PROFESSOR MORRIS ON KANT.*
MANY of our readers will remember Brown's remark with reference to the philosophies of Reid and Hume. Home—the typical sceptic—and Reid—scepticism's deadliest foe—did not, in reality, Brown said, differ at all. Hume cried out, "You -can't give any satisfactory reason for believing in a world external to your consciousness !" and added in a whisper, "But you can't get rid of the belief." Reid insisted loudly, "A belief in the external world is an essential part of the constitution of • Kant's Critique of Pure Beacon a Critical Expacititrn. By George S. Morris, 'Ph.D. Chicago; B. C. Griggs and Co. London Trabner and Co. 1882.
man's nature !" and then whispered," He can't justify it by any sufficient reason, though." Whether or no this be a true account of the matter so far as Reid is concerned, it certainly expresses a truth of wide application. There is, in many a great philosopher's works, a class of opinions that is loudly insisted upon, and a certain proportion of admissions, not falling in with the rest of his theory. To take instances near home, the late Mr. Mill, the most strenuous opponent of the Intuition Philosophy, granted that our belief in the veracity of memory is" ultimate," or, in other words, that memory gives us an intuitive knowledge of the past. Dr. Bain admits that one must assume the uniformity of Nature. Mr. Herbert Spencer's whole philosophy, though displaying in every page constructive genius, quietly takes for granted first principles which no experience could give him. Some one has said of Feuerbach that his Atheistic philosophy amounted to the solution of the following problem :— " Given that there is no God, how can you best account for religions belief?" We should, similarly, state Mr. Spencer's problem thus :—" Given that the Evolution philosophy con- tains the true account of mental and social phenomena, how are its principles to be best harmonised with observed facts P" It would take too long to examine in detail, and in each individual case, the causes to which we must attribute incon- sistency of this kind. We can only state, briefly illustrating our statement by the work of which we are about to speak, that it seems to us due to the double aspect of truth to the philosopher. He attempts two things,—to observe phenomena, and to construct a theory which should account for them. If facts are brought under his notice which do not seem to square with his theory, "taut pis pour les faits." He is too much interested in and com- mitted to his theory to revise it,—to abandon it for the time, perhaps. He is conscious that there is mach truth in it, and yet the facts are undeniable, therefore he gives up neither ; the real truth being, generally, that he has carried a theory, true within limits, beyond the sphere of its legitimate application.
We had occasion, a short time ago, to allude to the contrast, so often pointed out, between Kant's practical belief and his speculative principles. But there is a farther point to be noted in connection with the purely speculative philosophy of the
Konigsberg sage, which is brought into prominent relief in the volume before us. It is well known that two quite distinct schools of philosophy claim Kant as the original source of their
teaching. There is the German school, represented in its gradual development by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; and the school of destructive thought, which looks upon metaphysics as an impossibility, and upon all reasoning with respect to "things-in-themselves "as illusory and self-contradictory. Dean Manse! and Mr. Herbert Spencer represent two successive stages of this school, and certainly if we judged of Kant by the "Antinomies of Pure Reason" alone, these writers would seem to be the true exponents of his views. But even in the Critique of Pure Beason itself, to say nothing of the " Practical " critique, there are indications of another line of thought, separating hint completely from Hume, the father of scepticism, and the rest of his school, which later German writers claim to have explained and developed, and which issues, in them, not in the denial of the possibility of metaphysics, but in a system of ontology. The great question in these days, now that the cry "Back to Kant !" has become so general, is which of these schools is Kant's legitimate child, and which the bastard ? Or to revert to Brown's mode of expression, "What was Kant's shout, and what his whisper ?" Pro- fessor Morris's account of the matter, in the interesting little volume on the Critique of Pure Beason, with which he com- mences a series of German philosophical classics for English readers, is briefly as follows. Kant was early in life educated in the current philosophy of his time, which he found highly unsatisfactory :—
"He had been bred in the current metaphysics of his time—the so-called Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophy—in which the living thought of the acknowledged master Leibnitz had been reduced to a systematic, but lifeless, and hence comparatively uninstructive formalism. Through this, as will be subsequently seen, Kant, nevertheless, imbibed many a germ-of real philosophic thought ; but it did not satisfy him, and in his very first published work, he expresses incidentally his distrust of all current metaphysics, by declaring that our meta- physics, like many other sciences, has, in fact, only come to the threshold of real and solid knowledge; and God only knows when we shall see it step across the threshold.'"
Dissatisfied, then, with mental philosophy, he betook himself more and more to the study of physics, and thus fell under the influence of British writers, such as Newton. Side by side with British physicists, he studied Locke, Hume, and others of our "experience" philosophers, whose systems he found at all events definite; and, up to a certain point, satisfactory. The method of metaphysics should, he said, be the same as that which Newton followed in physics with such signal success. It must find its place "on the lowly ground of experience and common- sense; all we can do is to analyse the confused content of consciousness.'" Those convictions which are necessary to our happiness have, fortunately, been written by God in our hearts, and we hold them by an invincible, moral faith, which, however, defies theoretic justification.
Here is the point at which, according to Professor Morris, Kant reached philosophical low-water. His after-career con- sisted in a gradual progress towards emancipation from the trammels of Hame's scepticism,—never, indeed, thoroughly completed. This is the key-note to Professor Morris's work, which traces, with respect to each distinctive feature in Kant's philosophy, both the sensational principle from which it departed, and what the author holds to be the true view which the succeeding Kantians in Germany developed from it. To take one instance, Kant's account of Space. Hanle held that the spatial relations, investigated by geometry, are purely generalisations from experience; that our belief that a straight line is the shortest way from one point to another is an induc- tion, and has no necessary character in it. Kant, on the other hand, saw that the observation of one instance was quite suffi- cient to show that such relations must universally hold good. such a belief is founded on. no induction, but on an a priori judgment of the mind. Here, then, he seems to depart from the sensational theory. He grants—or appears to grant—the mind's perception of necessary objective truth. But at this point he stops short, and draws back. At the moment when he appears to be casting off his fruitless subjectivism, he halts, and seems afraid to proceed farther. True, he says, the mind, can know synthetic, a priori truths about space ; it knows beforehand that in any part of space the geometrical truths hold. good ; but space itself is, after all, only subjective. It is a " form " of thought. It is the indispensable condition of our sensible knowledge, as time is, and they shape and arrange it. But they have nothing to do with the "thing-in-itself.' Neither space nor time can be absolutely objective, because, if they were, they must be either substance or the attributes of substance, and they are neither. But Professor Morris points out that elsewhere Kant had explained that substance and attribute are terms derived "by abstraction from material things," so that this reasoning is no more valid than would be the reasoning of one who denied that he had sensations of sight, because they produced effects on him which he could not explain in terms of sensations of touch and smell.
We are unable to follow Professor Morris in his distinctively Hegelian tenets, to which we observe he gives the name of "philosophy," par excellence. We have no space to discuss the question here, but we think he would have done better to have examined the intuitionist belief in an external world, instead of dismissing Reid's account with the remark that the problem is artificial. His own remarks on the subject are rather poetic, than a definite handling of the difficulties of the question. He sums up thus Being is Doing, and Doing is, in the first and last resort, the operation of Spirit. But the activity of Spirit is Life, and so Life is in some sense coextensive with Reality. It is the contemplation of such results as these that Plato terms the Absolute, the Good; Aristotle, pure Energy St. John, Love ; Hegel, Spirit." All this savours of Hegel, and we have looked in vain for any account of the matter which solves the real problem otherwise than by ignoring it. But it is extremely interesting to trace the influence of Kant on the later Germans, however little we may think they improved upon him, or were, in detail, true exponents of his principles ; and the worli before us goes far to show that Kant's scepticism was only a halting-place, and that he himself did not look upon it as final, or as an account of his full mind. He rested in it, when his powers of analysis failed to carry him further; and, again, there was an element of reaction against the unsatisfactory metaphysics 'current in his time ; but he saw that truth was to be gained, though he had not succeeded in tracing the path to it. He saw the mountain in the distance, but could not find the road by which it was to be. approached. The last words of the Critique are certainly in a hopeful strain, and would sound strange indeed in the mouth of an Agnostic:—" The critical way alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to wander through it in my company, he may now judge whether, if he will contribute his share towards making this foot-path a highway, that which many centuries could not accomplish, may not be attained before the lapse of the present century,—namely, tho complete satisfaction of human reason respecting those problems which have at all times aroused its curiosity, though hitherto in vain."
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