when they are dulled with boring into the geological strata of other people's ideas. I was too much occupied with the personality of the man I had been talking with to read long, and so I abandoned myself to a reverie, passing in review the events of the long day. ”

“ A curious wavering followed in the mind and conduct of Kant’s new disciple. He wrote to his brother that Fräulein Kahn was indeed the noblest soul in the world, but that for one thing he himself was a wanderer, an independent creature, and that for the rest something new had just come into his life, which seemed to drive him out to conquer the whole world afresh. Marriage would clip a man’s wings, would imprison him yonder in Switzerland, would perhaps hinder his philosophizing in this wondrous and novel way. ”

“ If we sum up the Kantian philosophy, we find on all hands the Idea of Thought, which is in itself the absolute Notion, and has in itself difference, reality. In the theoretic and practical Reason it has only abstract difference, but in the Faculty of Judgment, as the unity of the two, Kant goes so far as to establish the difference as actual, establishing not only particularity, but also individuality. ”

“ Well, I suggest here this transformation, because, as an idea, it was precisely the transformation of the Kantian doctrine which was the common undertaking of the great post-Kantian German idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
Philosophy is full of surprises. Just when you think that the road is ended against a dark and impassable wall, the door opens, as it opened to Kant. And just when you think again that Kant’s discovery is the end, a new life for the first time begins. This is the new life of modern idealism. It accepts in one sense Kant’s result. ”

“ Moreover, even Kant, with all his caution, has to speak of that true self, to which you and I alike appeal, whenever we discourse about the things of space and time, as if it were something that we all shared in, a certain universal self, whose offspring are we all, with our flying moments of sense, our weak efforts at truth, our study of experience, our common trust in understanding. The world that we know is, according to Kant, the world, not of dead outer things, but of human thoughts ”

“ It surprised me that the philosophers should have suffered Kant to have made so great a distinction between them and artists, and only allowed the merit of genius to the latter. He says, in § 47 of his 'Kritik der Urtheilkraft,' 'In sciences, the greatest inventor is only distinguished from the most labored imitator and apprentice by gradation; but from those whom nature has gifted for beautiful nature, he is specifically distinguished.' This is derogatory. Sir Chaplain, and besides, not true. Why can Kant, then, only make Kantists, but no Kants? ”

“ In Germany, where there has been a revival of interest in Kant, during the past twenty years, reading the “Critique” has come to take rank, so to speak, as one of the liberal professions. There are learned men who, in all appearance, do nothing else. The habit is dangerously fascinating. The Kant devotee never knows when to stop. When I studied in Germany as a young college graduate, some fifteen years ago, it was my fortune to meet one of the most learned and many-sided of the new philosophical doctors of the day, who was just then preparing for a docentship. ”

“ Unless Kant, therefore, declares expressly in so many words, that he deduces sensation from an impression of the thing, per se, or, to use his own terminology, that sensation must be explained in philosophy, from a transcendental object which exists outside of us, I shall not believe what these interpreters tell us of Kant. But if he does make this declaration, I shall consider the Critique of Pure Reason rather as the result of the most marvellous accident than as the product of a mind. ”

“ Beck’s admirable discussion of the Kantian distinctions between analytic and synthetic judgments, synthetic a priori and synthetic a posteriori truths, intuition and thought, phenomena and things-in-themselves, sufficiently showed that these were but excrescences on the Kantian doctrine, merely temporary expedients for bringing the real problems into light; while the definiteness with which he expressed the cardinal doctrine of Kant’s theory, the original synthetic unity of self-consciousness, threw light on all the subordinate points. ”

“ The search for accessible truth, thinks Kant, is then the search for one’s own personal larger self. Because I am sane, because I have what Kant calls unity of apperception in me, because I need an orderly consciousness, therefore it is that the world of sense and of experience has an outwardly visible good order about it. My understanding, working upon sense, gives laws to nature, because if there were no such laws given by my understanding I should have no true inner experience at all. ”

“ From Plato down to himself, every philosopher had traced the origin of our knowledge to something without us; Kant began to examine the mind in itself, and to try to determine what its laws were in themselves ”

“ And what did he think of Kant in the light of his scientific attainments?
"Stinking," said Mac briefly. "But—at least a googolplex advanced above Mr. Cabell. Imbued with that quasi-mystic hogwash I could do nought but agree with the simple-minded laddie that the world is what you make it and that the eternal verity is to get along with one's neighbors. Your friend Kant is all wet, but by no means as wet as that." ”

“ He mistakes elements for kinds. In explaining the origin of our knowledge, he does not refer one part of each of our cognitions to the mind itself, and another part of each of our cognitions to some foreign source; but he refers some of our cognitions entirely to the one source, and some of them entirely to the other. It is true that Kant is ambiguous; and appears at times as if he had got hold of the right doctrine—namely, that the words a priori, or native, on the one hand, and a posteriori, or empirical, on the other, apply only to the elements of our ideas, and not to our ideas themselves. ”

“ Kane was in no mood to welcome his appearance. His presence, too, actively recalled the last night's adventure of which he was a witness—albeit a sympathizing one. Kane shrank from the illusions which he felt he would be sure to make. And with his present ill luck, he was by no means sure that his ministrations even to HIM had been any more successful than they had been to the Frenchwoman. ”

“ But implicitly Kant's idea of reason's autonomy,—of the 'I ought' as in its supreme truth an 'I will,'—is an eternal truth. The 'standpoint,' so to call it after Kant, is the standpoint which explains life and conduct and which makes conduct possible. It is the assertion that the completeness is, and is my inmost being, the source of my action, my chief good, and that chief good not a gratification or satisfaction to be looked forward to as reward, but essential life and self-realisation. And this joy is what is hidden under the austere gravity of the categorical imperative. ”

“ When one examines the general characteristics of the new intellectual productions of Germany, more especially in the sphere of philosophy, one is struck by the close resemblance in fundamental idea to that just noted. It was the essence of Kant’s endeavour, both in speculative and in ethical research, to show that the ultimate unit, the conscious subject, was not a mere atom, devoid of intrinsic characteristics, receiving all knowledge from without, and impelled to act solely by the natural relations between his individual impulses and things. ”

“ Kane, Ku, and Lono. Kane is greatest of the gods, the almighty father and creator of heaven and earth; but he sleeps through the ages, and gives no heed to what is done among gods and men, and, therefore, they do not heed him. Lono is so gentle and kind that men are not afraid of him, and so they forget him. Ku is active, masterful, fierce, and cruel, and delights in wars and human sacrifices, and bends all things to his will, and rules alike among gods and men; so we worship Ku. Wakea, our ancestor, is a great god, and, next to Ku, bears sway over heaven and earth ”

“ Science, says the materialist, proves that all known things are material phenomena. Yes, rejoins Lange, but Kant has proved that material are merely mental phenomena; so that the more the materialist proves his case the more surely he is playing into the hands of the idealist—an answer which would be complete if it did not turn on the equivocation of the word “phenomenon,” which in science means any positive fact, and not a mere appearance, much less a mental appearance, to sense and sensory experience. ”

“ Lange thus transmuted inconsistent Kantism into a consistent Neo-Kantism, consisting of these reformed positions: (1) we start with sensations in a priori forms; (2) all things known from these data are mental phenomena of experience; (3) everything beyond is idea, without any corresponding reality being knowable. “The intelligible world,” he concluded, “is a world of poetry.” Our reflection is that there is a great difference between the essence and the consistency of Kant’s philosophy. ”

“ Let this last fact decide the question of Kant's vitality. Qui bene distinguit bene docet. This is an old adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions, and the objects of the philosophic understanding, must be presumed to have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with most precision, their general relations—so long as his terminology continues to be adopted. This test, applied to Kant, will show that his spirit yet survives in Germany. ”

“ Kane exclaimed, a terrible menace in his voice, "I have never yet done a man to death by torture, but by God, sir, you tempt me!" ”

“ Kant thought things not because they were true, but because he was Kant." ”

“ In this connection I recollect old Kant, who, as a punishment for having gained possession surreptitiously of the "thing in itself"—also a very ludicrous affair!—was imposed upon by the categorical imperative, and with that in his heart strayed back again to "God," the "soul," "freedom," and "immortality," like a fox which strays back into its cage: and it had been his strength and shrewdness which had broken open this cage!—What? You admire the categorical imperative in you? ”

“ Thus nature and nature's law, the soul, the Deity, &c. are, as far as we are concerned, but modes of thought. It is true that he takes for granted that there are realities external to us, which are the causes of these modifications of the mind: but what is the meaning of causes out of us, existences besides our own, when outness or space has no reality except in the mind? To us, therefore, the philosophy of Kant seems the most disheartening, cold and miserable, possible. ”

“ Among the philosophers who have referred our conviction of the being of God to our moral nature, and have denied the possibility of demonstration on mere physical grounds, Kant is perhaps the most eminent. Yet he has asserted the reality of such a principle of physiology as we are now maintaining in the most emphatic manner. Indeed, this assumption of an end makes his very definition of an organized being. “An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.”121 And this, he says, is a universal and necessary maxim. ”

“ In his Critique, Kant undertakes a regular survey of consciousness. He professes to analyse the conditions of human knowledge—to mete out its limits—to indicate its point of departure,—and to determine its possibility. That Kant accomplished much, it would be prejudice to deny; nor is his service to philosophy the less, that his success has been more decided in the subversion of error than in the establishment of truth. ”

“ The crouching personage, repeated again in 3 as a prefix to the cross b, is curious. 5 is again E and 6 is Imix, referring to grain and honey.
24. The picture and three of the hieroglyphs plainly correspond. The grain deity E holds food and drink in his hand. Rain is pouring from the planets, and the wind-beast plunges down, as on pages 44 and 45. Sign 3 is E's hieroglyph, 6 is Kan-Imix and 2 is the wind-beast. B is superfluously added in 4 and the same is true of the cross b in 1, while Kin-Akbal in 5 seems to fit almost everywhere. ”

“ The first hieroglyph is a head with the Akbal sign, and the fourth is the usual compound of Kin and Akbal.
5. The cloud-burst seems to have destroyed the cultivation of the field, for B walks forth again with the implement for tilling the soil, as in the second picture. The second hieroglyph is B's with the prefix of the west, therefore probably denoting sunshine, the first again contains Caban and Muluc and the fourth is Kan-Imix referring again to the produce of the field. I shall not venture to explain the third sign here any more than I did in the previous passages. Compare page 8b. ”

“ The three tracts belonging to the years 1763–1764 bring forward in the sharpest fashion the essential opposition between the two classes of judgments. In the Essay on Negative Quantities, the fundamental thought is the total distinction in kind between logical opposition (the contradictoriness of notions, which Kant always viewed as formed, definite products of thought) and real opposition. For the one adequate explanation is found in the logical axiom of analytical thinking; for the other no such explanation is to be had. Logical ground and real ground are totally distinct. ”