Kantianism

“ 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 ”

“ For to him, as to all great and comprehensive thinkers, Philosophy has only its beginning in the theoretical explanation of things; its chief end is the rational organization and animation and guidance of the higher life in which all things culminate. Kant had carried with him through all his struggle and toil of thought, the cardinal faith in God, Freedom, and Immortality, as an inalienable possession of Reason, and he had beheld the human Personality transfigured and glorified in the Divine radiance of the primal Ideas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The idea of God, the immortality of the soul, the liberty of the will, the creation of the world—these and all such ideas the descendants of Kant have politely conducted to the frontiers of philosophy, and dismissed each and every one, but not before courteously thanking them for their provisional services. Our New Englander would appear to their eyes as a babe still in swaddling-clothes, or as a child learning to read by amusing itself with the pictures of old Mother Goose stories. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if the conscience of a righteous man does not help him to distinguish between good and evil, how is he to avoid sin? What does Kant's moral law mean, that law which was as consoling as the starry sky? Kant lived his life in profound peace of soul, he met his death quietly, in the consciousness of his own purity. But if Christ came again, he might condemn the serene philosopher for his very serenity. For the Pharisee, we repeat, was righteous, if purity of intentions, together with a firm readiness to fulfil everything which appears, to him in the light of duty, be righteousness in a man. ”

“ In modern times, and especially since Kant, philosophy has been led to see the older doctrines of the human reason, and of its knowledge of the divine, from various decidedly novel points of view. The sketch of a theory of the reason as a source of insight, which I gave, was influenced by Kant's famous teaching about the nature and unity of human experience. Kant stated this theory as the doctrine that all our human knowledge involves an {122} interpretation of the data of our senses in the light of what he called the "unity of apperception." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence, according to Kant, the possibility of all consciousness is conditioned by the possibility of the pure Ego, or by pure self-consciousness, just as the Science of Knowledge holds. In thinking, the conditioning is made the prior of the conditioned—for this is the significance of that relation; and thus it appears that, according to Kant, a systematic deduction of all consciousness, or, which is the same, a System of Philosophy, must proceed from the pure Ego, just as the Science of Knowledge proceeds ”

“ As a fact, it is much rather a mere restatement in rational fullness of the true spirit of the Kantian deduction, when one seeks to apply Kant's thoughts to the world as viewed on this level of consciousness. In essence the Kantian unity of Apperception and the unity of Experience are nothing but the constantly presupposed unity of our social as distinct from private and inner consciousness. From the point of view of Dualism, the object, as it is in itself, is indeed unknowable, for it the object in itself declines to tell us what its inner life is. ”

“ On the other side and independent stands a self-apprehending thought, the principle of freedom, which Kant has in common with ordinary and bygone metaphysic, but emptied of all that it held, and without his being able to infuse into it anything new. For, in the Critical doctrine, thought, or, as it is there called, Reason, is divested of every specific form, and thus bereft of all authority. The main effect of the Kantian philosophy has been to revive the consciousness of Reason, or the absolute inwardness of thought. ”

“ In the Kantian analysis knowledge is said to arise out of the union of heterogeneous elements, Sensation and Thought, the former supplying the Matter, the latter the Form. But what authenticates Kant’s fundamental antithesis of Matter and Form, Sensation and Thought, so that it should be imperative on every one to set out from it in his analysis of the nature of knowledge? Why are we not to be at liberty to conduct our analysis in whatever way and by whatever principles appear to us most suitable? ”

“ Kant's “I ought, therefore I can” is the relic of man's original consciousness of freedom—the freedom with which man was endowed at his creation—a freedom, now, alas! destroyed by sin. Or it may be the courage of the soul in which God is working anew by his Spirit. For Kant's “Ich soll, also Ich kann,” Julius Müller would substitute: “Ich sollte freilich können, aber Ich kann nicht”—“I ought indeed to be able, but I am not able.” Man truly repents only when he learns that his sin has made him unable to repent without the renewing grace of God. ”

“ Nature, on Kantian grounds, is the work of intelligence, and intelligence, in turn, obeys some deeper spiritual law. That law, when interpreted according to the Platonic-pantheistic tradition, is the perfection of the whole. There are many possible variations of the view. The perfection of the whole may be regarded as a moral perfection, the ideal of the moral will, as suggested by Kant, and more positively and constructively maintained by Fichte; or as the ideal of reason, as was maintained by Hegel and his followers ”

“ As a member of the human race I can be profoundly thankful for a philosopher like Kant. I can, indeed, dedicate myself to the study of the Kantian philosophy with some hope of mastering it. I can seek to reproduce in my life all the conditions that surrounded the life of the great metaphysician, but I cannot hope to make myself a Kant. ”

“ As a matter of fact, reflexion in the nineteenth century, devoted as it has been to the evolution of society, has busied itself with hardly anything more than with the study of those immanent elements which make for morality. It is therefore not an external guarantor of morals, such as Kant thought, which is here given. It is the immanent God who is revealed in the history and life of the race, even as also it is the immanent God who is revealed in the consciousness of the individual soul. ”

“ No; the Idea of a sum total of all that is conceivable is not an object of possible experience. Only particular things or phenomena are realities for us. God as the transcending total of particular things can have only a conceptual reality and a validity for thought. The total has the reality that any idea has. This is Kant’s general criticism of the dialectic Idea of God.
But the general conception of God had played so important a part in traditional philosophy that Kant felt it necessary to examine the three important intellectual proofs for His existence in order to show their falsity. ”

“ And here we see that, just in the same way, the Kantian Ethics begins by positing something which seems to have a meaning but which has really no meaning—something which, under the conditions imposed, cannot be rendered into thought at all. For neither Kant, nor any one else, ever has or ever can, frame a consciousness of a good will when from the word good are expelled all thoughts of those ends which we distinguish by the word good. ”

“ In the organic products of Nature we perceive this immediate unity of the Notion and reality; for in a living creature there is perceived in one unity the soul, or [472] the universal, and existence or particularity, which is not the case with inorganic Nature. Thus there enters into the Kantian philosophy the conception of the concrete, as that the universal Notion determines the particular. But Kant took these Ideas again in a subjective sense only, as guiding thoughts for the faculty of judgment, by which no Being-in-itself can be expressed ”

“ The psychical reality in which alone the truth is effective should never be forgotten out of regard for the truth. This is, however, the fact in the Kantian theory of religion in two directions.
It is always noticeable that the a priori of the practical reason is treated by Kant quite differently from the theoretical. In case of the latter the main idea of the synthesis, immanent in experience, of rationalism and empiricism, is retained, and the a priori of the pure forms of intuition and of the pure categories is nothing without the contents of concrete reality which become shaped in it. ”

“ The Philosophy of Kant has a most important bearing on the whole question as to the validity of the natural evidence for the being and perfections of God. We shall confine our attention to those parts of his system which give rise to the speculations that have issued in the recent theories of Ideal or Spiritual Pantheism.
In attempting to explain the nature and origin of the whole system of human knowledge, Kant divides our intellectual being into three distinct faculties,—sensation, understanding, and reason. He supposes that from sensation we derive the whole matter of our knowledge ”

“ But while Kant sought to give these common objects of religion and philosophy a lasting foundation upon the practical as contrasted with the theoretical reason, these essays aim at restoring them to a theoretical basis. The purpose is, to exhibit the theoretical nature and functions of the moral consciousness itself, thus closing the chasm left by Kant between his noumenal world of morality and his phenomenal world of science. ”

“ If the Kantian analysis stands, then it seems to follow, clearly enough, that God is the Inclusive Unit which at once embraces Mind and Nature, Soul and World, expresses itself in them, and imparts to them their meaning; and the plain dictate then is, that Kant's personal prejudice, and the personal prejudices of others like him, in favor of a transcendent God, must give way to that conception of the Divine, as immanent and inclusive, which is alone consistent with its being indeed the Totality of Conditions,—the Necessary Postulate, and the Sufficient Reason, for both Subject and Object. ”

“ Life is not an easy thing; the spiritual life is the hardest of all lives; and of all spiritual gifts, next perhaps to charity itself, insight is surely the most difficult to win. As long as these things are so, Kant’s doctrine will retain its profound ethical and religious significance. But, you will ask, is this, then, wisdom’s last word, “der Weisheit letzter Schluss?” Well, for my part I do not think so. I warn you indeed that in philosophy, if you will go beyond Kant, you must meet new dangers, and must attempt new and venturesome wandering. ”

“ On the other hand, there is a trait of rigorism in Kant, a survival of the ancient dualism, which was not altogether consistent with the implications of his own philosophy. This philosophy afforded, as we have seen, the basis for a monistic view of the universe. But to {48} his mind the natural inclinations of man are opposed to good conscience and sound reason. He had contempt for the shallow optimism of his time, according to which the nature of man was all good, and needed only to be allowed to run its natural course to produce highest ethical results. ”

“ Kant used the word 'critique' so often that his philosophy has been called the 'critical philosophy.' The word therefore needs an explanation. Kant himself distinguished two types of philosophy, which he called the dogmatic and critical types. The essence of a dogmatic philosophy is that it makes belief to rest upon knowledge. Its endeavour is to demonstrate that which is believed. It brings out as its foil the characteristically sceptical philosophy. This esteems that the proofs advanced in the interest of belief are inadequate. The belief itself is therefore an illusion. ”