APPENDIX

CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY

C’est le privilège du vrai génie, et surtout du génie qui ouvre une carrière, de faire impunément de grandes fautes.

Voltaire [Siècle de Louis XIV, ch. 32]

[“It is the privilege of true genius, and especially of the genius who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity.” Tr.]

207 It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a clear and complete exposition of its value. For the faults are something particular and finite, which can therefore be taken in fully at a glance. On the other hand, the very stamp that genius impresses on its works is that their excellence is unfathomable and inexhaustible, and therefore they do not become obsolete, but are the instructors of many succeeding centuries. The perfected masterpiece of a truly great mind will always have a profound and vigorous effect on the whole human race, so much so that it is impossible to calculate to what distant centuries and countries its enlightening influence may reach. This is always the case, since, however accomplished and rich the age might be in which the masterpiece itself arose, genius always rises like a palm-tree above the soil in which it is rooted.

A far-reaching, deep, and widespread effect of this kind cannot, however, take place suddenly, on account of the great difference between the genius and ordinary mankind. The knowledge this one man in a lifetime drew directly from life and the world, won, and presented to others as acquired and finished, cannot at once become the property of mankind, since men have not so much strength to receive as the genius has to give. But even after a successful struggle with unworthy opponents, who contest the life of what is immortal at its very birth, and would like to nip in the bud the salvation of mankind (like the serpent in Hercules’ cradle), that knowledge must first wander through the circuitous paths of innumerable false interpretations and distorted applications; it must overcome the attempts to unite it with old errors, and thus live in conflict, until a new and unprejudiced generation grows up to meet it. Even in youth this generation gradually receives some of the contents of that source from a thousand different channels, assimilates it by degrees, and thus shares in the benefit that was to flow from that great mind to mankind. So slow is the advance in the education of the human race, that feeble, and at the same time refractory, pupil of genius. Thus the whole strength and importance of Kant’s teaching will become evident only in the course of time, when the spirit of the age, itself gradually reformed and altered in the most important and essential respect by the influence of that teaching, furnishes living evidence of the power of that giant mind. However, I will certainly not take upon myself the thankless role of Calchas and Cassandra by presumptuously anticipating the spirit of the age. Only I may be allowed, in agreement with what has been said, to regard Kant’s works as still very new, whereas many at the present day look upon them as already antiquated. Indeed, they have discarded them as settled and done with, or, as they put it, have left them behind. Others, emboldened by this, ignore them altogether, and with brazen effrontery continue to philosophize about God and the soul on the assumptions of the old realistic dogmatism and its scholastic philosophy. This is as if we wished to introduce into modern chemistry the theories of the alchemists. Kant’s works, however, do not need my feeble eulogy, but will themselves externally extol their master, and will always live on earth, though perhaps not in the letter, yet in the spirit.

But, of course, if we look back at the first result of his doctrines, and the efforts and events in the sphere of philosophy during the period that has since elapsed, we see the corroboration of a very depressing saying of Goethe: “Just as the water displaced by a ship immediately flows in again behind it, so, when eminent minds have pushed error on one side and made room for themselves, it naturally closes in behind them again very rapidly.” (Poetry and Truth, Pt. 3, [Book 15], p. 521.) This period, however, has been only an episode that is to be reckoned as part of the above-mentioned fate of all new and great knowledge, an episode now unmistakably near its end, since the bubble so steadily blown out is at last bursting. People generally are beginning to be conscious that real and serious philosophy still stands where Kant left it. In any case, I cannot see that anything has been done in philosophy between him and me; I therefore take my departure direct from him.

What I have in view in this Appendix to my work is really only a vindication of the teaching I have set forth in it, in so far as in many points it does not agree with the Kantian philosophy, but actually contradicts it. Yet a discussion thereof is necessary, for evidently my line of thought, different as its content is from the Kantian, is completely under its influence, and necessarily presupposes and starts from it; and I confess that, next to the impression of the world of perception, I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant’s works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato. But I can justify the disagreements with Kant that are nevertheless to be found in my work, only by accusing him of error in the same points, and exposing mistakes he made. In this Appendix I must therefore deal with Kant in a thoroughly polemical manner, and seriously and with every effort; for only thus can the error that clings to Kant’s teaching be burnished away, and the truth of that teaching shine all the more brightly, and endure more positively. Therefore it must not be expected that my sincere and deep reverence for Kant will also extend to his weaknesses and mistakes, and hence that I should expose them only with the most cautious indulgence, for thus my language would of necessity become feeble and flat through circumlocutions. Towards a living person such indulgence is needed, since human frailty cannot endure even the most just refutation of an error, unless it is tempered by soothing and flattery, and hardly even then; and a teacher of the ages and benefactor of mankind deserves at least that his human frailty shall also be treated with indulgence, so that he may not be caused any pain. But the man who is dead has cast this weakness aside; his merit stands firm; time will purify it more and more of all overestimation and detraction. His mistakes must be separated from it, rendered harmless, and then given over to oblivion. Therefore in the polemic I am about to institute against Kant, I have only his mistakes and weaknesses in view. I face them with hostility, and wage a relentless war of extermination upon them, always mindful not to conceal them with indulgence, but rather to place them in the brightest light, the more surely to reduce them to nought. For the reasons above-mentioned, I am not aware here of either injustice or ingratitude to Kant. But in order that, even in the eyes of others, every appearance of malignancy may be removed, I will first of all bring out clearly my deeply-felt veneration for and gratitude to Kant by stating briefly what in my eyes appears to be his principal merit. I will do this from so general a standpoint that it will not be necessary for me to touch on those points in which I must later contradict him.

Kant’s greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect, and that on this account they cannot be known according to what they may be in themselves. He was led on to this path by Locke (see Prolegomena to every Metaphysic, § 13, note 2). Locke had shown that the secondary qualities of things, such as sound, odour, colour, hardness, softness, smoothness, and the like, founded on the affections of the senses, do not belong to the objective body, the thing-in-itself. To this, on the contrary, he attributed only the primary qualities, i.e., those that presuppose merely space and impenetrability, and so extension, shape, solidity, number, mobility. But this Lockean distinction, which was easy to find, and keeps only to the surface of things, was, so to speak, merely a youthful prelude to the Kantian. Thus, starting from an incomparably higher standpoint, Kant explains all that Locke had admitted as qualitates primariae, that is, as qualities of the thing-in-itself, as also belonging merely to its phenomenon in our faculty of perception or apprehension, and this just because the conditions of this faculty, namely space, time, and causality, are known by us a priori. Thus Locke had abstracted from the thing-in-itself the share that the sense-organs have in its phenomenon; but Kant further abstracted the share of the brain-functions (although not under this name). In this way the distinction between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself obtained an infinitely greater significance, and a very much deeper meaning. For this purpose he had to take in hand the great separation of our a priori from our a posteriori knowledge, which before him had never been made with proper precision and completeness or with clear and conscious knowledge. Accordingly, this then became the principal subject of his profound investigations. We wish here to observe at once that Kant’s philosophy has a three-fold relation to that of his predecessors; firstly, as we have seen, a relation to Locke’s philosophy, confirming and extending it; secondly, a relation to Hume’s, correcting and employing it, a relation that we find most distinctly expressed in the preface to the Prolegomena (that finest and most comprehensible of all Kant’s principal works, which is far too little read, for it immensely facilitates the study of his philosophy); thirdly, a decidedly polemical and destructive relation to the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff. We should know all three doctrines before proceeding to the study of the Kantian philosophy. Now if, in accordance with the above, the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, and hence the doctrine of the complete diversity of the ideal from the real, is the fundamental characteristic of the Kantian philosophy, then the assertion of the absolute identity of these two, which appeared soon afterwards, affords a melancholy proof of the saying of Goethe previously quoted. This is all the more the case, inasmuch as that identity rested on nothing but the vapouring of intellectual intuition. Accordingly, it was only a return to the crudeness of the common view, masked under the imposing impression of an air of importance, under bombast and nonsense. It became the worthy starting-point of the even grosser nonsense of the ponderous and witless Hegel. Now as Kant’s separation of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, arrived at in the manner previously explained, far surpassed in the profundity and thoughtfulness of its argument all that had ever existed, it was infinitely important in its results. For in it he propounded, quite originally and in an entirely new way, the same truth, found from a new aspect and on a new path, which Plato untiringly repeats, and generally expresses in his language as follows. This world that appears to the senses has no true being, but only a ceaseless becoming; it is, and it also is not; and its comprehension is not so much a knowledge as an illusion. This is what he expresses in a myth at the beginning of the seventh book of the Republic, the most important passage in all his works, which has been mentioned already in the third book of the present work. He says that men, firmly chained in a dark cave, see neither the genuine original light nor actual things, but only the inadequate light of the fire in the cave, and the shadows of actual things passing by the fire behind their backs. Yet they imagine that the shadows are the reality, and that determining the succession of these shadows is true wisdom. The same truth, though presented quite differently, is also a principal teaching of the Vedas and Puranas, namely the doctrine of Maya, by which is understood nothing but what Kant calls the phenomenon as opposed to the thing-in-itself. For the work of Maya is stated to be precisely this visible world in which we are, a magic effect called into being, an unstable and inconstant illusion without substance, comparable to the optical illusion and the dream, a veil enveloping human consciousness, a something of which it is equally false and equally true to say that it is and that it is not. Now Kant not only expressed the same doctrine in an entirely new and original way, but made of it a proved and incontestable truth through the most calm and dispassionate presentation. Plato and the Indians, on the other hand, had based their contentions merely on a universal perception of the world; they produced them as the direct utterance of their consciousness, and presented them mythically and poetically rather than philosophically and distinctly. In this respect they are related to Kant as are the Pythagoreans Hicetas, Philolaus, and Aristarchus, who asserted the motion of the earth round the stationary sun, to Copernicus. Such clear knowledge and calm, deliberate presentation of this dreamlike quality of the whole world is really the basis of the whole Kantian philosophy; it is its soul and its greatest merit. He achieved it by taking to pieces the whole machinery of our cognitive faculty, by means of which the phantasmagoria of the objective world is brought about, and presenting it piecemeal with marvellous insight and ability. All previous Western philosophy, appearing unspeakably clumsy when compared with the Kantian, had failed to recognize that truth, and had therefore in reality always spoken as if in a dream. Kant first suddenly wakened it from this dream; therefore the last sleepers (Mendelssohn) called him the all-pulverizer. He showed that the laws which rule with inviolable necessity in existence, i.e., in experience generally, are not to be applied to deduce and explain existence itself; that their validity is therefore only relative, in other words, begins only after existence, the world of experience generally, is already settled and established; that in consequence these laws cannot be our guiding line when we come to the explanation of the existence of the world and of ourselves. All previous Western philosophers had imagined that these laws, according to which all phenomena are connected to one another, and all of which—time and space as well as causality and inference—I comprehend under the expression the principle of sufficient reason, were absolute laws conditioned by nothing at all, aeternae veritates; that the world itself existed only in consequence of and in conformity with them; and that under their guidance the whole riddle of the world must therefore be capable of solution. The assumptions made for this purpose, which Kant criticizes under the name of the Ideas of reason (Vernunft), really served only to raise the mere phenomenon, the work of Maya, the shadow-world of Plato, to the one highest reality, to put it in the place of the innermost and true essence of things, and thus to render the real knowledge thereof impossible, in a word, to send the dreamers still more soundly to sleep. Kant showed that those laws, and consequently the world itself, are conditioned by the subject’s manner of knowing. From this it followed that, however far one might investigate and infer under the guidance of these laws, in the principal matter, i.e., in knowledge of the inner nature of the world in itself and outside the representation, no step forward was made, but one moved merely like a squirrel in his wheel. We therefore compare all the dogmatists to people who imagine that, if only they go straight forward long enough, they will come to the end of the world; but Kant had then circumnavigated the globe, and had shown that, because it is round, we cannot get out of it by horizontal movement, but that by perpendicular movement it is perhaps not impossible to do so. It can also be said that Kant’s teaching gives the insight that the beginning and end of the world are to be sought not without us, but rather within.

Now all this rests on the fundamental distinction between dogmatic and critical or transcendental philosophy. He who wishes to be clear about this, and to realize it by means of an example, can do so quite briefly if he reads, as a specimen of dogmatic philosophy, an essay by Leibniz, entitled De Rerum Originatione Radicali, printed for the first time in the edition of Leibniz’s philosophical works by Erdmann, vol. i, p. 147. Here the origin and excellent nature of the world are demonstrated a priori so thoroughly in the realistic-dogmatic manner with the aid of the ontological and cosmological proofs, and on the ground of the veritates aeternae. It is admitted once, by the way, that experience shows the very opposite of the excellence of the world here demonstrated, whereupon experience is then told that it does not understand anything about it, and ought to hold its tongue when philosophy has spoken a priori. With Kant the critical philosophy appeared as the opponent of this entire method. It makes its problem just those veritates aeternae that serve as the foundation of every such dogmatic structure, investigates their origin, and then finds this to be in man’s head. Here they spring from the forms properly belonging to it, which it carries in itself for the purpose of perceiving and apprehending an objective world. Thus here in the brain is the quarry furnishing the material for that proud, dogmatic structure. Now because the critical philosophy, in order to reach this result, had to go beyond the veritates aeternae, on which all the previous dogmatism was based, so as to make these truths themselves the subject of investigation, it became transcendental philosophy. From this it follows also that the objective world as we know it does not belong to the true being of things-in-themselves, but is its mere phenomenon, conditioned by those very forms that lie a priori in the human intellect (i.e., the brain); hence the world cannot contain anything but phenomena.

It is true that Kant did not arrive at the knowledge that the phenomenon is the world as representation and that the thing-in-itself is the will. He showed, however, that the phenomenal world is conditioned just as much by the subject as by the object, and by isolating the most universal forms of its phenomenon, i.e., of the representation, he demonstrated that we know these forms and survey them according to their whole constitutional nature not only by starting from the object, but just as well by starting from the subject, since they are really the limit between object and subject and are common to both. He concluded that, by pursuing this limit, we do not penetrate into the inner nature of the object or the subject, and consequently that we never know the essential nature of the world, namely the thing-in-itself.

He did not deduce the thing-in-itself in the right way, as I shall soon show, but by means of an inconsistency; and he had to pay the penalty for this in the frequent and irresistible attacks on this principal part of his teaching. He did not recognize the thing-in-itself directly in the will, but made a great and original step towards this knowledge, since he demonstrated the undeniable moral significance of human conduct to be quite different from, and not dependent on, the laws of the phenomenon, to be not even capable of explanation according to them, but to be something directly touching the thing-in-itself. This is the second main point of view for assessing his merit.

We can regard as the third point the complete overthrow of the scholastic philosophy. By this term I propose to denote generally the whole period beginning with Augustine, the Church Father, and ending just before Kant. For the chief characteristic of scholasticism is indeed that which is very correctly stated by Tennemann, namely the guardianship of the prevailing national religion over philosophy, for which there was in reality nothing left but to prove and embellish the principal dogmas religion prescribed for it. The scholastics proper down to Suarez confess this openly and without reserve; the succeeding philosophers do so more unconsciously, or at any rate not avowedly. It is held that the scholastic philosophy extends only to about a hundred years before Descartes, and that with him there begins an entirely new epoch of free investigation, independent of all positive theological doctrine. Such an investigation, however, cannot in fact be attributed to Descartes and his successors,²⁰⁸ but only an appearance of it, and in any case only an attempt at it. Descartes was an extremely great man, and, if we take into consideration the age in which he lived, he achieved very much. But if we set this consideration aside, and measure him according to the emancipation of thought from all fetters and to the beginning of a new period of impartial and original investigation with which he has been credited, we are obliged to find that, with his scepticism still lacking in true earnestness, and thus abating and passing away so quickly and so completely, he has the appearance of wishing to discard all at once all the fetters of the early implanted opinions belonging to his age and nation; but he does this only apparently and for a moment, in order at once to assume them again, and hold them all the more firmly; and it is just the same with all his successors down to Kant. Goethe’s verses are therefore very applicable to a free and independent thinker of this kind:

“Saving thy gracious presence, he to me
A long-legged grasshopper appears to be,
That springing flies, and flying springs,
And in the grass the same old ditty sings.” ²⁰⁹

Kant had reasons for looking as if he too had only this in view. But the pretended leap that was allowed, because it was known that it leads back to the grass, this time became a flight; and now those who stand below are able only to follow him with their eyes, and no longer to catch him again.

Kant therefore ventured to demonstrate by his teaching the impossibility of our being able to prove all those dogmas that were alleged to have been proved. Speculative theology and the rational psychology connected with it received from him their death-blow. They have since vanished from German philosophy, and we must not let ourselves be misled by the fact that the word is retained here and there after the thing has been given up, or that some miserable professor of philosophy has the fear of his master in view and leaves truth to look after itself. Only he who has observed the pernicious influence of those conceptions on natural science, as well as on philosophy, in all the writers, even the best, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can estimate the magnitude of this merit of Kant’s. The change of tone and of the metaphysical background that has appeared in German works on natural science since Kant is remarkable; before him things were the same as they still are in England. This merit of Kant is connected with the fact that the unreflecting pursuit of the laws of the phenomenon, the enhancement of these to eternal truths, and the raising of the fleeting phenomenon to the real inner being of the world, in short, realism, not disturbed in its delusion by any reflection, had been wholly prevalent in all preceding philosophy of ancient, medieval, and modern times. Berkeley, who like Malebranche before him had recognized its one-sidedness and indeed its falseness, was unable to overthrow it, since his attack was confined to one point. It was therefore reserved for Kant to help the fundamental idealistic view to obtain the ascendancy in Europe, at any rate in philosophy, a view which prevails in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia, and is in essence even that of religion. Thus before Kant we were in time; now time is in us, and so on.

Ethics was also treated by that realistic philosophy according to the laws of the phenomenon, which it regarded as absolute and holding good even of the thing-in-itself. Therefore ethics was based now on a doctrine of perfect happiness, now on the will of the Creator, and finally on the notion of perfection. In and by itself, such a concept is entirely empty and void of content, for it denotes a mere relation that acquires significance only from the things to which it is applied. “To be perfect” means nothing more than “to correspond to some concept presupposed and given,” a concept which must therefore be first framed, and without which the perfection is an unknown abstract quantity and consequently means nothing at all when expressed alone. Now if we want to make the concept “mankind” into a tacit assumption, and accordingly to set it up as a moral principle for aspiring to human perfection, then in this case we merely say: “Men ought to be as they ought to be,” and we are just as wise as we were before. In fact, “perfect” is very nearly a mere synonym of “numerically complete,” since it signifies that, in a given case or individual, all the predicates that lie in the concept of its species appear in support of it, and hence are actually present. Therefore, the concept of “perfection,” if used absolutely and in the abstract, is a word devoid of idea, and so also is all talk about the “most perfect of all beings,” and the like. All this is a mere idle display of words. Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century this concept of perfection and imperfection had become current coin; indeed, it was the hinge on which almost all questions of morality and even of theology turned. It was on everyone’s lips, so that ultimately it became a real nuisance. We see even the best authors of the time, Lessing for example, entangled most deplorably in perfections and imperfections and wrestling with them. Here any thinking man was bound to feel, vaguely at any rate, that this concept is without any positive content, since, like an algebraical symbol, it indicates a mere relation in abstracto. Kant, as we have already said, entirely separated the undeniable, great ethical significance of actions from the phenomenon and its laws, and showed that the former directly concerned the thing-in-itself, the innermost nature of the world, whereas the latter, i.e., time and space, and all that fills them and is arranged in them according to the causal law, are to be regarded as an unstable and insubstantial dream.

The little I have said, which by no means exhausts the subject, may be sufficient evidence of my recognition of Kant’s great merits, a recognition recorded here for my own satisfaction, and because justice demanded that those merits should be recalled to the mind of everyone who wishes to follow me in the unsparing exposure of his mistakes, to which I now turn.

That Kant’s great achievements were bound to be accompanied by great errors is easy to understand on merely historical grounds. For although he effected the greatest revolution in philosophy, and did away with scholasticism, which in the above-mentioned wider sense had lasted for fourteen hundred years, in order really to begin an entirely new third world-epoch in philosophy, the immediate result of his appearance was, however, in practice only negative, not positive. For, since he did not set up a completely new system to which his followers could have adhered only for a period, all observed indeed that something very great had happened, but no one rightly knew what. They certainly saw that all previous philosophy had been a fruitless dreaming, from which the new age awakened; but they did not know what they ought to adhere to now. A great void, a great lack, had occurred; the universal attention even of the general public was attracted. Induced by this, but not urged by inner inclination and feeling of power (which express themselves even at the most unfavourable moment, as in the case of Spinoza), people without any conspicuous talent made many different, feeble, absurd, and sometimes insane attempts, to which the public, now interested, gave its attention, and with great patience, such as is found only in Germany, long lent its ear.

The same thing must once have happened in nature, when a great revolution altered the whole surface of the earth, sea and land changed places, and the scene was levelled for a new creation. It was then a long time before nature could produce a new series of lasting forms, each in harmony with itself and with the rest. Strange and monstrous organisms appeared which did not harmonize with themselves or with one another, and could not last. But it is just the remains of these, still in existence, which have brought down to us the memorial of that wavering and tentative procedure of nature forming herself anew. Now since a crisis quite similar to this and an age of monstrous abortions were produced by Kant, as we all know, it may be concluded that his merit was not complete, but was burdened with great defects, and must have been negative and one-sided. These defects we will now investigate.

First of all, we will clearly present to ourselves and examine the fundamental idea in which lie the plan and purpose of the whole Critique of Pure Reason. Kant took up the point of view of his predecessors, the dogmatic philosophers, and accordingly started with them from the following assumptions. (1) Metaphysics is the science of that which lies beyond the possibility of all experience. (2) Such a thing can never be found according to fundamental principles that are themselves first drawn from experience (Prolegomena, § 1 ); but only what we know prior to, and hence independently of, experience can reach farther than possible experience. (3) In our reason (Vernunft), some fundamental principles of the kind are actually to be found; they are comprehended under the name of knowledge from pure reason. So far Kant agrees with his predecessors, but now he parts company from them. They say: “These fundamental principles, or knowledge from pure reason, are expressions of the absolute possibility of things, aeternae veritates, sources of ontology; they stand above the world-order, just as with the ancients fate stood above the gods.” Kant says that they are mere forms of our intellect, laws, not of the existence of things, but of our representations of them; therefore they are valid merely for our apprehension of things, and accordingly cannot extend beyond the possibility of experience, which is what was aimed at according to the first assumption. For it is precisely the a priori nature of these forms of knowledge, since it can rest only on their subjective origin, that cuts us off for ever from knowledge of the being-in-itself of things, and confines us to a world of mere phenomena, so that we cannot know things as they may be in themselves, even a posteriori, not to mention a priori. Accordingly, metaphysics is impossible, and in its place we have criticism of pure reason. In face of the old dogmatism, Kant is here wholly triumphant; hence all dogmatic attempts that have since appeared, have had to pursue courses quite different from the earlier ones. I shall now go on to the justification of my attempt in accordance with the expressed intention of the present criticism. Thus, with a more careful examination of the above argumentation, we shall have to confess that its first fundamental assumption is a petitio principii, ²¹⁰ it lies in the proposition (clearly laid down especially in Prolegomena, § 1): “The source of metaphysics cannot be empirical at all; its fundamental principles and concepts can never be taken from experience, either inner or outer.” Yet nothing at all is advanced to establish this cardinal assertion except the etymological argument from the word metaphysics. In truth, however, the matter stands thus: The world and our own existence present themselves to us necessarily as a riddle. It is now assumed, without more ado, that the solution of this riddle cannot result from a thorough understanding of the world itself, but must be looked for in something quite different from the world (for this is the meaning of “beyond the possibility of all experience”); and that everything of which we can in any way have immediate knowledge (for this is the meaning of possible experience, inner as well as outer) must be excluded from that solution. On the contrary, this solution must be sought only in what we can arrive at merely indirectly, namely by means of inferences from universal principles a priori. After the principal source of all knowledge had thus been excluded, and the direct path to truth closed, it is not surprising that the dogmatic attempts failed, and that Kant was able to demonstrate the necessity of this failure. For it had been assumed beforehand that metaphysics and knowledge a priori were identical; yet for this it would have been necessary first to demonstrate that the material for solving the riddle of the world cannot possibly be contained in the world itself, but is to be sought only outside it, in something we can reach only under the guidance of those forms of which we are a priori conscious. But so long as this is not proved, we have no ground for shutting ourselves off from the richest of all sources of knowledge, inner and outer experience, in the case of the most important and most difficult of all problems, in order to operate with empty forms alone. Therefore, I say that the solution to the riddle of the world must come from an understanding of the world itself; and hence that the task of metaphysics is not to pass over experience in which the world exists, but to understand it thoroughly, since inner and outer experience are certainly the principal source of all knowledge. I say, therefore, that the solution to the riddle of the world is possible only through the proper connexion of outer with inner experience, carried out at the right point, and by the combination, thus effected, of these two very heterogeneous sources of knowledge. Yet this is so only within certain limits inseparable from our finite nature, consequently so that we arrive at a correct understanding of the world itself without reaching an explanation of its existence which is conclusive and does away with all further problems. Consequently, est quadam prodire tenus,²¹¹ and my path lies midway between the doctrine of omniscience of the earlier dogmatism and the despair of the Kantian Critique. But the important truths discovered by Kant, by which the previous metaphysical systems were overthrown, have furnished my system with data and material. Compare what I have said about my method in chapter 17 of volume two. So much for Kant’s fundamental idea; we will now consider the argument and its detail.

Kant’s style bears throughout the stamp of a superior mind, a genuine, strong individuality, and a quite extraordinary power of thought. Its characteristic quality can perhaps be appropriately described as a brilliant dryness, on the strength of which he was able to grasp concepts firmly and pick them out with great certainty, and then toss them about with the greatest freedom, to the reader’s astonishment. I find the same brilliant dryness again in the style of Aristotle, though that is much simpler. Nevertheless, Kant’s exposition is often indistinct, indefinite, inadequate, and occasionally obscure. This obscurity is certainly to be excused in part by the difficulty of the subject and the depth of the ideas. Yet whoever is himself clear to the bottom, and knows quite distinctly what he thinks and wants, will never write indistinctly, never set up wavering and indefinite concepts, or pick up from foreign languages extremely difficult and complicated expressions to denote such concepts, in order to continue using such expressions afterwards, as Kant took words and formulas from earlier, even scholastic, philosophy. These he combined with one another for his own purpose, as for example, “transcendental synthetic unity of apperception,” and in general “unity of synthesis,” which he always uses where “union” or “combination” would be quite sufficient by itself. Moreover, such a man will not always be explaining anew what has already been explained once, as Kant does, for example, with the understanding, the categories, experience, and other main concepts. Generally, such a man will not incessantly repeat himself, and yet, in every new presentation of an idea that has already occurred a hundred times, leave it again in precisely the same obscure passages. On the contrary, he will express his meaning once distinctly, thoroughly, and exhaustively, and leave it at that. Quo enim melius rem aliquam concipimus, eo magis determinati sumus ad eam unico modo exprimendam,²¹² says Descartes in his fifth letter. But the greatest disadvantage of Kant’s occasionally obscure exposition is that it acted as exemplar vitiis imitabile,²¹³ in fact it was misinterpreted as a pernicious authorization. The public had been forced to see that what is obscure is not always without meaning; what was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make vigorous use of this privilege; Schelling at least equalled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity. Meanwhile, Jean Paul wrote in vain his fine paragraph, “Higher appreciation of philosophical madness in the professor’s chair, and of poetical madness in the theatre” (Aesthetische Nachschule); for in vain had Goethe already said:

“They prate and teach, and no one interferes;
All from the fellowship of fools are shrinking.
Man usually believes, if only words he hears,
That also with them goes material for thinking.” ²¹⁴

But let us return to Kant. We cannot help admitting that he entirely lacks grand, classical simplicity, naïveté, ingénuité, candeur. His philosophy has no analogy with Greek architecture which presents large, simple proportions, revealing themselves at once to the glance; on the contrary, it reminds us very strongly of the Gothic style of architecture. For an entirely individual characteristic of Kant’s mind is a peculiar liking for symmetry that loves a variegated multiplicity, in order to arrange this, and to repeat this arrangement in subordinate forms, and so on indefinitely, precisely as in Gothic churches. In fact, he sometimes carries this to the point of trifling, and then, in deference to this tendency, goes so far as to do open violence to truth, and treats it as nature was treated by old-fashioned gardeners, whose works are symmetrical avenues, squares and triangles, trees shaped like pyramids and spheres, and hedges in regular and sinuous curves. I will illustrate this with facts.

After discussing space and time isolated from everything else, and then disposing of the whole of this world of perception, filling space and time, in which we live and are, with the meaningless words “the empirical content of perception is given to us,” he immediately arrives in one jump at the logical basis of his whole philosophy, namely the table of judgements. From this table he deduces an exact dozen of categories, symmetrically displayed under four titles. These later become the fearful Procrustean bed on to which he violently forces all things in the world and everything that occurs in man, shrinking from no violence and disdaining no sophism in order merely to be able to repeat everywhere the symmetry of that table. The first thing that he symmetrically deduces from it is the pure physiological table of universal principles of natural science, namely the axioms of intuition, anticipations of perception, analogies of experience, and postulates of empirical thought in general. Of these fundamental principles the first two are simple; but each of the last two symmetrically sends out three shoots. The mere categories were what he calls concepts, but these fundamental principles of natural science are judgements. In consequence of his highest guiding line to all wisdom, namely symmetry, the series is now to prove itself fruitful in the inferences or syllogisms; and this indeed they do again symmetrically and rhythmically. For as, by applying the categories to sensibility, experience together with its a priori principles sprang up for the understanding, so by applying the syllogisms to the categories, a task performed by reason (Vernunft) according to its alleged principle of looking for the unconditioned, the Ideas of reason arise. This takes place as follows: The three categories of relation give to syllogisms the three only possible kinds of major premisses, and accordingly syllogisms also are divided into three kinds, each of which is to be regarded as an egg from which the faculty of reason hatches an Idea; from the categorical kind of syllogism, the Idea of the soul; from the hypothetical, the Idea of the world; and from the disjunctive, the Idea of God. In the middle one, namely the Idea of the world, the symmetry of the table of categories is once more repeated, since its four titles produce four theses, each of which has its antithesis as a symmetrical pendant.

We express our admiration for the really extremely acute combination that produced this elegant structure, but later on we shall thoroughly examine its foundations and its parts. First, however, we must make the following remarks.

It is astonishing how Kant, without further reflection, pursues his way, following his symmetry, arranging everything according to it, without ever considering by itself one of the subjects thus dealt with. I will explain myself in more detail. After taking intuitive knowledge into consideration merely in mathematics, he entirely neglects the rest of knowledge of perception in which the world lies before us, and sticks solely to abstract thinking. Such thinking, however, receives the whole of its meaning and value only from the world of perception, which is infinitely more significant, more universal, and more substantial than is the abstract part of our knowledge. In fact, and this is a main point, he has nowhere clearly distinguished knowledge of perception from abstract knowledge, and in this way, as we shall see later, he becomes implicated in inextricable contradictions with himself. After disposing of the whole world of the senses with the meaningless “it is given,” he now, as we have said, makes the logical table of judgements the foundation-stone of his structure. But here again he does not reflect for a moment on what really lies before him. These forms of judgements are indeed words and word-combinations. Yet first of all it should have been asked what these directly denote; it would be found that they are concepts. Then the next question would be about the nature of concepts. From the answer to it we should have seen what relation these have to the representations of perception in which the world exists, for perception and reflection would have been separated. It would then have been necessary to examine not merely how pure and only formal intuition a priori, but also how its content, namely empirical perception, enters consciousness. But then it would have been seen what share the understanding has in this, and so also in general what the understanding is, and, on the other hand, what reason (Vernunft) really is, the critique of which was being written. It is very remarkable that he does not once properly and adequately define the latter, but only occasionally, and as required by the context in each case, gives incomplete and inaccurate explanations of it, in entire contradiction to the rule of Descartes already quoted.²¹⁵ For example, on p. 11 (V, 24) of the Critique of Pure Reason, it is the faculty of the principles a priori; again on p. 299 (V, 356) he says that reason is the faculty of the principles, and that it is opposed to the understanding, which is the faculty of rules! Now one would think that there must be a vast difference between principles and rules, for it entitles us to assume a particular faculty of knowledge for each of them. But this great distinction is said to lie merely in the fact that what is known a priori through pure intuition or perception, or through the forms of the understanding, is a rule, and only what results a priori from mere concepts is a principle. We shall return later to this arbitrary and inadmissible distinction when dealing with the Dialectic. On p. 330 (V, 386) reason is the faculty of inference; mere judging (p. 69; V, 94) he often declares to be the business of the understanding. Now by this he really says that judging is the business of the understanding, so long as the ground of the judgement is empirical, transcendental, or metalogical (On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, §§ 31, 32, 33); but if it is logical, and the syllogism consists in this, then a quite special, and much more important, faculty of knowledge, namely of reason, is here at work. Indeed, what is more, on p. 303 (V, 360) it is explained that the immediate inferences from a proposition are still a matter of the understanding, and that only those where a mediating concept is used would be carried out by our faculty of reason. The example quoted is that from the proposition “All men are mortal,” the inference “Some mortals are men” is drawn by the mere understanding; on the other hand: “All scholars are mortal” is an inference demanding a quite different and far more important faculty, that of reason. How was it possible for a great thinker to produce anything like this? On p. 553 (V. 581) reason is all of a sudden the constant condition of all arbitrary actions. On p. 614 (V, 642) it consists in our being able to give an account of our assertions; on pp. 643, 644 (V, 671, 672) it consists in the fact that it unites the concepts of the understanding into Ideas, just as the understanding unites the manifold of objects into concepts. On p. 646 (V, 674) it is nothing but the faculty of deriving the particular from the general.

The understanding is also being constantly explained afresh. It is explained in seven passages of the Critique of Pure Reason: thus, on p. 51 (V, 75) it is the faculty of producing representations themselves; on p. 69 (V, 94) it is the faculty of judging, i.e., of thinking, i.e., of knowing through concepts; on p. 137 of the fifth edition,²¹⁶ it is the faculty of knowledge in general; on p. 132 (V, 171) it is the faculty of rules, but on p. 158 (V, 197) he says that “It is not only the faculty of rules, but the source of fundamental principles (Grundsätze) according to which everything is under rules”; and yet previously it was opposed to reason, because reason alone was the faculty of principles (Principien). On p. 160 (V, 199) the understanding is the faculty of concepts; but on p. 302 (V, 359) it is the faculty of the unity of phenomena by means of rules.

Against such really confused and groundless utterances on the question (although they come from Kant) I shall have no need to defend the explanations I have advanced of these two faculties of knowledge, for such explanations are fixed, precise, definite, simple, and always agree with the use of language in all nations and all ages. I have quoted them merely as proofs of my reproach that Kant pursues his symmetrical, logical system without reflecting sufficiently on the subject with which he thus deals.

Now, as I have said above, if Kant had seriously investigated to what extent two such different faculties of knowledge, one of which is the distinctive characteristic of mankind, come to be known, and what reason and understanding mean according to the use of language in all nations and by all philosophers, then he would never have divided reason into theoretical and practical without any further authority than the intellectus theoreticus and practicus of the scholastics, who use the terms in an entirely different sense, and he would never have made practical reason the source of virtuous conduct. In the same way, Kant should really have investigated what a concept is in general, before separating so carefully concepts of the understanding (by which he understands partly his categories, partly all common concepts) and concepts of reason (his so-called Ideas), and making them both the material of his philosophy, which for the most part deals only with the validity, application, and origin of all these concepts. But this very necessary investigation, unfortunately, has also been omitted, and this has greatly contributed to the terrible confusion of intuitive and abstract knowledge which I shall shortly demonstrate. The same want of adequate reflection with which he passed over such questions as: What is perception? What is reflection? What is concept? What is reason? What is understanding? caused him also to pass over the following investigations just as absolutely necessary, namely: What do I call the object which I distinguish from the representation? What is existence? What is object? What is subject? What are truth, illusion, error? But he pursues, without reflecting or looking about him, his logical schema and his symmetry. The table of judgements shall and must be the key to all wisdom.

I have mentioned it above as Kant’s principal merit that he distinguished the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, declared this whole visible world to be phenomenon, and therefore denied to its laws all validity beyond the phenomenon. It is certainly remarkable that he did not trace that merely relative existence of the phenomenon from the simple, undeniable truth which lay so near to him, namely “No object without a subject,” in order thus, at the very root, to show that the object, because it always exists only in relation to a subject, is dependent thereon, is conditioned thereby, and is therefore mere phenomenon that does not exist in itself, does not exist unconditionally. Berkeley, to whose merit Kant does not do justice, had already made that important proposition the foundation-stone of his philosophy, and had thus created an immortal reputation for himself. Yet even he did not draw the proper conclusions from that proposition, and so was in part misunderstood, and in part insufficiently attended to. In my first edition, I explained Kant’s avoidance of this Berkeleian principle as resulting from a visible fear of decided idealism, whereas, on the other hand, I found this distinctly expressed in many passages of the Critique of Pure Reason, and accordingly accused Kant of contradicting himself. And this reproach was well founded, in so far as the Critique of Pure Reason was at that time known to me only in its second edition, or in the five subsequent editions printed from it. Now when later I read Kant’s principal work in the first edition, which had already become scarce, I saw, to my great joy, all those contradictions disappear. I found that, although Kant does not use the formula “No object without subject,” he nevertheless, with just as much emphasis as do Berkeley and I, declares the external world lying before us in space and time to be mere representation of the subject that knows it. Thus, for example, he says there (p. 383) without reserve: “If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must cease to exist, as it is nothing but the phenomenon in the sensibility of our subject, and a species of its representations.” However, the whole passage from p. 348 to p. 392, in which Kant expounds his decided idealism with great beauty and clarity, was suppressed by him in the second edition. On the other hand, he introduced a number of remarks that controverted it. In this way, the text of the Critique of Pure Reason, as it was in circulation from the year 1787 to 1838, became disfigured and spoilt; it was a self-contradictory book, whose sense therefore could not be thoroughly clear and comprehensible to anyone. In a letter²¹⁷ to Professor Rosenkranz, I discussed this in detail, as well as my conjectures regarding the grounds and the weaknesses that could have induced Kant to disfigure his immortal work in such a way. The main passage of this letter was included by Rosenkranz in his preface to the second volume of the edition of Kant’s collected works edited by him, to which therefore I refer. In consequence of my representations, Professor Rosenkranz was induced in 1838 to restore the Critique of Pure Reason to its original form, for in the second volume, just mentioned, he had it printed according to the first edition of 1781. In this way he rendered an inestimable service to philosophy; indeed he has possibly rescued from destruction the most important work of German literature; and for this we must always be grateful to him. But let no one imagine he knows the Critique of Pure Reason, and has a clear conception of Kant’s teaching, if he has read only the second or one of the subsequent editions. This is absolutely impossible; for he has read only a mutilated, spoilt, and, to a certain extent ungenuine text. It is my duty to state this here emphatically, as a warning to everyone.

However, the way in which Kant introduces the thing-in-itself stands in undeniable contradiction to the fundamental, emphatic, and idealistic view so clearly expressed in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Without doubt this is mainly why, in the second edition, he suppressed the principal idealistic passage previously referred to, and declared himself directly opposed to Berkeley’s idealism. By doing this, however, he only introduced inconsistencies into his work, without being able to remedy its main de-fect. It is well known that this defect is the introduction of the thing-in-itself in the way he chose, whose inadmissibility was demonstrated in detail by G. E. Schulze in Aenesidemus, and which was soon recognized as the untenable point of his system. The matter can be made clear in a very few words. Kant bases the assumption of the thing-in-itself, although concealed under many different turns of expression, on a conclusion according to the law of causality, namely that empirical perception, or more correctly sensation in our organs of sense from which it proceeds, must have an external cause. Now, according to his own correct discovery, the law of causality is known to us a priori, and consequently is a function of our intellect, and so is of subjective origin. Moreover, sensation itself, to which we here apply the law of causality, is undeniably subjective; and finally, even space, in which, by means of this application, we place the cause of the sensation as object, is a form of our intellect given a priori, and is consequently subjective. Therefore the whole of empirical perception remains throughout on a subjective foundation, as a mere occurrence in us, and nothing entirely different from and independent of it can be brought in as a thing-in-itself, or shown to be a necessary assumption. Empirical perception actually is and remains our mere representation; it is the world as representation. We can arrive at its being-in-itself only on the entirely different path I have followed, by means of the addition of self-consciousness, which proclaims the will as the in-itself of our own phenomenon. But then the thing-in-itself becomes something toto genere different from the representation and its elements, as I have explained.

The great defect of the Kantian system in this point, which, as I have said, was soon demonstrated, is an illustration of the beautiful Indian proverb: “No lotus without a stem.” Here the stem is the faulty deduction of the thing-in-itself, though only the method of deduction, not the recognition of a thing-in-itself belonging to the given phenomenon. But in this last way Fichte misunderstood it, and this was possible only because he was concerned not with truth, but with making a sensation for the furtherance of his personal ends. Accordingly, he was foolhardy and thoughtless enough altogether to deny the thing-in-itself, and to set up a system in which not the merely formal part of the representation, as with Kant, but also the material, namely its whole content, was ostensibly deduced a priori from the subject. He quite correctly reckoned here on the public’s lack of judgement and stupidity, for they accepted wretched sophisms, mere hocus-pocus, and senseless twaddle as proofs, so that he succeeded in turning the public’s attention from Kant to himself, and in giving to German philosophy the direction in which it was afterwards carried farther by Schelling, finally reaching its goal in the senseless sham wisdom of Hegel.

I now return to Kant’s great mistake, already touched on above, namely that he did not properly separate knowledge of perception from abstract knowledge; from this there arose a terrible confusion which we have now to consider more closely. If he had sharply separated representations of perception from concepts thought merely in abstracto, he would have kept these two apart, and would have known with which of the two he had to deal in each case. Unfortunately this was not the case, although the reproach for this has not yet become known, and is therefore perhaps unexpected. His “object of experience,” of which he is constantly speaking, the proper subject of the categories, is not the representation of perception, nor is it the abstract concept; it is different from both, and yet is both at the same time, and is an utter absurdity and impossibility. For, incredible as it seems, he lacked the good sense or the good will to come to an understanding with himself about this, and to explain clearly to others whether his “object of experience, i.e., of the knowledge brought about by the application of the categories,” is the representation of perception in space and time (my first class of representations), or merely the abstract concept. Strange as it is, there is constantly running through his mind something between the two, and so there comes about the unfortunate confusion that I must now bring to light. For this purpose I shall have to go over the whole elementary theory in general.

The Transcendental Aesthetic is a work of such merit that it alone would be sufficient to immortalize the name of Kant. Its proofs have such a complete power of conviction that I number its propositions among the incontestable truths. They are also undoubtedly among those that are richest in results, and are therefore to be regarded as that rarest thing in the world, a real and great discovery in metaphysics. The fact, which he strictly demonstrates, that we are a priori conscious of a part of our knowledge, admits of no other explanation at all except that this constitutes the forms of our intellect; indeed this is not so much an explanation as merely the distinct expression of the fact itself. For a priori means nothing but “not gained on the path of experience, and hence not come into us from without.” Now that which is present in the intellect yet has not come from without, is just that which originally belongs to the intellect itself, namely its own nature. If that which is thus present in the intellect itself consists in the mode and manner in which all its objects must present themselves to it, then this is equivalent to saying that what is thus present is the intellect’s forms of knowing, in other words, the mode and manner, settled once for all, in which it fulfils this its function. Accordingly, “knowledge a priori” and “the intellect’s own forms” are fundamentally only two expressions for the same thing, and so are, to a certain extent, synonyms.

Therefore, I knew of nothing to take away from the theories of the Transcendental Aesthetic, but only of something to add to them. Kant did not pursue his thought to the very end, especially in not rejecting the whole of the Euclidean method of demonstration, even after he had said on p. 87 (V, 120) that all geometrical knowledge has direct evidence from perception. It is most remarkable that even one of his opponents, in fact the cleverest of them, G. E. Schulze (Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie, ii, 241), draws the conclusion that an entirely different treatment of geometry from what is actually in use would result from Kant’s teaching. He thus imagines that he is bringing an apagogical argument against Kant, but as a matter of fact, without knowing it, he is beginning a war against the Euclidean method. I refer to § 15 in the first book of the present work.

After the detailed discussion of the universal forms of all perception, given in the Transcendental Aesthetic, we necessarily expect to receive some explanation of its content, of the way in which empirical perception enters our consciousness, of how knowledge of this whole world, for us so real and so important, originates in us. But about this the whole of Kant’s teaching really contains nothing but the oft-repeated meaningless expression: “The empirical part of perception is given from without.” Therefore, here also from the pure forms of intuition, Kant arrives with one jump at thinking, at the Transcendental Logic. At the very beginning of the Transcendental Logic (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 50; V, 74), where Kant cannot help touching on the material content of empirical perception, he takes the first false step, he commits the πρῶτον ψεῦδος. “Our knowledge,” he says, “has two sources, receptivity of impressions and spontaneity of concepts: the former is the capacity of receiving representations; the latter is the capacity for knowing an object through these representations. Through the first an object is given to us, through the second it is thought.” This is false, for according to this the impression, for which alone we have mere receptivity, which therefore comes from without and alone is really “given,” would be already a representation, in fact even an object. But it is nothing more than a mere sensation in the sense-organ, and only by the application of the understanding (i.e., of the law of causality), and of the forms of perception, of space and time, does our intellect convert this mere sensation into a representation. This representation now exists as object in space and time, and cannot be distinguished from the latter (the object) except in so far as we ask about the thing-in-itself; in other respects it is identical with the object. I have discussed this point in detail in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 21. But with this the business of the understanding and of knowledge of perception is finished, and for this no concepts and no thinking are needed in addition; therefore the animal also has these representations. If concepts are added, if thinking is added, to which spontaneity can certainly be attributed, then knowledge of perception is entirely abandoned, and a completely different class of representations, namely non-perceptible, abstract concepts, enters consciousness. This is the activity of reason (Vernunft), which nevertheless has the whole content of its thinking only from the perception that precedes this thinking, and from the comparison of this with other perceptions and concepts. But in this way Kant brings thinking into perception, and lays the foundation for the terrible confusion of intuitive and abstract knowledge which I am here engaged in condemning. He allows perception, taken by itself, to be without understanding, purely sensuous, and thus entirely passive, and only through thinking (category of the understanding) does he allow an object to be apprehended; thus he brings thinking into perception. But then again, the object of thinking is an individual, real object; in this way, thinking loses its essential character of universality and abstraction, and, instead of universal concepts, receives as its object individual things; thus he again brings perception into thinking. From this springs the terrible confusion referred to, and the consequences of this first false step extend over the whole of his theory of knowledge. Through the whole of this, the utter confusion of the representation of perception with the abstract representation tends to a cross between the two, which he describes as the object of knowledge through the understanding and its categories, and this knowledge he calls experience. It is difficult to believe that, in the case of this object of the understanding, Kant pictured to himself something quite definite and really distinct. I shall now prove this by the tremendous contradiction, running through the whole of the Transcendental Logic, which is the real source of the obscurity that envelops it.

Thus in the Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 67-69 (V, 92-94) ; pp. 89, 90 (V, 122, 123); further, V, 135, 139, 153, he repeats and insists that the understanding is no faculty of perception, that its knowledge is not intuitive but discursive; that the understanding is the faculty of judging (p. 69: V, 94), and a judgement is indirect knowledge, representation of a representation (p. 68: V, 93); that the understanding is the faculty of thinking, and thinking is knowledge through concepts (p. 69: V, 94); that the categories of the understanding are by no means the conditions under which objects are given in perception (p. 89: V, 122), and perception in no way requires the functions of thinking (p. 91: V, 123); that our understanding can only think, not perceive (V, pp. 135, 139). Further, in the Prolegomena, § 20, he says that perception, intuition, perceptio belongs merely to the senses; that judgement belongs only to the understanding; and in § 22, that the business of the senses is to perceive, that of the understanding to think, i.e., to judge. Finally, in the Critique of Practical Reason, fourth edition, p. 247 (Rosenkranz’s edition, p. 281) he says that the understanding is discursive, its representations are thoughts, not perceptions. All this is in Kant’s own words.

From this it follows that this world of perception would exist for us even if we had no understanding at all, that it comes into our head in an entirely inexplicable way; this he frequently indicates by his curious expression that perception is given, without ever explaining this indefinite and metaphorical expression any further.

Now all that has been quoted is contradicted most flagrantly by all the rest of his doctrine of the understanding, of its categories, and of the possibility of experience, as he explains this in the Transcendental Logic. Thus in the Critique of Pure Reason, p. 79 (V, 105) the understanding through its categories brings unity into the manifold of perception, and the pure concepts of the understanding refer a priori to objects of perception. On p. 94 (V, 126) he says that “the categories are the condition of experience, whether of perception or of thinking that is met with in it.” In V, 127,²¹⁸ the understanding is the originator of experience. In V, 128,²¹⁸ the categories determine the perception of the objects. In V, p. 130,²¹⁹ all that we represent to ourselves as combined in the object (which is of course something perceptible and not an abstraction), has been combined by an act of the understanding. In V, p. 135,²²⁰ the understanding is explained anew as the faculty of combining a priori, and bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of apperception. According to all ordinary use of language, however, apperception is not the thinking of a concept, but perception. In V, p. 136,²²⁰ we find even a supreme principle of the possibility of all perception in relation to the understanding. In V, p. 143,²²¹ it is given even as a heading that all sensuous perception is conditioned by the categories. At the very same place, the logical function of the judgements also brings the manifold of given perceptions under an apperception in general, and the manifold of a given perception stands necessarily under the categories. In V, p. 144,²²¹ unity comes into perception by means of the categories through the understanding. In V, p. 145,²²¹ the thinking of the understanding is very strangely explained by saying that the understanding synthetizes, combines, and arranges the manifold of perception. In V, p. 161,²²¹ experience is possible only through the categories, and consists in the connexion of perceptions (Wahrnehmungen) which, however, are just intuitions (Anschauungen). In V, p. 159,²²¹ the categories are a priori knowledge of the objects of perception in general. Moreover, here and in V, pp. 163 and 165,²²¹ one of Kant’s main doctrines is expressed, namely that the understanding first of all makes nature possible, since it prescribes for her laws a priori, and nature accommodates herself to the constitution of the understanding, and so on. Now nature is certainly perceptible and not an abstraction; accordingly, the understanding would have to be a faculty of perception. In V, p. 168²²¹ it is said that the concepts of the understanding are the principles of the possibility of experience, and this is the determining of phenomena in space and time generally, phenomena which, however, certainly exist in perception. Finally, pp. 189-211 (V, 232-265) there is the long proof (whose incorrectness is shown in detail in my essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 23), that the objective succession and also the coexistence of the objects of experience are not sensuously apprehended, but are brought into nature only through the understanding, and that nature herself first becomes possible in this way. But it is certain that nature, the sequence of events, and the coexistence of states, is something purely perceptible, and not something merely thought in the abstract.

I invite everyone who shares my respect for Kant to reconcile these contradictions, and to show that, in his doctrine of the object of experience and of the way in which this object is determined by the activity of the understanding and its twelve functions, Kant conceived something quite distinct and definite. I am convinced that the contradiction I have pointed out, which extends through the whole Transcendental Logic, is the real reason for the great obscurity of its language. In fact, Kant was vaguely aware of the contradiction, inwardly struggled with it, but yet would not or could not bring it to clear consciousness. He therefore wrapped it in mystery for himself and for others, and avoided it by all kinds of subterfuges. Possibly from this it can also be inferred why he made from the faculty of knowledge so strange and complicated a machine, with so many wheels, such as the twelve categories, the transcendental synthesis of imagination, of the inner sense, of the transcendental unity of apperception, also the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, and so on. And notwithstanding this great apparatus, not even an attempt is made to explain the perception of the external world, which is after all the main thing in our knowledge, but this pressing claim is very miserably rejected always by the same meaningless metaphorical expression: “Empirical perception is given to us.” On p. 145²²² of the fifth edition, we learn further that perception is given through the object; consequently, the object must be something different from perception.

Now if we endeavour to examine Kant’s innermost meaning, which he himself does not distinctly express, we find that actually such an object different from perception, which, however, is by no means a concept, is for him the proper object for the understanding; indeed that it really must be by the strange assumption of such an object, incapable of representation, that perception first becomes experience. I believe that an old, deep-rooted prejudice in Kant, dead to all investigation, is the ultimate reason for the assumption of such an absolute object that is an object in itself, i.e., one without a subject. It is certainly not the perceived object, but through the concept it is added to perception by thought as something corresponding to perception; and now perception is experience, and has value and truth that it consequently receives only through the relation to a concept (in diametrical opposition to our exposition, according to which the concept obtains value and truth only from perception). It is then the proper function of the categories to add by thought on to perception this object that is not capable of direct representation. “The object is given only through perception, and it is afterwards thought in accordance with the category” (Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, p. 399). This becomes particularly clear from a passage, p. 125²²³ of the fifth edition: “It is now asked whether concepts a priori do not also come first as conditions under which alone something is, although not perceived, yet conceived as object in general,” a question he answers in the affirmative. Here the source of the error and the confusion that surrounds it are clearly seen. For the object as such exists always only for and in perception; now perception may be brought about through the senses, or, in the absence of the object, through the power of imagination. What is thought, on the other hand, is always a universal, non-perceptible concept, which can at all events be the concept of an object in general. Only indirectly, however, by means of concepts, is thinking related to objects, and these objects themselves always are and remain perceptible. For our thinking does not help to impart reality to perceptions; this they have in so far as they are capable of it (empirical reality) through themselves; but our thinking does serve to comprehend and embrace the common element and the results of perceptions, in order to be able to preserve them and manipulate them more easily. Kant, however, ascribes the objects themselves to thinking, in order thus to make experience and the objective world dependent on the understanding, yet without letting the understanding be a faculty of perception. In this connexion, he certainly distinguishes perceiving from thinking, but he makes particular things the object sometimes of perception and sometimes of thinking. But actually they are only the object of perception; our empirical perception is at once objective, just because it comes from the causal nexus. Things, and not representations different from them, are directly its object. Individual things as such are perceived in the understanding and through the senses; the one-sided impression on these is at once completed by the power of the imagination. On the other hand, as soon as we pass over to thinking, we leave individual things, and have to do with universal concepts without perceptibility, although afterwards we apply the results of our thinking to individual things. If we stick to this, the inadmissibility is apparent of the assumption that the perception of things obtains reality and becomes experience only through the thought of these very things applying the twelve categories. On the contrary, in perception itself empirical reality, and consequently experience, is already given; but perception can also come about only by the application of knowledge of the causal nexus, the sole function of the understanding, to the sensation of the senses. Accordingly, perception is really intellectual, and this is just what Kant denies.

Besides the passage quoted, Kant’s assumption here criticized is also found expressed with admirable clearness in the Critique of Judgement, § 36, at the very beginning; likewise in the Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Science, in the note to the first explanation of “Phenomenology.” But with a naïvety which Kant ventured on least of all in connexion with this doubtful point, it is found most distinctly laid down in the book of a Kantian, namely, Kiesewetter’s Grundriss einer allgemeinen Logik, third edition, Part I, p. 434 of the explanation, and Part II, §§ 52 and 53 of the explanation; likewise in Tieftrunk’s Denklehre in rein Deutschem Gewande (1825). There it is clearly seen how the disciples of every thinker, who do not think for themselves, become the magnifying mirror of his mistakes. Having once decided on his doctrine of the categories, Kant always trod warily when expounding it; the disciples, on the contrary, are quite bold, and thus expose its falseness.

In accordance with what has been said, the object of the categories with Kant is not exactly the thing-in-itself, but yet is very closely akin to it. It is the object-in-itself, an object requiring no subject, an individual thing, and yet not in time and space, because not perceptible; it is object of thinking, and yet not abstract concept. Accordingly, Kant makes a triple distinction: (1) the representation; (2) the object of the representation; (3) the thing-in-itself. The first is the concern of sensibility, which for him includes, simultaneously with sensation, also the pure forms of perception, namely space and time. The second is the concern of the understanding, that adds it in thought through its twelve categories. The third lies beyond all possibility of knowledge. (As proof of this, see pp. 108 and 109 of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.) The distinction between the representation and the object of the representation is, however, unfounded. Berkeley had already demonstrated this, and it follows from the whole of my discussion in the first book, especially from Chapter I of the supplements; in fact it follows from Kant’s own wholly idealistic point of view in the first edition. But if we did not wish to reckon the object of the representation as belonging to the representation, and to identify it therewith, we should have to attribute it to the thing-in-itself; in the end this depends on the sense we attach to the word object. However, this much is certain, that, when we reflect clearly, nothing can be found except representation and thing-in-itself. The unwarranted introduction of that hybrid, the object of the representation, is the source of Kant’s errors. Yet, when this is removed, the doctrine of the categories as concepts a priori also falls to the ground; for they contribute nothing to perception, and are not supposed to hold good of the thing-in-itself, but by means of them we conceive only those “objects of the representations,” and thus convert representation into experience. For every empirical perception is already experience; but every perception that starts from sensation is empirical. By means of its sole function (namely a priori knowledge of the law of causality), the understanding refers this sensation to its cause. In this way the cause presents itself in space and time (forms of pure intuition or perception) as object of experience, material object, enduring in space through all time, but yet as such always remaining representation, just like space and time themselves. If we wish to go beyond this representation, we arrive at the question as to the thing-in-itself, the answer to which is the theme of my whole work, as of all metaphysics in general. Kant’s error, here discussed, is connected with the mistake of his which we previously condemned, namely that he gives no theory of the origin of empirical perception, but, without more ado, treats it as given, identifying it with the mere sensation to which he adds only the forms of intuition or perception, namely space and time, comprehending both under the name of sensibility. But still there does not arise any objective representation from these materials. On the contrary, this positively demands a relation of the sensation to its cause, and hence the application of the law of causality, and thus understanding. For without this, the sensation still remains always subjective, and does not put an object into space, even when space is given with it. But according to Kant, the understanding could not be applied to perception; it was supposed merely to think, in order to remain within the Transcendental Logic. With this again is connected another of Kant’s mistakes, namely that he left it to me to furnish the only valid proof of the rightly recognized a priori nature of the law of causality, in other words, the proof from the possibility of objective, empirical perception itself. Instead of this, he gives an obviously false proof, as I have shown in my essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 23. From the above, it is clear that Kant’s “object of the representation” (2) is made up of what he has stolen partly from the representation (1) and partly from the thing-in-itself (3). If experience actually came about only by our understanding applying twelve different functions, in order to think through just as many concepts a priori the objects that were previously merely perceived, then every real thing as such would have to have a number of determinations, which, being given a priori, just like space and time, could not possibly be thought away, but would belong quite essentially to the existence of the thing, and yet could not be deduced from the properties of space and time. But only a single determination of this kind is to be found, that of causality. On this rests materiality, for the essence of matter consists in action, and it is through and through causality. (See Vol. 2, chap. 4.) But it is materiality alone that distinguishes the real thing from the picture of the imagination, that picture then being only representation. For matter, as permanent, gives the thing permanence through all time according to its matter, while the forms change in conformity with causality. Everything else in the thing is either determinations of space or of time, or its empirical properties, all of which relate to its activity, and are thus fuller determinations of causality. Causality, however, already enters as a condition into empirical perception, and this is accordingly a concern of the understanding, which makes perception possible, but, apart from the law of causality, contributes nothing to experience and its possibility. What fills the old ontologies, apart from what is stated here, is nothing more than relations of things to one another, or to our reflection, and is a scrambled-up hotch-potch.

The style and language of the doctrine of the categories afford an indication of its groundlessness. What a difference in this respect between the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic! In the former, what clearness, definiteness, certainty, firm conviction, openly expressed and infallibly communicated! All is full of light, no dark lurking-places are left; Kant knows what he wants, and knows he is right. In the latter, on the other hand, all is obscure, confused, indefinite, wavering, uncertain; the language is cautious and uneasy, full of excuses and appeals to what is coming, or even to what is withheld. The entire second and third sections of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding are completely changed in the second edition, because they did not satisfy Kant himself, and have become quite different from those in the first edition, although no clearer. We actually see Kant in conflict with the truth, in order to carry out the hypothesis that he has once settled. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, all his propositions are actually demonstrated and proved from undeniable facts of consciousness; in the Transcendental Analytic, on the other hand, when we consider it closely, we find mere assertions that so it is and so it must be. Therefore here, as everywhere, the style bears the stamp of the thinking from which it has arisen, for style is the physiognomy of the mind. Moreover it is to be noted that, whenever Kant wishes to give an example for the purpose of fuller discussion, he almost always takes for this purpose the category of causality, and then what is said turns out to be correct; precisely because the law of causality is the real, but also the only, form of the understanding, and the remaining eleven categories are merely blind windows. The deduction of the categories is simpler and plainer in the first edition than in the second. He endeavours to explain how, according to the perception given by sensibility, the understanding brings about experience by means of thinking the categories. In this connexion, the expressions recognition, reproduction, association, apprehension, transcendental unity of apperception, are repeated ad nauseam, and yet no clarity is reached. It is very remarkable, however, that in this explanation he does not once touch on what must occur to everyone first of all, the relation of the sensation to its external cause. If he did not wish to admit this relation, he should have expressly denied it, but he does not do even this. He therefore furtively manoeuvres round it, and all the Kantians have stealthily evaded it in precisely the same way. The secret motive for this is that he reserves the causal nexus under the name “ground of the phenomenon” for his false deduction of the thing-in-itself, and then that, through the relation to the cause, perception would become intellectual, a thing which he dare not admit. Moreover, he seems to have been afraid that, if the causal nexus were allowed to hold good between sensation and object, the latter would at once become the thing-in-itself, and would introduce Locke’s empiricism. But the difficulty is removed by reflection constantly reminding us that the law of causality is of subjective origin, just as is the sensation itself; moreover our own body, in so far as it appears in space, already belongs to representations. But Kant was prevented from admitting this by his fear of Berkeleian idealism.

“The combination of the manifold of perception” is repeatedly stated to be the essential operation of the understanding by means of its twelve categories. Yet this is never properly explained, nor is it shown what this manifold of perception is before the combination by the understanding. Now time and space, the latter in all its three dimensions, are continua, i.e., all their parts are originally not separated but combined. But they are the universal forms of our perception; hence everything that exhibits itself (is given) in them also appears originally as continuum, in other words, its parts already appear as combined, and require no additional combination of the manifold. If, however, we wish to interpret that combination of the manifold of perception by saying that I refer the different sense-impressions of an object only to this one, thus, for example, when perceiving a bell, I recognize that what affects my eye as yellow, my hands as smooth and hard, my ear as emitting sounds, is yet only one and the same body, then this is rather a consequence of the knowledge a priori of the causal nexus (of this actual and sole function of the understanding). By virtue of this knowledge, all those different impressions on my different organs of sense nevertheless lead me only to a common cause of them, namely the constitution of the body that stands before me, so that my understanding, in spite of the variety and plurality of the effects, still apprehends the unity of the cause as a single object exhibiting itself in just this way in perception. In the fine recapitulation of his teaching which Kant gives in the Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 719-726 (V, 747-754), he explains the categories, possibly more clearly than anywhere else, as “the mere rule of the synthesis of what perception or observation may give a posteriori.” It seems that something is present in his mind to the effect that in the construction of the triangle the angles furnish the rule for the composition of the lines; at any rate, by this picture we can best explain to ourselves what he says about the function of the categories. The preface to the Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Science contains a long note, also furnishing an explanation of the categories, and stating that they “differ in no respect from the formal acts of the understanding in judging,” except that in the latter, subject and predicate can at all events change places. Then in the same passage the judgement in general is defined as “an act through which the given representations first become knowledge of an object.” According to this, as the animals do not judge, they too must necessarily have no knowledge whatever of objects. Generally, according to Kant, there are only concepts of objects, no perceptions. On the other hand, I say that objects exist primarily only for perception, and that concepts are always abstractions from this perception. Therefore abstract thinking must be conducted exactly according to the world present in perception, for only the relation to this world gives content to the concepts, and we cannot assume for the concepts any other a priori determined form than the faculty for reflection in general. The essential nature of this faculty is the formation of concepts, i.e., of abstract non-perceptible representations, and this constitutes the sole function of our faculty of reason, as I have shown in the first book. Accordingly, I demand that we throw away eleven of the categories, and retain only that of causality, but that we see that its activity is indeed the condition of empirical perception, this being therefore not merely sensuous but intellectual, and that the object thus perceived, the object of experience, is one with the representation from which only the thing-in-itself can still be distinguished.

After repeated study of the Critique of Pure Reason at different periods of my life, a conviction has forced itself on me with regard to the origin of the Transcendental Logic, and I mention it here as being very useful for its understanding. The sole discovery, based on objective apprehension and the highest human thought, is the aperpu that time and space are known by us a priori. Gratified by this lucky find, Kant wanted to pursue this vein still farther, and his love for architectonic symmetry gave him the clue. Just as he had found a pure intuition or perception a priori attributed as a condition to empirical perception, so he imagined that certain pure concepts, as presupposition in our faculty of knowledge, would also lie at the root of the empirically acquired concepts. He imagined that empirical, actual thinking would be possible first of all through a pure thinking a priori, which would have no objects at all in itself, but would have to take them from perception. Thus he thought that, just as the Transcendental Aesthetic establishes an a priori basis for mathematics, so must there also be such a basis for logic, and so the former then received a symmetrical pendant in a Transcendental Logic. From now on, Kant was no longer unprejudiced; he was no longer in a condition of pure investigation and observation of what is present in consciousness, but was guided by an assumption and pursued a purpose, that of finding what he presupposed, in order to add to the Transcendental Aesthetic, so fortunately discovered, a Transcendental Logic analogous to it, and thus symmetrically corresponding to it, as a second storey. For this he hit upon the table of judgements, from which he formed as well as he could the table of categories, as the doctrine of twelve pure concepts a priori which were to be the condition of our thinking those very things whose perception is conditioned a priori by the two forms of sensibility. Thus a pure understanding corresponded symmetrically to a pure sensibility. After this, there occurred to him yet another consideration that offered him a means of increasing the plausibility of the thing, by assuming the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding. But precisely in this way is his method of procedure, to him unconscious, most clearly betrayed. Thus, since he aimed at finding for every empirical function of the faculty of knowledge an analogous a priori function, he remarked that, between our empirical perceiving and our empirical thinking, carried out in abstract non-perceptible concepts, a connexion very frequently, though not always, takes place, since every now and then we attempt to go back from abstract thinking to perceiving. We attempt this, however, merely in order really to convince ourselves that our abstract thinking has not strayed far from the safe ground of perception, and has possibly become somewhat high-flown or even a mere idle display of words, much in the same way as, when walking in the dark, we stretch out our hand every now and then to the wall that guides us. We then go back to perception only tentatively and for the moment, by calling up in imagination a perception corresponding to the concept that occupies us at the moment, a perception which yet can never be quite adequate to the concept, but is a mere representative of it for the time being. I have already undertaken the necessary discussion of this in my essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 28. Kant calls a fleeting phantasm of this kind a schema in contrast to the perfected picture of the imagination. He says that it is, so to speak, a monogram of the imagination, and asserts that, just as such a schema stands midway between our abstract thinking of empirically acquired concepts and our clear perception occurring through the senses, so also do there exist a priori similar schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding between the faculty of perception a priori of pure sensibility and the faculty of thinking a priori of the pure understanding (hence the categories). He describes these schemata one by one as monograms of the pure imagination a priori, and assigns each of them to the category corresponding to it, in the strange “Chapter on the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,” which is well known for its great obscurity, since no one has ever been able to make anything out of it. But its obscurity is cleared up if we consider it from the point of view here given; but here more than anywhere else do the intentional nature of Kant’s method of procedure and the resolve, arrived at beforehand, to find what would correspond to the analogy, and what might assist the architectonic symmetry, clearly come to light. In fact, this is the case to such a degree that the thing borders on the comical. For, by assuming schemata of the pure (void of content) concepts a priori of the understanding (categories) analogous to the empirical schemata (or representatives of our actual concepts through the imagination), he overlooks the fact that the purpose of such schemata is here entirely wanting. For the purpose of the schemata in the case of empirical (actual) thinking is related solely to the material content of such concepts. For, since these concepts are drawn from empirical perception, we assist ourselves and see where we are, in the case of abstract thinking, by casting now and then a fleeting, retrospective glance at perception from which the concepts are taken, in order to assure ourselves that our thinking still has real content. This, however, necessarily presupposes that the concepts which occupy us have sprung from perception; and it is a mere glance back at their material content, in fact a mere remedy for our weakness. But with concepts a priori, which still have no content at all, obviously this is of necessity omitted; for these have not sprung from perception, but come to it from within, in order first to receive a content from it. Therefore they have as yet nothing on which they could look back. I discuss this point at length, because it is precisely this that throws light on the mysterious method of the Kantian philosophizing. This accordingly consists in the fact that, after the happy discovery of the two forms of intuition or perception a priori, Kant attempts, under the guidance of analogy, to demonstrate for every determination of our empirical knowledge an analogue a priori, and this finally extends in the schemata even to a merely psychological fact. Here the apparent depth of thought and the difficulty of the discussion merely serve to conceal from the reader the fact that its content remains an entirely undemonstrable and merely arbitrary assumption. But whoever finally penetrates the meaning of such an exposition is easily induced to regard this laboriously acquired comprehension as a conviction of the truth of the matter. On the other hand, if Kant had here maintained an unprejudiced and purely observant attitude, as with the discovery of the intuitions or perceptions a priori, he could not but have found that what is added to the pure intuition or perception of space and time, when an empirical perception comes from it, is the sensation on the one hand, and knowledge of causality on the other. This converts the mere sensation into objective empirical perception; yet it is not on this account borrowed and learnt from sensation, but exists a priori, and is just the form and function of the pure understanding. It is also, however, its sole form and function, yet one so rich in results that all our empirical knowledge rests on it. If, as has often been said, the refutation of an error is complete only by our demonstrating psychologically the way in which it originated, then I believe I have achieved this in what I have said above with regard to Kant’s doctrine of the categories and of their schemata.

After Kant had introduced such great mistakes into the first simple outlines of a theory of the representation-faculty, he took into his head a variety of very complicated assumptions. In connexion with these, we have first of all the synthetic unity of apperception, a very strange thing very strangely described. “The I think must be able to accompany all my representations.” Must be able: this is a problematical-apodictic enunciation, or, in plain English, a proposition taking away with one hand what it gives with the other. And what is the meaning of this proposition balanced on a point? That all representing is thinking? Not so: that indeed would be terrible, for then there would be nothing but abstract concepts, or at any rate a pure perception free from reflection and from will, like that of the beautiful, the deepest comprehension of the true essence of things, in other words, of their Platonic Ideas. Then again, the animals would be bound either to think, or not even to have representations. Or is the proposition supposed to mean: No object without subject? This would be very badly expressed by it, and would come too late. If we summarize Kant’s utterances, we shall find that what he understands by the synthetic unity of apperception is, so to speak, the extensionless centre of the sphere of all our representations, whose radii converge on it. It is what I call the subject of knowing, the correlative of all representations, and is at the same time what I have described and discussed at length in chapter 22 of the second volume as the focus on which the rays of the brain’s activity converge. To that chapter I therefore refer, so as not to repeat myself.

That I reject the whole doctrine of the categories, and number it among the groundless assumptions with which Kant burdened the theory of knowledge, follows from the criticism of it given above. In the same way it follows from the demonstration of the contradictions in the Transcendental Logic which had their ground in the confusion of knowledge from perception with abstract knowledge; further, from the demonstration of the want of a distinct and definite conception of the nature of the understanding and of the faculty of reason. Instead of this we found in Kant’s works only incoherent, inconsistent, inadequate, and incorrect expressions about those two faculties of the mind. Finally, it results from the explanations that I myself have given in the first book and its supplements, and in even greater detail in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, §§ 21, 26, and 34, about the same faculties of the mind. These explanations are very definite and distinct, and clearly result from a consideration of the nature of our knowledge; moreover, they fully agree with the conceptions of those two faculties of knowledge that appear in the language and writings of all ages and all nations, but were not brought to distinct expression. Their defence against the very different Kantian description has for the most part been already given with the exposure of the errors of that description. Now, as the table of judgements, which Kant makes the basis of his theory of thinking and indeed of his whole philosophy, is yet correct in itself and as a whole, it is still incumbent on me to demonstrate how these universal forms of all judgements arise in our faculty of knowledge, and to make them agree with my description of it. In this discussion I shall always associate with the concepts understanding and reason (Vernunft) the sense given to them in my explanation, with which therefore I assume the reader to be familiar.

An essential difference between Kant’s method and that which I follow is to be found in the fact that he starts from indirect, reflected knowledge, whereas I start from direct and intuitive knowledge. He is comparable to a person who measures the height of a tower from its shadow; but I am like one who applies the measuring-rod directly to the tower itself. Philosophy, therefore, is for him a science of concepts, but for me a science in concepts, drawn from knowledge of perception, the only source of all evidence, and set down and fixed in universal concepts. He skips over this whole world of perception which surrounds us, and which is so multifarious and rich in significance, and he sticks to the forms of abstract thinking. Although he never states the fact, this procedure is founded on the assumption that reflection is the ectype of all perception, and that everything essential to perception must therefore be expressed in reflection, and indeed in very contracted, and therefore easily comprehensible, forms and outlines. Accordingly, what is essential and conformable to law in abstract knowledge would place in our hands all the threads that set in motion before our eyes the many-coloured puppet-show of the world of perception. If only Kant had expressed this highest principle of his method plainly, and had then followed it consistently, he would at least have been obliged clearly to separate the intuitive from the abstract, and we would not have had to contend with inextricable contradictions and confusions. But from the way in which he has solved his problem we see that that fundamental principle of his method was only very indistinctly present in his mind, and thus we still have to guess at it, even after a thorough study of his philosophy.

Now as regards the method stated and the fundamental maxim itself, there is much to be said for it, and it is a brilliant idea. The real nature of all science consists indeed in our comprehending the endless manifold of the phenomena of perception under comparatively few abstract concepts, and arranging out of these a system from which we have all those phenomena wholly in the power of our knowledge, can explain the past and determine the future. The sciences, however, divide among themselves the extensive sphere of phenomena according to the special and manifold classes of these latter. It was a bold and happy idea to isolate what is absolutely essential to the concepts as such and apart from their content, in order to see from the forms of all thinking, found in this way, what is also essential to all intuitive knowledge, and consequently to the world as phenomenon in general. Now since this would be found a priori on account of the necessity of those forms of thought, it would be of subjective origin, and would lead exactly to the ends Kant had in view. Then before going farther, what the relation of reflection to knowledge of perception is should have been investigated (and this naturally presupposes the clear separation of the two, which Kant neglected); in what way reflection really reproduces and represents knowledge of perception. It should have been investigated whether such reflection remains quite pure, or is changed and partially disguised by assimilation into its own (reflection’s) forms, whether the form of abstract reflective knowledge becomes more definite through the form of knowledge of perception, or through the nature or quality that unalterably belongs to itself, i.e., to reflective knowledge. In this way, even what is very heterogeneous in intuitive knowledge can no longer be distinguished, the moment it has entered reflective knowledge; and conversely, many distinctions observed by us in the reflective method of knowledge have also sprung from this knowledge itself, and in no way indicate corresponding differences in intuitive knowledge. As a result of this investigation, however, it would have been seen that knowledge of perception, on being taken up into reflection, undergoes nearly as much change as food does when assimilated into the animal organism, whose forms and combinations are determined by itself, so that from their composition the nature and quality of the food can no longer be recognized at all. Or (for this is saying a little too much) at any rate, it would have appeared that reflection is in no way related to knowledge of perception as a reflection in water is to the objects reflected, and hardly even as the shadow of these objects is to the objects themselves. Such a shadow reproduces only a few external outlines, but it also unites the most manifold into the same form, and presents the most varied through the same outline. Thus, starting from it, we could not possibly construct the shapes or forms of things with completeness and certainty.

The whole of reflective knowledge, or reason (Vernunft), has only one main form, and that is the abstract concept. It is peculiar to our faculty of reason itself, and has no direct necessary connexion with the world of perception. This world of perception, therefore, exists for the animals entirely without reflective knowledge, and even if it were to be a totally different world, that form of reflection would nevertheless suit it just as well. But the combination of concepts for judging has certain definite and regular forms which, found by induction, constitute the table of judgements. For the most part, these forms can be derived from the nature of reflective knowledge itself, and hence directly from the faculty of reason, especially in so far as they spring from the four laws of thought (which I call metalogical truths) and from the dictum de omni et nullo.²²⁴ Others of these forms, however, have their ground in the nature of knowledge of perception, and hence in the understanding; yet they do not by any means point to an equal number of special forms of the understanding, but can be deduced wholly and entirely from the sole function that the understanding has, namely direct knowledge of cause and effect. Finally, still others of these forms have sprung from the concurrence and combination of the reflective and intuitive methods of knowledge, or really from the taking up of the latter into the former. I shall now go through the moments of the judgement individually, and demonstrate the origin of each from the sources mentioned. From this it follows automatically that a deduction of categories from them falls to the ground, and that the assumption thereof is just as groundless as its exposition has been found to be confused and self-conflicting.

(1) The so-called quantity of judgements springs from the essential nature of concepts as such. It therefore has its ground solely in our faculty of reason, and has absolutely no direct connexion with the understanding and with knowledge of perception. As explained in the first book, it is in fact essential to concepts as such that they have a range, a sphere, and that the wider and less definite concept includes the narrower and more definite. The latter can therefore be separated out, and this can be done in two ways; either we express the narrower concept merely as an indefinite part of the wider concept in general, or we define it and completely separate it by means of the addition of a special name. The judgement that is the carrying out of this operation is called in the first case a particular, in the second case a universal judgement. For example, one and the same part of the sphere of the concept “tree” can be isolated through a particular and through a universal judgement, thus: “Some trees bear gall-nuts,” or “All oaks bear gall-nuts.” We see that the difference of the two operations is very slight, in fact that its possibility depends on the richness of the language. Nevertheless, Kant has declared that this difference reveals two fundamentally different actions, functions, categories of the pure understanding that just through these determines experience a priori.

Finally, we can also use a concept in order to arrive by its means at a definite, particular representation of perception, from which, and at the same time from many others, this concept itself is drawn off; this is done through the singular judgement. Such a judgement indicates only the boundary between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception, and passes directly over to the latter: “This tree here bears gall-nuts.” Kant has made a special category of this also.

After all that has been said, there is no need here of further polemic.

(2) In the same way, the quality of judgements lies entirely within the province of our faculty of reason, and is not an adumbration of any law of the understanding that makes perception possible; in other words, it does not point or refer thereto. The nature of abstract concepts, which is just the inner nature of our faculty of reason itself objectively comprehended, entails the possibility of uniting and separating their spheres, as already explained in the first book, and on this possibility, as their presupposition, rest the universal laws of thought, the laws of identity and of contradiction. Since they spring purely from our faculty of reason, and cannot be further explained, I have attributed to them metalogical truth. They determine that what is united must remain united, and what is separated must remain separated, and hence that what is settled and established cannot at the same time be again eliminated. Thus they presuppose the possibility of the combination and separation of spheres, in other words, judgement. But according to the form, this lies simply and solely in our faculty of reason, and this form has not, like the content of the judgements, been taken over from the perceptible knowledge of the understanding, and therefore no correlative or analogue of it is there to be looked for. After perception has arisen through the understanding and for the understanding, it exists complete, subject to no doubt or error; accordingly it knows neither affirmation nor denial. For it expresses itself, and has not, like the abstract knowledge of our faculty of reason, its value and content in the mere relation to something outside it, according to the principle of the ground of knowing. It is therefore nothing but reality; all negation is foreign to its nature; that can be added in thought only through reflection, but on this very account it always remains in the province of abstract thinking.

To the affirmative and negative Kant adds the infinite judgements, making use of a fad of the old scholastics, a cunningly contrived stop-gap not even requiring an explanation, a blind window, like many others employed by him for the sake of his architectonic symmetry.

(3) Under the very wide concept of relation Kant has brought three entirely different properties of judgements, which we must therefore examine individually in order to recognize their origin.

(a) The hypothetical judgement in general is the abstract expression of that most universal form of all our knowledge, the principle of sufficient reason. In my essay on this principle, I showed in 1813 that it has four entirely different meanings, and that in each of these it originates primarily from a different faculty of knowledge, just as it also concerns a different class of representations. From this it is sufficiently clear that the origin of the hypothetical judgement in general, of this universal form of thought, cannot be, as Kant would have it, merely the understanding and its category of causality; but that the law of causality, the only form of knowledge of the pure understanding according to my description, is only one of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason embracing all pure or a priori knowledge. This principle, on the other hand, has in each of its meanings this hypothetical form of judgement as its expression. Here we see quite clearly how kinds of knowledge quite different in their origin and significance nevertheless appear, when thought by our faculty of reason in abstracto, in one and the same form of combination of concepts and judgements. In this form they can no longer be distinguished at all, but in order to distinguish them we must go back to knowledge of perception, leaving abstract knowledge altogether. Therefore the path followed by Kant for finding the elements and also the inner mechanism of intuitive knowledge from the standpoint of abstract knowledge was quite the wrong one. Moreover, the whole of my introductory essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason is to be regarded to a certain extent merely as a thorough discussion of the significance of the hypothetical form of judgement; I shall therefore not dwell on it any more here.

(b) The form of the categorical judgement is nothing but the form of the judgement in general, in the strictest sense. For, strictly speaking, judging simply means thinking the combination, or the irreconcilability, of the spheres of concepts. Therefore, the hypothetical and disjunctive combinations are not really special forms of the judgement, for they are applied only to judgements already completed, in which the combination of the concepts remains unchanged, namely the categorical. But they again connect these judgements, since the hypothetical form expresses their dependence on one another, and the disjunctive their incompatibility. But mere concepts have only one kind of relation to one another, namely those relations expressed in the categorical judgement. The fuller determination, or the subspecies of this relation, are the intersection and the complete separateness of the concept-spheres, and thus affirmation and negation. Out of these Kant has made special categories under quite a different title, that of quality. Intersection and separateness again have subspecies, according as the spheres lie within one another completely or only partially, a determination constituting the quantity of the judgements. Out of these Kant has again made a quite special title of categories. Thus he separated what is quite closely related and even identical, namely the easily surveyed modifications of the only possible relations of mere concepts to one another; on the other hand, he united under this title of relation that which is very different.

Categorical judgements have as their metalogical principle the laws of thought of identity and contradiction. But the ground of the connexion of concept-spheres giving truth to the judgement, that is nothing but this connexion, can be of a very varied nature, and, as a result of this, the truth of the judgement is either logical, or empirical, or transcendental, or metalogical. This has already been discussed in the introductory essay, §§ 30-33, and need not here be repeated. But it follows from this how very different the immediate kinds of knowledge can be, all of which exhibit themselves in the abstract through the combination of the spheres of two concepts as subject and predicate, and that we cannot by any means set up a single function of the understanding as corresponding to and producing it. For example, the judgements: “Water boils”; “The sine measures the angle”; “The will decides”; “Employment distracts”; “Distinction is difficult,” express through the same logical form the most varied kinds of relations. From this we obtain once more the sanction, however wrong the beginning, to place ourselves at the standpoint of abstract knowledge, in order to analyse direct, intuitive knowledge. For the rest, the categorical judgement springs from a knowledge of the understanding proper, in my sense, only where a causality is expressed through it; but this is the case also with all judgements expressing a physical quality. For if I say: “This body is heavy, hard, fluid, green, sour, alkaline, organic,” and so on, this always expresses its action or effect, and thus a knowledge that is possible only through the pure understanding. Now after this knowledge, like much that is quite different from it (e.g., the subordination of highly abstract concepts), has been expressed in the abstract through subject and predicate, these mere relations of concepts have been transferred back to knowledge of perception, and it has been supposed that the subject and predicate of the judgement must have a special correlative of their own in perception, namely substance and accident. But later on I shall clearly show that the concept “substance” has no other true content than that of the concept “matter.” Accidents, however, are quite synonymous with kinds of effects, so that the supposed knowledge of substance and accident is still always that of the pure understanding of cause and effect. But how the representation of matter really arises is discussed partly in our first book, § 4, and still more clearly in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason at the end of § 21. To some extent we shall see it still more closely when we investigate the principle that substance is permanent.

(c) The disjunctive judgements spring from the law of thought of the excluded middle, which is a metalogical truth; they are therefore entirely the property of pure reason, and do not have their origin in the understanding. The deduction of the category of community or reciprocal effect from them, however, is a really glaring example of the acts of violence on truth which Kant ventures to commit, merely in order to satisfy his love for architectonic symmetry. The inadmissibility of that deduction has already often been rightly censured, and has been demonstrated on various grounds, especially by G. E. Schulze in his Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie and by Berg in his Epikritik der Philosophie. What actual analogy is there in fact between the problematical determination of a concept by predicates that exclude one another, and the idea of reciprocal effect? The two indeed are quite opposed, for in the disjunctive judgement the actual statement of one of the two terms of division is necessarily at the same time an elimination of the other. On the other hand, if we imagine two things in the relation of reciprocal effect, the statement of the one is necessarily the statement of the other also, and vice versa. Therefore the actual logical analogue of reciprocal effect is unquestionably the circulus vitiosus, for in it, just as ostensibly in the case of reciprocal effect, what is established is also the ground, and conversely. And just as logic rejects the circulus vitiosus, so also is the concept of reciprocal effect to be banished from metaphysics. For I now intend quite seriously to prove that there is no reciprocal effect at all in the proper sense, and that this concept, so extremely popular precisely on account of the indefiniteness of the idea, appears on closer consideration to be empty, false, and invalid. First of all, let us recall what causality in general is, and, to assist in this, let us look up my discussion about it in the introductory essay, § 20, also in my essay On the Freedom of the Will, chap. 3, pp. 27 seq. (2nd ed., pp. 26 seq.), and finally in the fourth chapter of the second volume of the present work. Causality is the law according to which the states or conditions of matter that appear determine their positions in time. With causality it is a question merely of states or conditions, in fact, really only of changes, and not of matter as such or of persistence without change. Matter as such is not under the law of causality, for it neither comes into being nor passes away; thus the whole thing, as we commonly say, does not come under this law, but only the states or conditions of matter. Further, the law of causality has nothing to do with permanence, for where nothing changes there is no producing of effects and no causality, but a continuing state of rest. If such a state or condition is changed, then the newly arisen state is again either permanent, or it is not, and it at once produces a third condition or state. The necessity with which this happens is just the law of causality, which is a form of the principle of sufficient reason, and thus cannot be further explained, since the principle of sufficient reason is the very principle of all explanation and all necessity. From this it is clear that the existence of cause and effect is closely connected with, and necessarily related to, the sequence of time. Only in so far as state A precedes state B in time, but their succession is necessary and not an accidental one, in other words, is no mere sequence but a consequence—only to this extent is state A the cause and state B the effect. But the concept of reciprocal effect contains this, that each is cause and each is effect of the other; but this is equivalent to saying that each of the two is the earlier and the later at the same time, which is absurd. For that both states are simultaneous, and indeed necessarily simultaneous, cannot be accepted, since, as they necessarily belong together and are simultaneous, they constitute only one state. The enduring presence of all its determinations is certainly required for the persistence of this state, but then there is no longer any question of change and causality, but of duration and rest. Nothing is said except that, if one determination of the whole state is changed, the resultant new state cannot continue, but becomes the cause of the change of all the other determinations of the first state also, whereby a new, third state appears. All this happens merely in accordance with the simple law of causality, and does not establish a new law, that of reciprocal effect.

I also positively assert that the concept of reciprocal effect cannot be illustrated by a single example. All that we should like to pass off as such is either a state of rest, to which the concept of causality, having significance only in regard to changes, finds no application whatever; or it is an alternating succession of states of the same name that condition one another, for the explanation of which simple causality is quite sufficient. An example of the first class is afforded by a pair of scales brought to rest by equal weights. There is no effect at all here, for there is no change; it is a state of rest; gravity acts, uniformly distributed, as it does in every body supported at its centre of gravity, but it cannot manifest its force through any effect. That the taking away of one weight produces a second state that at once becomes the cause of a third, namely the sinking of the other scale, happens according to the simple law of cause and effect. It requires no special category of the understanding, not even a special name. An example of the other class is the continuous burning of a fire. The combination of oxygen with the combustible body is the cause of the heat, and the heat again is the cause of the renewed occurrence of that chemical combination. But this is nothing but a chain of causes and effects, the alternate links of which, however, bear the same name. The burning A produces free heat B; this produces a new burning C (i.e., a new effect having the same name as the cause A, but not individually the same with it); this produces a new heat D (which is not really identical with the effect B, but is the same only according to the concept, in other words, it has the same name as B), and so on indefinitely. A good example of what in ordinary life is called reciprocal effect is afforded by a theory of deserts given by Humboldt (Ansichten der Natur, second edition, vol. II, p. 79). In sandy deserts it does not rain, but it rains on the wooded mountains that border them. The cause is not the attraction of the clouds by the mountains, but the column of heated air, rising from the sandy plain, which prevents the particles of vapour from disintegrating, and drives the clouds upwards. On the mountain range the vertically rising current of air is weaker, the clouds descend, and the rainfall ensues in the cooler air. Thus want of rain and the absence of plants in the desert stand in the relation of reciprocal effect. It does not rain, because the heated surface of sand radiates more heat; the desert does not become a steppe or prairie, because it does not rain. But obviously we have again here, as in the above example, only a succession of causes and effects of the same names, and absolutely nothing essentially different from simple causality. It is just the same with the swinging of a pendulum, and even, in fact, with the self-maintenance of the organic body, where every state likewise produces a new one. This state is of the same kind as the one by which it was itself brought about, but individually it is new. Only here the matter is more complicated, since the chain no longer consists of links of two kinds, but of links of many kinds, so that a link of the same name recurs only after several others have intervened. However, we always see before us only an application of the single and simple law of causality which affords the rule of the sequence of states or conditions, but not something that needs to be comprehended by a new and special function of the understanding.

Or will it be said as a proof of the concept of reciprocal effect that action and reaction are equal to each other? But this is to be found precisely in what I urge so strongly, and have discussed at length, in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, namely that the cause and the effect are not two bodies, but two successive states of bodies. Consequently, each of the two states also implicates all the bodies concerned, and hence the effect, i.e., the newly appearing state, e.g., in the case of impact, extends to both bodies in the same proportion; therefore the impelled body undergoes just as great a change as does the impelling body (each in proportion to its mass and velocity). If we choose to call this reciprocal effect, then absolutely every effect is a reciprocal effect, and no new concept arises on this account, still less a new function of the understanding for it, but we have only a superfluous synonym for causality. Kant, however, thoughtlessly expresses just this view in the Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Science, where the proof of the fourth proposition of mechanics begins: “All external effect in the world is reciprocal effect.” Then how are different functions to lie a priori in the understanding for simple causality and for reciprocal effect; in fact, how is the real succession of things to be possible and knowable only by means of causality, and their coexistence only by means of reciprocal effect? Accordingly, if all effect is reciprocal effect, succession and simultaneity would be the same thing, and consequently everything in the world would be simultaneous. If there were true reciprocal effect, then the perpetuum mobile would also be possible, and even a priori certain. On the other hand, the a priori conviction that there is no true reciprocal effect and no form of the understanding for such an effect, is the basis for asserting that perpetual motion is impossible.

Aristotle also denies reciprocal effect in the strict sense, for he remarks that two things can indeed be reciprocally causes of each other, but only in so far as we understand this in a different sense of each, for example, that one thing acts on the other as motive, but the latter acts on the former as the cause of its movement. Thus we find the same words in two passages: Physics, Bk. ii, c. 3, and Metaphysics, Bk. v, c. 2. “Eστι δέ τινα ϰαὶ ἀλλήλων αἴτια· τὸ πονεῖν αἴτιον τῆς εὐεξίας, ϰαὶ αὕτη τοῦ πονεῖν· ἀλλ’ οὐ τὸν αὐτὸν τρóπον, ἀλλὰ τὸ μὲν ὡς τέλος, τὸ δὲ ώς ἀρχὴ ϰινήσεως. (Sunt prae-lerea quae sibi sunt mutuo causae, ut exercitium bonae habitudinis, et haec exercitii: at non eodem modo, sed haec ut finis, illud ut principium lotus.)²²⁵ Moreover, if he assumed a reciprocal effect proper, he would introduce it here, for in both passages he is concerned with enumerating all the possible kinds of causes. In the Posterior Analytics, Bk. ii, c. 11, he speaks of a rotation of causes and effects, but not of a reciprocal effect.

(4) The categories of modality have the advantage over all the others, since what is expressed through each of them actually corresponds to the form of judgement from which it is derived. With the other categories this is hardly ever the case, since they are usually deduced from the forms of judgement with the most arbitrary violence.

Therefore, that the concepts of the possible, of the actual, and of the necessary give rise to the problematical, the assertory, and the apodictic forms of judgement, is perfectly true; but that those concepts are special, original cognitive forms of the understanding incapable of further derivation, is not true. On the contrary, they spring from the single form of all knowledge, which is original and therefore known to us a priori, namely the principle of sufficient reason; and in fact knowledge of necessity springs directly from this. On the other hand, only by applying reflection to this do the concepts of contingency, possibility, impossibility, and actuality arise. Therefore all these do not in any way originate from one faculty of the mind, the understanding, but arise through the conflict of abstract knowledge with intuitive, as will be seen in a moment.

I maintain that to be necessary and to be consequent from a given ground or reason are absolutely reciprocal concepts, and completely identical. We can never know or even think anything as necessary, except in so far as we regard it as the consequent from a given ground or reason. The concept of necessity contains absolutely nothing more than this dependence, this being established through another thing, and this inevitably following from it. Thus it arises and exists simply and solely by applying the principle of sufficient reason. Therefore, according to the different forms of this principle, there are a physically necessary (the effect from the cause), a logically necessary (through the ground of knowing, in analytical judgements, syllogisms, and so on), a mathematically necessary (according to the ground of being in space and time), and finally a practically necessary. With this last we wish to express not some determination through a so-called categorical imperative, but the necessarily appearing action with the given empirical character according to the motives presented to it. But everything necessary is so only relatively, namely on the presupposition of the ground or reason from which it follows; therefore absolute necessity is a contradiction. For the rest, I refer to § 49 of the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

The contradictory opposite, in other words, the denial of necessity, is contingency. The content of this concept is therefore negative, and so nothing more than absence of the connexion expressed by the principle of sufficient reason. Consequently even the contingent is always only relative; thus it is contingent in relation to something that is not its ground or reason. Every object, of whatever kind it be, e.g., every event in the actual world, is always at the same time both necessary and contingent; necessary in reference to the one thing that is its cause; contingent in reference to everything else. For its contact in time and space with everything else is a mere coincidence without necessary connexion; hence also the words chance, contingency, σύμπτωμα, contingent. Therefore an absolute contingency is just as inconceivable as an absolute necessity, for the former would be just an object that did not stand to any other in the relation of consequent to ground. The inconceivability of such a thing, however, is precisely the content of the principle of sufficient reason negatively expressed. This principle, therefore, would first have to be overthrown if we were to conceive an absolute contingency. But then this itself also would have lost all meaning, for the concept of the contingent has meaning only in reference to that principle, and signifies that two objects do not stand to each other in the relation of ground to consequent.

In nature, in so far as this is representation of perception, everything that happens is necessary, for it proceeds from its cause. If, however, we consider this individual thing in relation to everything else that is not its cause, we recognize it as contingent; but this is already an abstract reflection. Now if further, in the case of an object of nature, we abstract entirely from its causal relation to everything else, and hence from its necessity and contingency, then the concept of the actual comprehends this kind of knowledge. In the case of this concept we consider only the effect, without looking about for the cause, in reference to which we should otherwise have to call it necessary, and in reference to everything else contingent. All this rests ultimately on the fact that the modality of the judgement indicates not so much the objective quality of things as the relation of our knowledge to that quality. But as in nature everything proceeds from a cause, everything actual is also necessary; yet only in so far as it is at this time, in this place; for only thus far does determination through the law of causality extend. But if we leave nature of perception, and pass over to abstract thinking, we can in reflection represent to ourselves all the laws of nature, known to us partly a priori, partly only a posteriori. This abstract representation contains all that is in nature at any time, in any place, but with abstraction from every definite place and time; and in just this way, through such reflection, we have entered the wide realm of possibility. But what finds no place even here is the impossible. It is obvious that possibility and impossibility exist only for reflection, for the abstract knowledge of our faculty of reason, not for the knowledge of perception, although it is the pure forms of such knowledge which suggest to our reason determination of the possible and the impossible. According as the laws of nature, from which we start when thinking of the possible and the impossible, are known a priori or a posteriori, is the possibility or impossibility metaphysical or only physical.

From this exposition, which requires no proof because it rests directly on knowledge of the principle of sufficient reason and on the development of the concepts of the necessary, the actual, and the possible, it is clear enough how entirely groundless is Kant’s assumption of three special functions of the understanding for those three concepts; here again we see that he did not let himself be disturbed by any scruple in achieving his architectonic symmetry.

In addition to this, however, there is also the very great mistake, namely his confusion with each other of the concepts of necessary and contingent, of course after the example of previous philosophy. This earlier philosophy misused abstraction in the following way. It was obvious that that of which the ground is set, follows inevitably, in other words, cannot fail to be, and so necessarily is. But men held to this last determination alone, and said that that is necessary which cannot be otherwise, or whose opposite is impossible. But they disregarded the ground and the root of such necessity, overlooked the relativity of all necessity that results therefrom, and thus made the utterly inconceivable fiction of an absolutely necessary, in other words, of something whose existence would be as inevitable as the consequent from the reason or ground, yet which would not be consequent from a ground, and would thus depend on nothing. This addition is just an absurd petitio principii, since it is contrary to the principle of sufficient reason. Now starting from this fiction they declared, in diametrical opposition to the truth, that everything established through a ground or reason was contingent, since they looked at the relative nature of its necessity, and compared this with the entirely fictitious absolute necessity that is self-contradictory in its concept.²²⁶ Now Kant also retains this fundamentally perverse definition of the contingent, and gives it as explanation: Critique of Pure Reason, V, pp. 289-291; 243 (V, 301); 419, 458, 460 (V, 447, 486, 488). Here indeed he falls into the most obvious contradiction with himself, since he says on p. 301: “Everything contingent has a cause,” and adds: “That is contingent, of which the non-existence is possible.” But whatever has a cause cannot possibly not be; therefore it is necessary. For the rest, the origin of the whole of this false explanation of the necessary and the contingent is to be found in Aristotle in De Generatione et Corruptione, Bk. ii, chaps. 9 and 11, where the necessary is declared to be that of which the non-existence is impossible; opposed to it is that of which the existence is impossible. And between these two lies that which can be and also not be—hence that which arises and passes away, and this would then be the contingent. According to what has been said above, it is clear that this explanation, like so many of Aristotle’s, has resulted from sticking to abstract concepts without going back to the concrete and perceptible, in which, however, lies the source of all abstract concepts, and by which they must therefore always be controlled. “Something of which the non-existence is impossible” can certainly be thought in the abstract, but if we go with it to the concrete, the real, the perceptible, we find nothing to illustrate the thought, even only as something possible—as merely the aforesaid consequent of a given ground, whose necessity, however, is relative and conditioned.

I take this opportunity to add a few more remarks on these concepts of modality. As all necessity rests on the principle of sufficient reason, and on this very account is relative, all apodictic judgements are originally, and in their ultimate significance, hypothetical. They become categorical only by the introduction of an assertory minor, hence in the consequent of a syllogism. If this minor is still undecided, and this indecision is expressed, this gives the problematical judgement.

What in general (as rule) is apodictic (a law of nature), is always in reference to a particular case only problematical, since first the condition which puts the case under the rule must actually appear. Conversely, what in the particular as such is necessary (apodictic) (every particular change necessary through its cause), is again in general, and expressed universally, only problematical, since the cause that appears concerns only the particular case, and the apodictic, always hypothetical, judgement invariably states only universal laws, not particular cases directly. All this has its ground in the fact that the possible exists only in the province of reflection and for our faculty of reason, the actual in the province of perception and for our understanding, the necessary for both. In fact, the distinction between necessary, actual, and possible really exists only in the abstract and according to the concept; in the real world all three coincide in one. For all that happens, happens necessarily, because it happens from causes, but these themselves in turn have causes, so that the whole course of events in the world, great as well as small, is a strict concatenation of what necessarily takes place. Accordingly, everything actual is at the same time something necessary, and in reality there is no difference between actuality and necessity. In just the same way there is no difference between actuality and possibility, for what has not happened, in other words has not become actual, was also not possible, since the causes without which it could never take place have themselves not happened, nor could they happen, in the great concatenation of causes; thus it was an impossibility. Accordingly, every event is either necessary or impossible. All this holds good merely of the empirically real world, in other words, of the complex of individual things, and thus of the wholly particular or individual as such. On the other hand, if by means of our faculty of reason we consider things in general, comprehending them in the abstract, then necessity, actuality, and possibility are again separated. We then know everything as generally possible according to a priori laws belonging to our intellect, and that which corresponds to the empirical laws of nature as possible in this world, even if it has never become actual; thus we clearly distinguish the possible from the actual. The actual is in itself always also necessary, but it is understood as being such only by the man who knows its cause; apart from this, it is and is called contingent. This consideration also gives us the key to that contentio περὶ δυνάτων²²⁷ between the Megaric Diodorus and Chrysippus the Stoic, which Cicero mentions in his book De Fato. Diodorus says: “Only what becomes actual has been possible, and all that is actual is also necessary.” On the other hand, Chrysippus says: “Much that is possible never becomes actual, for only the necessary becomes actual.” We can explain this as follows: Actuality is the conclusion of a syllogism for which possibility provides the premisses. Yet for it not only the major, but also the minor is required; only the two give complete possibility. Thus the major gives a merely theoretical, general possibility in abstracto; but this in itself still does not make anything possible at all, in other words, capable of becoming actual. For this the minor is still needed, which gives the possibility for the particular case, since it brings the case under the rule. Precisely in this way the case at once becomes actuality. For example:

Maj. All houses (consequently mine also) can be destroyed by fire.

Min. My house is catching fire.

Concl. My house is being destroyed by fire.

For every general proposition, and hence every major, establishes things with regard to actuality only under a presupposition, and consequently hypothetically; for example, the ability to be destroyed by fire has the catching fire as a presupposition. This presupposition is brought out in the minor. The major always loads the gun, but only when the minor applies the fuse does the shot, i.e., the conclusion, follow. This holds good everywhere of the relation of possibility to actuality. Now as the conclusion, which is the assertion of actuality, follows necessarily, it is clear from this that everything that is actual is also necessary; this can also be seen from the fact that necessity means simply being consequent of a given ground or reason. With the actual this ground is a cause; hence everything actual is necessary. Accordingly, we see the concepts of the possible, the actual, and the necessary coincide, and not merely the last presuppose the first, but also vice versa. What keeps them apart is the limitation of our intellect through the form of time; for time is the mediator between possibility and actuality. The necessity of the individual event can be seen perfectly from the knowledge of all its causes, but the coincidence of all these different causes, independent of one another, seems to us to be contingent; in fact their independence of one another is just the concept of contingency. However, as each of them was the necessary consequence of its cause, and the chain of causes is beginningless, it is clear that contingency is a merely subjective phenomenon, arising out of the limitation of the horizon of our understanding, and is just as subjective as is the optical horizon in which the heavens touch the earth.

As necessity is identical with consequent from a given ground or reason, it must also appear as a special necessity in the case of each form of the principle of sufficient reason, and also have its opposite in the possibility and impossibility which always arise only through the application of our reason’s abstract reflection to the object. Opposed to the above-mentioned four kinds of necessity are the same number of kinds of impossibility, that is, physical, logical, mathematical, and practical. In addition it may be observed that, if we keep entirely within the province of abstract concepts, possibility always belongs to the more general concept, necessity to the more limited. For example “An animal may be a bird, a fish, an amphibious creature, and so on.” “A nightingale must be a bird, a bird must be an animal, an animal must be an organism, an organism must be a body.” This is really because logical necessity, whose expression is the syllogism, goes from the general to the particular, and never vice versa. In nature of perception (the representations of the first class), on the contrary, everything is really necessary through the law of causality. Only added reflection can at the same time comprehend it as contingent, comparing it with that which is not its cause, and also as simply and solely actual, by disregarding all causal connexion. Only with this class of representations does the concept of the actual really occur, as is also indicated by the derivation of the word from the concept of causality. If we keep entirely within the third class of representations, pure mathematical perception, there is nothing but necessity. Possibility also arises here merely through reference to the concepts of reflection; for example, “A triangle may be right-angled, obtuse-angled, or equiangular, but it must have three angles amounting to two right angles.” Thus here we arrive at the possible only by passing from the perceptible to the abstract.

After this discussion, which assumes a recollection of what was said in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason as well as in the first book of the present work, it is hoped that there will be no further doubt about the true and very heterogeneous origin of those forms of judgements laid before us by the table, and likewise no doubt about the inadmissibility and utter groundlessness of the assumption of twelve special functions of the understanding for their explanation. Many particular observations, easily made, also furnish information on this latter point. Thus, for example, it requires great love of symmetry and much confidence in a guiding line taken from it, to assume that an affirmative, a categorical, and an assertory judgement are three things so fundamentally different as to justify the assumption of a quite special function of the understanding for each of them.

Kant himself betrays an awareness of the untenability of his doctrine of categories by the fact that, in the third section of the Analysis of Principles (phaenomena et noumena), in the second edition he omitted several long passages from the first (namely pp. 241, 242, 244-246, 248-253) which showed too openly the weakness of that doctrine. Thus, for example, he there (p. 241) says that he has not defined the individual categories, because he could not do so even if he had wished, since they were incapable of any definition. He had forgotten that on p. 82 of the same first edition he had said: “I purposely dispense with the definition of the categories, although I may be in possession of it.” This was therefore—sit venia verbo²²⁸ wind. But he has allowed this last passage to stand; and so all those passages afterwards prudently omitted betray the fact that nothing distinct can be thought in connexion with the categories, and that this whole doctrine stands on a weak foundation.

This table of categories is now supposed to be the guiding line along which every metaphysical, and in fact every scientific, speculation is to be conducted (Prolegomena, § 39). In fact, it is not only the foundation of the whole Kantian philosophy, and the type according to which its symmetry is carried through everywhere, as I have already shown above, but it has also really become the Procrustean bed on to which Kant forces every possible consideration by means of a violence that I shall now consider somewhat more closely. But with such an opportunity, what were the imitatores, servum pecus²²⁹ bound to do? We have seen. That violence is therefore committed in the following way. The meaning of the expressions that denote the titles, forms of judgements, and categories, is entirely set aside and forgotten, and only the expressions themselves retained. These have their origin partly in Aristotle’s Analytica priora, i, 23 (περὶ ποιóτητος ϰαὶ ποσóτητος τῶν τοῦ συλλογισμοῦ ὅρων: de qualitate et quantitate terminorum syllogismi),²³⁰ but they are arbitrarily chosen; for the extent of the concepts could certainly have been expressed otherwise than by the word quantity, although this word is better suited to its object than are the remaining titles of the categories. Even the word quality has obviously been chosen merely from the habit of opposing quality to quantity; for the name quality is indeed taken arbitrarily enough for affirmation and denial. But in every inquiry conducted by Kant, every quantity in time and space, and every possible quality of things, physical, moral, and so on, is brought under those category-titles, although between these things and those titles of the forms of judging and thinking there is not the least thing in common, except the accidental and arbitrary nomenclature. We must be mindful of the high esteem due to Kant in other respects, in order not to express our indignation at this procedure in harsh terms. The pure physiological table of general principles of natural science at once furnishes us with the nearest example. What in the world has the quantity of judgements to do with the fact that every perception has an extensive magnitude? What has the quality of judgements to do with the fact that every sensation has a degree? On the contrary, the former rests on the fact that space is the form of our external perception, and the latter is nothing more than an empirical, and moreover quite subjective, observation or perception drawn merely from the consideration of the nature of our sense-organs. Further, in the table that lays the foundation for rational psychology (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 344; V, 402), the simple, uncompounded nature of the soul is cited under quality; but this is precisely a quantitative property, and has no reference at all to affirmation or denial in the judgement. But quantity had to be filled up by the unity of the soul, although that is already included in its simple nature. Modality is then ludicrously forced in; the soul thus stands in connexion with possible objects; but connexion belongs to relation; relation, however, is already taken possession of by substance. Then the four cosmological Ideas that are the material of the antinomies are traced back to the titles of the categories. We shall speak of these in greater detail later on, when we examine these antinomies. Several examples, if possible even more glaring, are furnished by the table of the categories of freedom in the Critique of Practical Reason; further by the Critique of Judgement, first book, which goes through the judgement of taste according to the four titles of the categories; finally by the Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Science which are cut out entirely in accordance with the table of categories. Possibly the false, which is mixed up here and there with what is true and excellent in this important work, was mainly brought about precisely in this way. Let us see, at the end of the first chapter, how the unity, plurality, and totality of the directions of lines are supposed to correspond to the categories, so named according to the quantity of the judgements.

The principle of the permanence of substance is derived from the category of subsistence and inherence. We know this, however, only from the form of categorical judgements, in other words, from the connexion of two concepts as subject and predicate. Hence how violently is that great metaphysical principle made dependent on this simple, purely logical form! But this is done only pro forma and for the sake of symmetry. The proof given here for this principle entirely sets aside its alleged origin from the understanding and the category, and is produced from the pure intuition or perception of time. But this proof also is quite incorrect. It is false to say that in mere time there are simultaneity and duration; these representations first result from the union of space with time, as I have already shown in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 18, and have discussed more fully in § 4 of the present work. I must assume an acquaintance with these two discussions for an understanding of what follows. It is false to say that time itself remains in spite of all change; on the contrary, it is precisely time itself that is fleeting; a permanent time is a contradiction. Kant’s proof is untenable, however much he has supported it with sophisms; in fact he falls here into the most palpable contradiction. Thus, after falsely setting up coexistence as a mode of time (p. 177; V, 219), he says (p. 183; V, 226) quite correctly: “Coexistence is not a mode of time, for in it absolutely no parts are simultaneous, but all are in succession.” In truth, space is just as much implicated in coexistence as time is. For if two things are simultaneous and yet not one, they are different through space; if two states or conditions of one thing are simultaneous (e.g., the glow and the heat of iron), then they are two coexistent effects of one thing; hence they presuppose matter, and matter presupposes space. Strictly speaking, the simultaneous is a negative determination, merely indicating that two things or states are not different through time; thus their difference is to be sought elsewhere. But our knowledge of the persistence of substance, i.e., of matter, must of course rest on an insight a priori, for it is beyond all doubt, and cannot therefore be drawn from experience. I derive it from the fact that the principle of all becoming and passing away, namely the law of causality, of which we are conscious a priori, essentially concerns only changes, i.e., successive states or conditions of matter. It is therefore limited to the form, but leaves matter untouched, which thus exists in our consciousness as the foundation of all things. This foundation is not subject to any becoming or passing away; consequently, it has always been and always continues to be. A deeper proof of the permanence of substance, drawn from the analysis of our perceptible representation of the empirical world in general, is found in our first book, § 4, where it was shown that the essential nature of matter consists in the complete union of space and time, a union that is possible only by means of the representation of causality, and consequently only for the understanding, that is nothing but the subjective correlative of causality. Matter is therefore never known otherwise than as operative or causative, in other words, as causality through and through. To be and to act are with it identical, as is indeed indicated by the word actuality (Wirklichkeit). Intimate union of space and time—causality, matter, actuality—are therefore one, and the subjective correlative of this one is the understanding. Matter must carry in itself the conflicting properties of the two factors from which it arises, and it is the representation of causality which eliminates the contradictory element in both, and renders their coexistence conceivable to the understanding. Matter is through and for the understanding alone, and the whole faculty of the understanding consists in the knowledge of cause and effect. Thus for the understanding there is united in matter the inconstant and unstable flux of time, appearing as change of accidents, with the rigid immobility of space, exhibiting itself as the permanence of substance. For if substance passed away just as the accidents do, the phenomenon would be completely torn away from space, and would belong only to mere time; the world of experience would be dissolved by the destruction of matter, by annihilation. Therefore from the share that space has in matter, i.e., in all the phenomena of actuality—since it is the opposite and the reverse of time, and thus, in itself and apart from union with time, knows absolutely no change—that principle of the permanence of substance, which everyone recognizes as a priori certain, had to be deduced and explained; not, however, from mere time, to which for this purpose Kant quite falsely attributed a permanence.

In the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 23, I have demonstrated in detail the incorrectness of the proof (which now follows) of the a priori nature and the necessity of the law of causality from the mere chronological sequence of events; I can therefore only refer to it here.²³¹ It is just the same with the proof of reciprocal effect, the concept of which I had to demonstrate previously as invalid. What is necessary about modality has also been said already, and the working out of its principles now follows.

I should have to refute a good many more particulars in the further course of the Transcendental Analytic, if I were not afraid of trying the patience of the reader; I therefore leave them to his own reflection. But again and again in the Critique of Pure Reason we come across that principal and fundamental error of Kant’s which I have previously censured in detail, namely the complete absence of any distinction between abstract, discursive knowledge and intuitive knowledge. It is this that spreads a permanent obscurity over the whole of Kant’s theory of the faculty of knowledge. It never lets the reader know what is at any time really being talked about, so that instead of understanding he is always merely guessing and con-jecturing, since he tries every time to understand what is said alternately about thinking and about perceiving, and always remains in suspense. In the chapter “On the Differentiation of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena,” that incredible want of reflection on the real nature of the representation of perception and of the abstract representation leads Kant, as I shall explain more fully in a moment, to the monstrous assertion that without thought, and hence without abstract concepts, there is absolutely no knowledge of an object, and that, because perception is not thought, it is also not knowledge at all, and in general is nothing but mere affection of sensibility, mere sensation! Nay more, that perception without concept is absolutely empty, but that concept without perception is still something (p. 253; V, 309). Now this is the very opposite of the truth, for concepts obtain all meaning, all content, only from their reference to representations of perception, from which they have been abstracted, drawn off, in other words, formed by the dropping of everything inessential. If, therefore, the foundation of perception is taken away from them, they are empty and void. Perceptions, on the other hand, have immediate and very great significance in themselves (in them, in fact, is objectified the will, the thing-in-itself); they represent themselves, express themselves, and have not merely borrowed content as concepts have. For the principle of sufficient reason rules over them only as the law of causality, and as such determines only their position in space and time. It does not, however, condition their content and their significance, as is the case with concepts, where it holds good of the ground or reason of knowing. For the rest, it looks as if just here Kant really wants to set about distinguishing the representation of perception from the abstract representation. He reproaches Leibniz and Locke, the former with having made everything into abstract representations, the latter with having made everything into representations of perception. But yet no distinction is reached, and although Locke and Leibniz actually did make these mistakes, Kant himself is burdened with a third mistake that includes both these, namely that of having mixed up the perceptible and the abstract to such an extent that a monstrous hybrid of the two resulted, an absurdity of which no clear mental picture is possible, and which therefore inevitably merely confused and stupefied students, and set them at variance.

Certainly in the chapter referred to “On the Differentiation of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena,” thought and perception are separated more than anywhere else; but here the nature of this distinction is a fundamentally false one. Thus it is said on p. 253 (V, 309): “If I take away all thought (through categories) from empirical knowledge, there is left absolutely no knowledge of an object; for through mere perception nothing at all is thought, and that this affection of sensibility is in me does not constitute any relation at all of such a representation to any object.” To a certain extent, this sentence contains all Kant’s errors in a nutshell, since it clearly brings out that he falsely conceived the relation between sensation, perception, and thinking. Accordingly, he identifies perception, the form of which is supposed to be space, and indeed space in all three dimensions, with the mere subjective sensation in the organs of sense, but he admits knowledge of an object only through thinking, which is different from perceiving. On the other hand, I say that objects are first of all objects of perception, not of thinking, and that all knowledge of objects is originally and in itself perception. Perception, however, is by no means mere sensation, but with it the understanding already proves itself active. Thought, that is added only in the case of man, not in that of the animals, is mere abstraction from perception, does not furnish fundamentally new knowledge, does not establish objects that did not exist previously. It merely changes the form of the knowledge already gained through perception, makes it into an abstract knowledge in concepts, whereby its perceptible nature is lost, but, on the other hand, its combination becomes possible, and this immeasurably extends its applicability. On the other hand, the material of our thinking is none other than our perceptions themselves, and not something which perception does not contain, and which would be added only through thought. Therefore the material of everything that occurs in our thinking must be capable of verification in our perception, as otherwise it would be an empty thinking. Although this material is elaborated and transformed by thought in many different ways, it must nevertheless be capable of being restored from this; and it must be possible for thought to be traced back to this material—just as a piece of gold is ultimately reduced from all its solutions, oxides, sublimates, and compounds, and is again presented reguline and undiminished. This could not be, if thought itself had added something, indeed the main thing, to the object.

The whole chapter on the amphiboly, which follows this, is merely a criticism of the Leibnizian philosophy, and as such is on the whole correct, although the whole form or arrangement is made merely for the sake of architectonic symmetry which here also affords the guiding line. Thus to bring out the analogy with the Aristotelian Organon, a transcendental topic is set up. This consists in our having to consider every concept from four points of view, in order to make out to which faculty of knowledge it should be brought. But those four points of view are assumed quite arbitrarily, and ten more could be added with just as much right; but their fourfold number corresponds to the titles of the categories. Therefore the chief doctrines of Leibniz are divided among them as best may be. Through this criticism, what were merely Leibniz’s false abstractions are also to a certain extent stamped as natural errors of the faculty of reason. Instead of learning from his great philosophical contemporaries, Spinoza and Locke, Leibniz preferred to serve up his own strange inventions. In the chapter on the amphiboly of reflection, it is said finally that there can perhaps be a perception entirely different from ours, to which however our categories can nevertheless be applicable. Therefore, the objects of that supposed perception would be noumena, things that could be merely thought by us; but as the perception that would give meaning to that thinking is lacking in us, and is in fact wholly problematical, the object of that thinking would also be merely a quite indefinite possibility. I have shown above through quoted passages that Kant, in the greatest contradiction with himself, sets up the categories, now as the condition of the representation of perception, now as the function of merely abstract thinking. Here they now appear in the latter meaning, and it seems quite as if he wants to ascribe to them merely a discursive thinking. But if this is really his opinion, then necessarily at the beginning of the Transcendental Logic, before specifying at such great length the different functions of thought, he should have characterized thought in general, and consequently distinguished it from perception. He should have shown what knowledge is given by mere perception, and what new knowledge is added in thought. He would then have known what he was really talking about, or rather he would have spoken quite differently, first about perceiving, and then about thinking. Instead of this, he is now concerned with something between the two, which is an impossibility. Then also there would not be that great gap between the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Logic, where, after describing the mere form of perception, he disposes of its content, all that is empirically apprehended, with the phrase “it is given.” He does not ask how it comes about, whether with or without understanding, but with a leap passes over to abstract thinking, and not even to thinking in general, but at once to certain forms of thought. He does not say a word about what thinking is, what the concept is, what the relation of abstract and discursive to concrete and intuitive is, what the difference between the knowledge of man and that of the animal is, and what the faculty of reason is.

But it was just this difference between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception, entirely overlooked by Kant, which the ancient philosophers denoted by ϕαɩνoμένα and νooύμενα.²³² Their contrast and incommensurability occupied those philosophers so much in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato’s doctrine of the Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later the scholastics in the dispute between nominalism and realism, whose seed, so late in developing, was already contained in the opposite mental tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant who, in an unwarrantable manner, entirely neglected the thing for the expression of which those words ϕαινoένα and νοούμενα had already been taken, now takes possession of the words, as if they were still unclaimed, in order to denote by them his things-in-themselves and his phenomena.

After having had to reject Kant’s doctrine of the categories, just as he himself rejected that of Aristotle, I will indicate here by way of suggestion a third method of reaching what is intended. Thus, what both Kant and Aristotle looked for under the name of the categories were the most universal concepts under which all things, however different, must be subsumed, and through which, therefore, everything existing would ultimately be thought. This is just why Kant conceived them as the forms of all thinking.

Grammar is related to logic as are clothes to the body. Those highest of all concepts, this ground-bass of our faculty of reason, are the foundation of all more special thinking, and therefore without the application of this, no thinking whatever can take place. Should not such concepts, therefore, ultimately lie in those which, just on account of their exceeding generality (transcendentality), have their expression not in single words, but in whole classes of words, since one of them is already thought along with every word, whatever it may be, and accordingly their designation would have to be looked for not in the lexicon, but in the grammar? Therefore, ought they not ultimately to be those distinctions of concepts by virtue of which the word that expresses them is either a substantive or an adjecive, a verb or an adverb, a pronoun, a preposition, or some other particle, in short the partes orationis (parts of speech)? For unquestionably these denote the forms which all thinking assumes in the first instance, and in which it immediately moves. Precisely on this account, they are the essential forms of speech, the fundamental constituent elements of every language, so that we cannot imagine any language that would not consist at least of substantives, adjectives, and verbs. To these fundamental forms there could then be subordinated those forms of thought which are expressed through their inflexions, through declension and conjugation; and here in the main thing it is inessential whether we make use of the article and the pronoun for denoting them. But we will examine the matter somewhat more closely, and raise anew the question: What are the forms of thinking?

(1) Thinking consists throughout of judging; judgements are the threads of its whole texture, for without the use of a verb our thinking makes no progress, and whenever we use a verb, we judge.

(2) Every judgement consists in recognizing the relation between a subject and a predicate, which are separated or united by it with various restrictions. It unites them by the recognition of the actual identity of the two, an identity that can occur only with convertible concepts; then in the recognition that the one is always thought along with the other, although not conversely—in the universal affirmative proposition; up to the recognition that the one is sometimes thought along with the other, in the particular affirmative proposition. Negative propositions take the reverse course. Accordingly, in every judgement it must be possible to find subject, predicate, and copula, the last affirmative or negative, although not every one of these is denoted by a word of its own, though that is generally the case. One word often denotes predicate and copula, as “Caius ages”; occasionally one word denotes all three, as concurritur, i.e., “The armies come to close quarters.” From this it is clear that we have not to look for the forms of thinking precisely and directly in words, or even in the parts of speech; for the same judgement can be expressed in different languages, indeed by different words in the same language, and even by different parts of speech. However, the thought nevertheless remains the same, and consequently its form also; for the thought could not be the same with a different form of thought itself. But with the same idea and with the same form of the idea the form of words can very well be different, for it is merely the outward expression of the thought, and that, on the other hand, is inseparable from its form. Therefore grammar explains only the clothing of the forms of thought; hence the parts of speech can be derived from the original thought-forms themselves, which are independent of all languages; their function is to express these forms of thought with all their modifications. They are the instrument, the clothing, of the forms of thought, which must be made to fit their structure accurately, so that that structure can be recognized in it.

(3) These actual, unalterable, original forms of thinking are certainly those of Kant’s logical table of judgements; only that in this table are to be found blind windows for the sake of symmetry and of the table of categories, which must therefore be omitted; likewise a false arrangement. Thus:

(a) Quality: affirmation or denial, i.e., combination or separation of concepts: two forms. It belongs to the copula.

(b) Quantity: the subject-concept is taken wholly or in part: totality or plurality. To the former also belong individual subjects: Socrates means “all Socrateses.” Hence only two forms. It belongs to the subject.

(c) Modality: has actually three forms. It determines the quality as necessary, actual, or contingent. Consequently, it also belongs to the copula.

These three forms of thought spring from the laws of thought of contradiction and of identity. But from the principle of sufficient reason and from that of the excluded middle there arises

(d) Relation: This appears only when we decide about ready and completed judgements, and can consist only in the fact that it either states the dependence of one judgement on another (also in the plurality of both), and hence combines them in the hypothetical proposition; or else states that judgements exclude one another, and hence separates them in the disjunctive proposition. It belongs to the copula, that here separates or combines the completed judgements.

The parts of speech and grammatical forms are modes of expression of the three constituent elements of the judgement, that is, the subject, the predicate, and the copula, and also of their possible relations, and thus of the thought-forms just enumerated, and of the closer determinations and modifications thereof. Therefore substantive, adjective, and verb are essential and fundamental constituents of language in general; and so they are bound to be found in all languages. Yet a language could be imagined in which adjective and verb were always amalgamated, as they sometimes are in all languages. For the time being, it can be said that substantive, article, and pronoun are intended to express the subject; adjective, adverb, preposition, to express the predicate; the verb to express the copula. But with the exception of esse (to be), the verb already contains the predicate. Philosophical grammar has to tell us about the precise mechanism of the expression of the thought-forms, just as logic has to inform us about the operations with the thought-forms themselves.

Note.—As a warning against a wrong path, and to illustrate the above, I mention S. Stern’s Vorläufige Grundlage zur Sprachphilosophie (1835) as being a wholly abortive attempt to construct the categories out of the grammatical forms. He has entirely confused thinking with perceiving, and therefore, instead of the categories of thinking, he has claimed to deduce the supposed categories of perceiving from the grammatical forms; consequently, he has put the grammatical forms in direct relation to perception. He is involved in the great error that language is directly related to perception, instead of its being directly related merely to thought as such, and hence to the abstract concepts, and primarily by means of these to perception. But they have to perception a relation that brings about an entire change of the form. What exists in perception, and hence also the relations which spring from time and space, certainly becomes an object of thinking. Therefore there must also be forms of language to express it, yet always only in the abstract, as concepts. Concepts are always the first material of thought, and the forms of logic are related only to these as such, never directly to perception. Perception always determines only the material, never the formal, truth of propositions, as the formal truth is determined according to the logical rules alone.

I return to the Kantian philosophy, and come to the Transcendental Dialectic. Kant opens it with the explanation of reason (Vernunft ), which faculty is supposed to play the principal role in it; for hitherto only sensibility and understanding were on the scene. In discussing his different explanations of reason, I have already spoken about the one given here, that “it is the faculty of principles.” Here it is now taught that all a priori knowledge hitherto considered, which makes pure mathematics and pure natural science possible, gives us mere rules, but not principles, because it proceeds from perceptions and forms of knowledge, not from mere concepts, which are required if we are to speak of principles. Accordingly, such a principle should be a knowledge from mere concepts and yet synthetical. But this is absolutely impossible. From mere concepts nothing but analytical propositions can ever result. If concepts are to be combined synthetically and yet a priori, this combination must necessarily be brought about through a third thing, namely a pure intuition or perception of the formal possibility of experience, just as synthetic judgements a posteriori are brought about through empirical perception; consequently, a synthetic proposition a priori can never proceed from mere concepts. In general, however, we are a priori conscious of nothing more than the principle of sufficient reason in its different forms, and therefore no synthetic judgements a priori are possible other than those resulting from that which gives content to that principle.

Nevertheless, Kant finally comes forward with a pretended principle of reason²³³ answering to his demand, but only with this one, from which other conclusions and corollaries subsequently follow. It is the principle set up and elucidated by Chr. Wolff in his Cosmologia, sect. 1, c. 2, § 93, and his Ontologia, § 178. Now just as previously under the title of the amphiboly, mere Leibnizian philosophemes were taken to be natural and necessary aberrations of the faculty of reason, and were criticized as such, so precisely the same thing is done here with the philosophemes of Wolff. Kant still presents this principle of reason (Vernunft) in a faint light through indistinctness, indefiniteness, and by cutting it up (p. 307; V, 364, and 322; V, 379). Clearly expressed, however, it is as follows: “If the conditioned is given, then the totality of its conditions must also be given, and consequently also the unconditioned, by which alone that totality becomes complete.” We become most vividly aware of the apparent truth of this proposition if we picture to ourselves the conditions and the conditioned as the links of a pendent chain, whose upper end, however, is not visible; thus it might go on to infinity. As the chain does not fall but hangs, there must be one link above, which is the first, and is fixed in some way. Or more briefly, our faculty of reason would like to have a point of contact for the causal chain that reaches back to infinity; this would be convenient for it. We wish, however, to examine the proposition not figuratively, but in itself. Synthetic it certainly is, for analytically nothing more follows from the concept of the conditioned than that of the condition. However, it has not a priori truth, or even a posteriori, but surreptitiously obtains its semblance of truth in a very subtle way that I must now disclose. Immediately and a priori, we have the different kinds of knowledge expressed by the principle of sufficient reason in its four forms. From this immediate knowledge all abstract expressions of the principle of sufficient reason are already derived, and are thus indirect; but their conclusions and corollaries are even more so. I have discussed above how abstract knowledge often unites many different kinds of intuitive knowledge into one form or one concept, so that they are now no longer dis-tinguishable. Thus abstract knowledge is related to intuitive as the shadow is to real objects, whose great variety and multiplicity it reproduces through one outline comprehending them all. Now the pretended principle of reason (Vernunft) makes use of this shadow. In order from the principle of sufficient ground or reason (Grund) to deduce the unconditioned that flatly contradicts this principle, it cleverly and cunningly abandons the immediate, perceptible knowledge of the content of the principle of sufficient reason in its particular forms, and makes use only of abstract concepts drawn from it and having value and meaning only through it, in order to smuggle its unconditioned in some way into the wide sphere of those concepts. Its procedure becomes most distinct through dialectical expression; thus: “If the conditioned exists, its condition must also be given, and that indeed entirely, hence completely, thus the totality of its conditions; consequently, if they constitute a series, the whole series, and so also its first beginning, thus the unconditioned.” Here it is already false that the conditions to a conditioned as such can constitute a series. On the contrary, the totality of the conditions to every conditioned must be contained in its nearest reason or ground from which it directly proceeds, and which only thus is a Sufficient reason or ground. Thus, for example, the different determinations of the state or condition that is the cause, all of which must have come together before the effect appears. But the series, for example the chain of causes, arises merely from the fact that what was just now the condition is again regarded by us as a conditioned; but then the whole operation begins again from the beginning, and the principle of sufficient reason appears anew with its demand. But to a conditioned there can never be a real successive series of conditions that would exist merely as such, and on account of what is finally and ultimately conditioned. On the contrary, it is always an alternating series of conditioneds and conditions; as each link is laid aside, the chain is broken, and the demand of the principle of sufficient reason is entirely removed. This demand arises anew by the condition becoming the conditioned. Thus the principle of sufficient ground or reason always demands only the completeness of the nearest or next condition, never the completeness of a series. But this very concept of the completeness of the condition leaves it indefinite whether such a completeness is to be simultaneous or successive; and since the latter is now chosen, there arises the demand for a complete series of conditions following one another. Merely through an arbitrary abstraction is a series of causes and effects regarded as a series of nothing but causes that would exist merely on account of the last effect, and would therefore be demanded as its sufficient reason or ground. On the other hand, from a closer and more intelligent consideration, and by descending from the indefinite generality of abstraction to the particular, definite reality, it is found that the demand for a sufficient reason or ground extends merely to the completeness of the determinations of the nearest cause, not to the completeness of a series. The demand of the principle of sufficient reason is extinguished completely in each given sufficient reason or ground. It at once arises anew, since this reason or ground is again regarded as a consequent; but it never demands immediately a series of reasons or grounds. On the other hand, if, instead of going to the thing itself, we keep within the abstract concepts, those differences disappear. Then a chain of alternating causes and effects, or of alternating logical reasons and consequents, is given out as a chain of nothing but causes or reasons of the last effect, and the completeness of the conditions through which a reason or ground first becomes sufficient, appears as a completeness of that assumed series of nothing but grounds or reasons, which exists only on account of the last consequent. There then appears very boldly the abstract principle of reason (Vernunft) with its demand for the unconditioned. But in order to recognize the invalidity of this demand, there is no need of a critique of reason by means of antinomies and their solution, but only of a critique of reason understood in my sense. Such a critique would be an examination of the relation of abstract knowledge to immediate intuitive knowledge by descending from the indefinite generality of the former to the fixed definiteness of the latter. It follows from this that the essential nature of reason (Vernunft) by no means consists in the demand for an unconditioned; for, as soon as it proceeds with full deliberation, it must itself find that an unconditioned is really an absurdity. As a faculty of knowledge, our reason can always be concerned only with objects; but every object for the subject is necessarily and irrevocably subordinated and given over to the principle of sufficient reason, a parte ante as well as a parte post.²³⁴ The validity of the principle of sufficient reason is so much involved in the form of consciousness that we simply cannot imagine anything objectively of which no “why” could be further demanded; hence we cannot imagine an absolute absolute like a blank wall in front of us. That this or that person’s convenience bids him stop somewhere, and arbitrarily assume such an absolute, is of no avail against that incontestable certainty a priori, even if he assumes an air of importance in doing so. In fact, the whole talk about the absolute, that almost sole theme of the philosophies attempted since Kant’s time, is nothing but the cosmological proof incognito. In consequence of the case brought against this proof by Kant, it is deprived of all rights and is outlawed; it dare not any longer appear in its true form. It therefore appears in all kinds of disguises, now in distinguished form under the cloak of intellectual intuition or of pure thinking, now as a suspected vagabond, half begging, half demanding what it wants, in the more unassuming philosophemes. If the gentlemen absolutely want to have an absolute, I will place in their hands one that satisfies all the demands made on such a thing much better than their misty and extravagant phantoms do; I mean matter. It is beginningless and imperishable, hence it is independent and quod per se est et per se concipitur.²³⁵ From its womb everything comes, and to it everything returns; what more can we demand of an absolute? But to those on whom no critique of reason has had any effect, we ought rather to exclaim:

Are ye not like women who ever
Return merely to their first word,
Though one has talked reason for hours? ²³⁶

That the return to an unconditioned cause, to a first beginning, is by no means established in the nature of our faculty of reason is, moreover, proved in practice by the fact that the original religions of our race, which even now have the greatest number of followers on earth, I mean Brahmanism and Buddhism, neither know nor admit such assumptions, but carry on to infinity the series of phenomena that condition one another. On this point I refer to the note given below with the criticism of the first antinomy, and we can also look up Upham’s Doctrine of Buddhaism (p. 9), and generally every genuine account of the religions of Asia. We should not identify Judaism with reason (Vernunft).

Kant, who by no means wishes to maintain his pretended principle of reason (Vernunft) as objectively valid, but only as subjectively necessary, deduces it even as such only by a shallow sophism, p. 307 (V, 364). He says that, because we try to subsume every truth known to us under a more general truth, as long as this method goes on, this should be nothing but the pursuit of the unconditioned that we already presuppose. In truth, however, by such an attempt we do nothing more than apply and appropriately use our faculty of reason for the simplification of our knowledge by a comprehensive survey. Our reason is that faculty of abstract universal knowledge which distinguishes the prudent, thoughtful human being, endowed with speech, from the animal, the slave of the present moment. For the use of the faculty of reason consists precisely in our knowing the particular through the universal, the case through the rule, the rule through the more general rule, and thus in our looking for the most universal points of view. Through such a survey our knowledge is so facilitated and perfected that from it arises the great difference between animal and human life, and again between the life of the educated man and that of the uneducated. Now the series of grounds of knowledge, existing only in the sphere of the abstract, and thus of our faculty of reason, certainly always finds an end in the indemonstrable, in other words, in a representation that is not further conditioned according to this form of the principle of sufficient reason, and thus in the a priori or a posteriori immediately perceptible ground of the highest proposition of the chain of reasoning. I have already shown in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 50, that here the series of the grounds of knowledge really passes over into the series of the grounds of becoming or of being. However, we can try to put forward this circumstance, in order to demonstrate an unconditioned according to the law of causality, even if it be merely as a demand, only when we have not yet distinguished the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, but, keeping to the abstract expression, have confused them all. Kant, however, tries to establish this confusion even by a mere play on the words Universalitas (universality) and Universitas (totality), p. 322 (V, 379). It is therefore fundamentally false to say that our search for higher grounds of knowledge, for more general truths, springs from the assumption of an object unconditioned as regards its existence, or that it has anything whatever in common therewith. Moreover, how could it be essential to our faculty of reason to presuppose something that it must recognize as an absurdity as soon as it reflects? On the contrary, the origin of that concept of the unconditioned can never be demonstrated in anything but in the indolence of the individual who by means of it wishes to get rid of all questions, his own and those of others, although without any justification.

Now Kant himself denies objective validity to this pretended principle of reason (Vernunft), yet he gives it as a necessary subjective assumption, and thus introduces into our knowledge an unsolvable split that he soon renders more conspicuous. For this purpose, he further unfolds that principle of reason (Vernunft), p. 322 (V, 379), according to his favourite method of architectonic symmetry. From the three categories of relation spring three kinds of syllogism, each of which gives the guiding line to the discovery of a special unconditioned, of which therefore there are again three, namely soul, world (as object-in-itself and totality complete in itself), God. Now we must at once observe here a great contradiction, of which, however, Kant takes no notice, since it would be very dangerous to the symmetry. Indeed, two of these unconditioneds are themselves in turn conditioned by the third, namely soul and world by God, who is their originating cause. Thus the two former by no means have the predicate of unconditionedness in common with the latter, and yet this is the point here, but only the predicate of being inferred according to principles of experience beyond the sphere of the possibility of experience.

Setting this aside, we find again in the three unconditioneds to which, according to Kant, everyone’s faculty of reason, following its essential laws, must come, the three main subjects round which the whole of philosophy, under the influence of Christianity, from the scholastics down to Christian Wolff, has turned. Accessible and familiar as those concepts have become through all those philosophers, and now also through the philosophers of pure reason (Vernunft ), it is by no means certain from this that, even without revelation, they were bound to result from the development of everyone’s faculty of reason, as a creation peculiar to the nature of this reason itself. To decide this, it would be necessary to make use of historical research, and to find out whether the ancient and non-European nations, especially those of Hindustan, and many of the oldest Greek philosophers actually arrived at those concepts, or whether only we, by translating the Brahma of the Hindus and the Tien of the Chinese quite falsely as “God,” charitably ascribe such concepts to them, just as the Greeks encountered their gods everywhere; whether it is not rather the case that theism proper is to be found only in the Jewish religion, and the two religions that have sprung from it. On this very account, the adherents of these religions comprehend the followers of all other religions on earth under the name of heathen. Incidentally, the word heathen is an extremely silly and crude expression that should be banished, at any rate from the writings of scholars, since it identifies and mixes up indiscriminately Brahmans, Buddhists, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Gauls, Iroquois, Patagonians, Caribbeans, Tahitians, Australians, and many others. Such an expression is suitable for parsons, but in the learned world it must be shown the door at once; it can travel to England, and take up its abode at Oxford. It is a thoroughly established fact that Buddhism in particular, the religion with the greatest number of representatives on earth, contains absolutely no theism, indeed rejects it out of hand. As regards Plato, I am of the opinion that he owes to the Jews the theism that periodically comes over him. This is why Numenius (according to Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, i, c. 22, Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica, xiii, 12, and Suidas, under “Numenius”) called him the Moses graecizans: Tì γάρ ἐστι Πλάτων, ἢ Mωσῆς ἀττιϰíζων;²³⁷ and he reproaches him with having stolen (ἀποσύλησας) his doctrines of God and the creation from the Mosaic writings. Clement often repeats that Plato knew and made use of Moses, e.g., Stromata, i, 25; v, 14, § 90 etc.; Paedagogus, ii, 10, and iii, 11; also in the Cohortatio ad gentes, c. 6, where, after in the previous chapter monkishly scolding and ridiculing all the Greek philosophers for not having been Jews, he exclusively praises Plato and breaks out into pure exultation that, as he (Plato) learned his geometry from the Egyptians, his astronomy from the Babylonians, magic from the Thracians, and a great deal from the Assyrians, so he learned his theism from the Jews: Oἷδά σου τοὺς διδασϰάλoυς ϰᾄν ἀποϰρύπτειν ἐθέλῃς, ... δόξαν τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ παρ’ αὐτῶν ὠϕέλησαι τῶν ‛Eβραίων (tuos magistros novi, licet eos celare velis, . . . illa de Deo sententia suppeditata tibi est ab Hebraeis .²³⁸ A touching scene of recognition. But in what follows I see unusual confirmation of the matter. According to Plutarch (Marius), and better according to Lactantius (i, 3, 19), Plato thanked nature for his having been born a human being and not an animal, a man and not a woman, a Greek and not a barbarian. Now in Isaac Euchel’s Gebete der Juden, from the Hebrew second edition, 1799, p. 7,²³⁹ there is a morning prayer in which the Jews thank and praise God that they have been born Jews and not heathens, free men and not slaves, men and not women. Such a historical investigation would have saved Kant from an unfortunate necessity in which he is now involved, for he represents those three concepts as springing necessarily from the nature of our faculty of reason, and yet he shows that they are untenable and cannot be established by this faculty, thus making our reason itself the sophist, for he says, p. 339 (V, 397): “There are sophistications not of people, but of pure reason itself, from which even the wisest man cannot free himself, and though possibly after much trouble he can avoid error, yet he can never get rid of the illusion that incessantly mocks and torments him.” Accordingly, these Kantian “Ideas of Reason” might be compared to the focus in which the converging reflected rays from a concave mirror meet several inches in front of its surface; in consequence of which, through an inevitable process of the understanding, an object presents itself to us there which is a thing without reality.

But the name Ideas is very unfortunately chosen for these three ostensibly necessary productions of pure theoretical reason. It was forcibly taken from Plato, who denoted by it the imperishable forms that, multiplied by time and space, become imperfectly visible in the innumerable, individual, fleeting things. In consequence of this, Plato’s Ideas are in every way perceptible, as is so definitely indicated through the word he chose, which could be adequately translated only through things perceptible or visible. Kant has appropriated it to denote what lies so far from all possibility of perception that even abstract thinking can only half attain to it. The word “Idea,” first introduced by Plato, has retained ever since, through twenty-two centuries, the meaning in which he used it; for not only all the philosophers of antiquity, but also all the scholastics, and even the Church Fathers and the theologians of the Middle Ages, used it only with that Platonic meaning, in the sense of the Latin word exemplar, as Suarez expressly mentions in his twenty-fifth Disputation, Sect. 1. That Englishmen and Frenchmen were later induced through the poverty of their languages to misuse the word is bad enough, but not important. Kant’s misuse of the word Idea by the substitution of a new significance, drawn in on the slender thread of not-being-object-of-experience, a significance that it has in common with Plato’s Ideas, but also with all possible chimeras, is therefore altogether unjustifiable. Now, as the misuse of a few years is not to be considered against the authority of many centuries, I have used the word always in its old original, Platonic significance.

The refutation of rational psychology is very much more detailed and thorough in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason than in the second and subsequent editions; here, therefore, we must certainly make use of the first edition. On the whole, this refutation has very great merit, and much that is true. But I am definitely of the opinion that it is merely from Kant’s love of symmetry that he derives as necessary the concept of the soul from that paralogism by applying the demand for the unconditioned to the concept of substance, which is the first category of relation. Accordingly he maintains that the concept of a soul arises in this way in every speculative reason (Vernunft). If this concept actually had its origin in the assumption of a final subject of all the predicates of a thing, then one would have assumed a soul not only in man, but also just as necessarily in every inanimate thing, for such a thing also requires a final subject of all its predicates. In general, however, Kant makes use of a wholly inadmissible expression when he speaks of something that can exist only as subject and not as predicate (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason, p. 323; V, 412; Prolegomena, §§ 4 and 47); although a precedent for this is to be found in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, iv, chap. 8. Nothing whatever exists as subject and predicate, for these expressions belong exclusively to logic, and denote the relation of abstract concepts to one another. In the world of perception, their correlative or representative must be substance and accident. But we need not look further for that which exists always only as substance and never as accident, but we have it directly in matter. It is the substance to all the properties of things that are its accidents. If we wish to retain Kant’s expression just condemned, matter is actually the final subject of all the predicates of every empirically given thing, what is left after removing all its properties of every kind. This holds good of man as well as of the animal, plant, or stone, and it is so evident that, in order not to see it, there is needed a determined will not to see. I shall soon show that it is actually the prototype of the concept substance. Subject and predicate, however, are related to substance and accident rather as the principle of sufficient reason or ground in logic is to the law of causality in nature, and the confusion or identification of the two former is just as inadmissible as is that of the two latter. But in the Prolegomena, § 46, Kant carries this confusion and identification to the fullest extent, in order to represent the concept of the soul as arising from the concept of the final subject of all predicates, and from the form of the categorical syllogism. To discover the sophistry of this paragraph, we need only reflect that subject and predicate are purely logical determinations that concern simply and solely abstract concepts, and this indeed according to their relation in the judgement. On the other hand, substance and accident belong to the world of perception and to its apprehension in the understanding; but they are found there only as identical with matter and form or quality. A few more remarks on this in a moment.

The antithesis that has given rise to the assumption of two fundamentally different substances, body and soul, is in truth the antithesis of the objective and subjective. If man apprehends himself objectively in external perception, he finds a being spatially extended, and in general entirely corporeal. On the other hand, if he apprehends himself in mere self-consciousness, and thus purely subjectively, he finds a merely willing and perceiving being, free from all forms of perception, and thus without any of the properties belonging to bodies. He now forms the concept of the soul, like all the transcendent concepts Kant calls Ideas, by applying the principle of sufficient reason, the form of every object, to what is not object, and here indeed to the subject of knowing and willing. Thus he regards knowing, thinking, and willing as effects, of which he is looking for the cause; he cannot assume the body to be this cause, and therefore assumes one that is entirely different from the body. In this way, the first and the last dogmatists prove the existence of the soul, Plato in the Phaedrus, and also Wolff, namely from thinking and willing as the effects leading to that cause. Only after the concept of an immaterial, simple, indestructible being or essence had arisen in this way by the hypostasizing of a cause corresponding to the effect, did the school develop and demonstrate this from the concept of substance. But the school had previously formed this concept itself expressly for this purpose by the following noteworthy dodge.

With the first class of representations, in other words, the real world of perception, the representation of matter is also given, since the law of causality, ruling in that class, determines the change of conditions or states, and these states themselves presuppose something permanent of which they are the change. When discussing the principle of the permanence of substance, I showed by reference to previous passages that this representation of matter arises because in the understanding, for which alone it exists, time and space are intimately united by the law of causality (the understanding’s sole form of knowledge), and the share of space in this product exhibits itself as the permanence of matter, while the share of time shows itself as the change of states of matter. Purely by itself, matter can be thought only in the abstract, but cannot be perceived; for to perception it always appears in form and quality. Now from this concept of matter, substance is again an abstraction, consequently a higher genus. It arose through the fact that of the concept of matter only the predicate of permanence was allowed to stand, while all its other essential properties, such as extension, impenetrability, divisibility, and so on, were thought away. Therefore, like every higher genus, the concept substance contains less in itself than does the concept matter, but it does not in return for this contain, as the higher genus usually does, more under itself, since it does not include several lower genera besides matter. On the contrary this remains the only true subspecies of the concept of substance, the only demonstrable thing by which its content is realized and obtains a proof. Thus the purpose for which our reason (Vernunft) usually produces a higher concept by abstraction, that is in order to think simultaneously in this concept several subspecies that are different through secondary determinations, has here no place at all. Consequently, that abstraction is either quite purposelessly and uselessly undertaken, or has a secret secondary purpose. This secret purpose now comes to light, since under the concept substance a second species is coordinated with matter its genuine subspecies, namely the immaterial, simple, indestructible substance, soul. But the surreptitious introduction of this concept occurred through following an unauthorized and illogical method in the formation of the higher concept substance. In its legitimate working, our reason (Vernunft) always forms a higher generic concept by placing several specific concepts side by side; and, comparing them, it proceeds discursively, and by omitting their differences and retaining the qualities in which they agree, obtains the generic concept that includes them all, but contains less. From this it follows that the specific concepts must always precede the generic concept; but in the present case it is quite the reverse. Only the concept matter existed before the generic concept substance, which without occasion, and consequently without justification, was formed superfluously from the former concept by the arbitrary omission of all its determinations except one. Only subsequently was the second ungenuine subspecies placed beside the concept matter, and thus foisted in. But for the formation of this, nothing more was now required but an express denial of what had already been tacitly omitted previously in the higher generic concept, namely extension, impenetrability, and divisibility. Thus the concept substance was formed merely in order to be the vehicle for surreptitiously introducing the concept of the immaterial substance. Consequently, it is very far from being able to pass for a category or necessary function of the understanding; on the contrary, it is an exceedingly superfluous concept, because its only true content already lies in the concept of matter, beside which it contains only a great void. This void can be filled up by nothing except the surreptitiously introduced secondary species immaterial substance; and that concept was formed solely to take up this secondary species. Strictly speaking, therefore, the concept of substance must be entirely rejected, and that of matter be everywhere put in its place.

The categories were a Procrustean bed for every possible thing, but the three kinds of syllogism are such only for the three so-called Ideas. The Idea of the soul had been forced to find its origin in the categorical form of the syllogism. It is now the turn of the dogmatic representations concerning the universe, in so far as this is thought of as an object-in-itself between two limits, that of the smallest (atom) and that of the largest (limits of the universe in time and space). These must now proceed from the form of the hypothetical syllogism. For this in itself no particular violence is necessary. For the hypothetical judgement has its form from the principle of sufficient reason; and from the senseless and unqualified application of this principle, and from then arbitrarily laying it aside, we do in fact get all those so-called Ideas, and not the cosmological alone. Thus, according to the principle of sufficient reason, only the dependence of one object on another is always sought, until finally the exhaustion of the imagination puts an end to the journey. Here the fact is lost sight of that every object, indeed the whole series of objects and the principle of sufficient reason itself, are in a much closer and greater dependence, that is, in dependence on the knowing subject, for whose objects, i.e., representations, that principle alone is valid, since their mere position in space and time is determined by it. Therefore, as the form of knowledge from which only the cosmological Ideas are here derived, namely the principle of sufficient reason, is the origin of all hair-splitting hypostases, there is in this case no need of any sophisms; but the need thereof is all the greater in order to classify those Ideas according to the four titles of the categories.

(1) The cosmological Ideas with regard to time and space, and thus of the limits of the world in both, are boldly regarded as determined through the category of quantity, with which they obviously have nothing in common except the accidental indication in logic of the extent of the subject-concept in the judgement by the word quantity, a figurative expression, instead of which another might just as well have been chosen. However, this is enough for Kant’s love of symmetry, in order to make use of the fortunate accident of this nomenclature, and to tie up with it the transcendent dogmas of the world’s extension.

(2) Even more boldly does Kant tie up the transcendent Ideas about matter with quality, in other words, the affirmation or negation in a judgement. For this there is no foundation even in an accidental similarity of words; for it is precisely to the quantity and not to the quality of matter that its mechanical (not chemical) divisibility is related. But, what is more, this whole Idea of divisibility by no means belongs to the inferences according to the principle of sufficient reason, from which, however, as from the content of the hypothetical form, all the cosmological Ideas should flow. For the assertion on which Kant here relies, namely that the relation of the parts to the whole is that of condition to conditioned, and thus a relation according to the principle of sufficient reason, is certainly a subtle yet groundless sophism. On the contrary, that relation is based on the principle of contradiction; for the whole is not through the parts, nor are the parts through the whole, but the two are necessarily together because they are one, and their separation is only an arbitrary act. It rests on this, according to the principle of contradiction, that if the parts are thought away, the whole is thought away, and conversely. But it does not by any means rest on the fact that the parts as ground condition the whole as consequent, and that therefore, according to the principle of sufficient reason, we should necessarily be urged to look for the ultimate parts, in order to understand the whole from them as its ground. Such great difficulties are overcome here by the love of symmetry.

(3) Now the Idea of the first cause of the world would quite properly come under the title of relation. Kant, however, must keep this for the fourth title, that of modality, otherwise there would be nothing left for that title. He then forces that Idea under it by saying that the contingent or accidental (in other words, every consequent from its ground, according to his explanation which is diametrically opposed to the truth) becomes the necessary through the first cause. Therefore, for the sake of symmetry, the concept of freedom here appears as a third Idea. With this concept, however, as is distinctly stated in the note to the thesis of the third antinomy, only the Idea of the world-cause, which alone is suitable here, is really meant. The third and fourth antinomies are therefore at bottom tautological.

About all this, however, I find and maintain that the whole antinomy is a mere sham fight. Only the assertions of the antitheses actually rest on the forms of our faculty of knowledge, in other words, if we express it objectively, on the necessary, a priori certain, most universal laws of nature. Their proofs alone are therefore furnished from objective grounds. On the other hand, the assertions and proofs of the theses have no ground other than a subjective one, and rely simply and solely on the weakness of the subtly reasoning individual. His imagination grows weary with an endless regression, and he therefore puts an end to this by arbitrary assumptions which he tries to gloss over as best he can; moreover in this case his power of judgement is paralysed by early and deeply imprinted prejudices. Therefore the proof of the thesis in all four antinomies is everywhere only a sophism, whereas that of the antithesis is an inevitable inference of our faculty of reason from the laws of the world as representation, known to us a priori. Moreover, only with great pains and skill has Kant been able to sustain the thesis, and to enable it to make apparent attacks on the opponent, which is endowed with original force and strength. Now his first and usual artifice here is that he does not stress and bring out the nervus argumentationis,²⁴⁰ as anyone does when he is conscious of the truth of his proposition, and thus present it in as isolated, bare, and distinct a form as possible. On the contrary he introduces the same argument on both sides, concealed under, and mixed up with, a whole host of superfluous and prolix sentences.

Now the theses and antitheses, which here appear in conflict, remind one of the δίϰαιος and ἄδιϰος λóγος²⁴¹ which Socrates, in Aristophanes’ Clouds, represents as contending. But this resemblance extends only to the form, and not to the content, as those would gladly assert who ascribe to these most speculative of all questions of theoretical philosophy an influence on morality, and therefore seriously regard the thesis as the δίϰαιος (just), and the antithesis as the ἄδιϰος (unjust) λóγος. However, I shall not accommodate myself and pay heed to such small, narrow, and perverse minds; and paying honour not to them but to truth, I shall expose as sophisms the proofs furnished by Kant for the individual theses, whereas I shall show that the proofs of the antitheses are quite fair, correct, and drawn from objective grounds. I assume that, in this investigation, the reader always has before him the Kantian antinomy itself.

If the proof of the thesis in the first antinomy is to be admitted, it proves too much, since it would be just as applicable to time itself as to change in time, and would therefore prove that time itself must have had a beginning, which is absurd. Besides, the sophism consists in this, that, instead of the beginninglessness of the series of conditions or states, which was primarily the question, the endlessness (infinity) of the series is suddenly substituted. It is now proved, what no one doubts, that completeness logically contradicts this endlessness, and yet every present is the end of a past. But the end of a beginningless series can always be thought without detracting from its beginninglessness, just as conversely the beginning of an endless series can also be thought. But against the really correct argument of the antithesis, namely that the changes of the world absolutely and necessarily presuppose an infinite series of changes retrogressively, nothing at all is advanced. We can imagine the possibility of the causal series one day ending in an absolute standstill, but we cannot by any means imagine the possibility of an absolute beginning. ²⁴²

With regard to the spatial limits of the world, it is proved that, if it is to be called a given whole, it must necessarily have limits. The logical conclusion is correct, only it was just its first link which was to be proved, and this is left unproved. Totality presupposes limits, and limits presuppose totality; but here the two together are arbitrarily presupposed. For this second point, however, the antithesis affords no such satisfactory proof as for the first, because the law of causality provides us with necessary determinations merely in regard to time, not to space, and affords us a priori the certainty that no occupied time could ever be bounded by a previous empty time, and that no change could ever be the first, but not that an occupied space can have no empty space beside it. To this extent, no decision a priori on the latter point would be possible; yet the difficulty of imagining the world as limited in space is to be found in the fact that space itself is necessarily infinite, and that therefore a limited, finite world in space, however large it may be, becomes an infinitely small magnitude. In this incongruity the imagination finds an insuperable obstacle, since accordingly there is left to it only the choice of thinking the world as either infinitely large or infinitely small. The ancient philosophers already saw this: Mητρóδωρος, ὁ ϰαθηγητὴς Ὲπιϰούρου, ϕησὶν ἄτοπον εἶναι ἐν µεγάλῳ πεδίῳ ἕνα στάχυν γεννηθῆναι, ϰαì ἕνα ϰóσμον ἐν τῷ ἀπείρῳ (Metrodorus, caput scholae Epicuri, absurdum ait, in magno campo spicam unam produci, et unum in infinito mundum). Stobaeus, Ecl., I, c. 23.²⁴³ Therefore many of them taught (as immediately follows), ὰπείρους ϰóσμους ἐν τῷ ἀπείρῳ (infinitos mundos in infinito).²⁴⁴ This is also the sense of the Kantian argument for the antithesis, though he has disfigured it by a scholastic and stilted mode of expression. The same argument could also be used against setting limits to the world in time, if we did not already have a much better one under the guidance of causality. Further, with the assumption of a world limited in space, there arises the unanswerable question what advantage the filled part of space would have over the infinite space that remained empty. In the fifth dialogue of his book Del Infinito, Universo e Mondi, Giordano Bruno gives a detailed and very readable account of the arguments for and against the finiteness of the world. For the rest, Kant himself seriously, and on objective grounds, asserts the infinity of the world in space in his Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, Part II, chap. 7. Aristotle also acknowledges the same thing in Physics, iii, chap. 4. This chapter, together with those that follow, is well worth reading with regard to this antinomy.

In the second antinomy, the thesis at once commits a petitio principii²⁴⁵ that is not in the least subtle, since it begins: “Every compound substance consists of simple parts.” From the compoundness, here arbitrarily assumed, it of course very easily demonstrates afterwards the simple parts. But the proposition, “All matter is compound,” which is just the point, remains unproved, because it is just a groundless assumption. Thus the opposite of the simple is not the compound, but the extended, that which has parts, the divisible. But here it is really tacitly assumed that the parts existed before the whole, and were gathered together, and that in this way the whole came into existence; for this is what the word “compound” means. Yet this can be asserted just as little as the opposite. Divisibility implies merely the possibility of splitting the whole into parts; it by no means implies that the whole was compounded out of parts, and thus came into existence. Divisibility merely asserts the parts a parte post; compoundness asserts them a parte ante. For there is essentially no time-relation between the parts and the whole; rather do they condition each other reciprocally, and to this extent they are always simultaneous; for only in so far as both exist does the spatially extended exist. Therefore what Kant says in the note to the thesis: “Space should really not be called a compositum, but a totum,” and so on, holds good entirely of matter as well, since matter is simply space that has become perceptible. On the other hand, the infinite divisibility of matter, asserted by the antithesis, follows a priori and incontestably from that of space which it fills. This proposition has nothing at all against it; therefore Kant also, p. 513 (V, 541), presents it as objective truth, when he is speaking seriously and in his own person, and no longer as the mouthpiece of the ἄδιϰος λóγος. Likewise in the Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Science (page 108, first edition), the proposition: “Matter is divisible to infinity” stands as an established and certain truth at the head of the proof of the first proposition in mechanics, after it had appeared and been demonstrated in dynamics as the fourth proposition. Here, however, Kant spoils the proof of the antithesis by the greatest confusion of style and a useless torrent of words, with the cunning intention that the evidence of the antithesis shall not put the sophisms of the thesis too much in the shade. Atoms are not a necessary idea of our faculty of reason, but merely a hypothesis for explaining the differences in the specific gravity of bodies. But Kant himself has shown in the Dynamics of his Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Science that we can also explain this otherwise, and even better and more simply, than by atomism; before him, however, was Priestley, On Matter and Spirit, Sect. I. In fact, even in Aristotle, Physics, iv, 9, the fundamental idea of this is to be found.

The argument for the third thesis is a very subtle sophism, and is really Kant’s pretended principle of pure reason (Vernunft) itself entirely unadulterated and unchanged. It attempts to prove the finiteness of the series of causes by saying that, to be sufficient, a cause must contain the complete sum of the conditions from which the following state, the effect, results. For this completeness of the determinations simultaneously in the state or condition that is the cause, the argument now substitutes the completeness of the series of causes by which that state itself first arrived at actuality; and because completeness presupposes a state of being closed in, and this again presupposes finiteness, the argument infers from this a first cause closing the series and therefore unconditioned. But the juggling is obvious. In order to conceive state A as a sufficient cause of state B, I assume that it contains the completeness of the determinations necessary for this, from whose coexistence state B inevitably ensues. In this way my demand on it as a sufficient cause is entirely satisfied, and that demand has no direct connexion with the question how state A itself arrived at actuality. On the contrary, this belongs to an entirely different consideration in which I regard the self-same state A no longer as cause, but as itself effect, in which case another state must be related to it, just as it itself is related to B. The presupposition of the finiteness of the series of causes and effects, and accordingly of a first beginning, nowhere appears as necessary in this, any more than the presence of the present moment has as assumption a beginning of time itself; such assumption is added only by the indolence of the speculating individual. That this presupposition lies in the acceptance of a cause as sufficient reason or ground, is therefore surreptitiously obtained, and is false, as I have already shown in detail when considering the Kantian principle of reason (Vernunft) which coincides with this thesis. To illustrate the assertion of this false thesis, Kant has the effrontery, in his note thereon, to give as an example of an unconditioned beginning his rising from his chair, as though it were not just as impossible for him to rise without motive as for the ball to roll without cause. I certainly do not need to prove the groundlessness of his appeal to the philosophers of antiquity, which he makes from a feeling of weakness, from Ocellus Lucanus, the Eleatics, etc., not to speak of the Hindus. As in the case of the previous ones, nothing can be said against the argument of this antithesis.

The fourth antinomy is, as I have already remarked, really tautological with the third. The proof of the thesis is also essentially the same as that of the preceding. His assertion that every conditioned presupposes a complete series of conditions, and thus a series ending with the unconditioned, is a petitio principii²⁴⁶ that must be absolutely denied. Every conditioned presupposes nothing but its condition; the fact that this is again conditioned raises a new consideration not directly contained in the first.

A certain plausibility is not to be denied to the antinomy; yet it is remarkable that no part of the Kantian philosophy has met with so little contradiction, indeed, has found so much acknowledgement and approbation, as this exceedingly paradoxical doctrine. Almost all philosophical groups and text-books have admitted and repeated it, and even elaborated it, whereas almost all the other doctrines of Kant have been disputed. In fact there has never been a lack of warped minds which rejected even the Transcendental Aesthetic. The unanimous assent which the antinomy, on the other hand, has met with, may in the end spring from the fact that some people re-gard with inward gratification the point where the understanding is really supposed to be brought to a standstill, since it has hit upon something that at the same time is and is not, and accordingly they actually have here before them the sixth trick of Philadelphia in Lichtenberg’s broadsheet.²⁴⁷

Now if we examine the real meaning of Kant’s critical resolution of the cosmological argument which follows, it is not what he gives it out to be, namely the solution of the dispute by disclosing that both sides, starting from false assumptions, are wrong in the first and second antinomies, but right in the third and fourth. On the contrary, it is in fact the confirmation of the antitheses by the explanation of their assertion.

Kant first of all asserts in this solution, obviously wrongly, that both sides started from the assumption, as the first principle, that with the conditioned, the completed (hence closed) series of its conditions is given. Merely the thesis laid down this proposition, namely Kant’s principle of pure reason (Vernunft), as the foundation of its assertions; the antithesis, on the other hand, everywhere expressly denied it, and maintained the contrary. Kant further charges both sides with this assumption that the world exists in itself, in other words, independently of its being known and of the forms of that knowledge. But once more this assumption is made only by the thesis; it is so far from forming the basis of the assertions of the antithesis as to be even quite inconsistent with them. For that it is entirely given is absolutely contradictory to the concept of an infinite series. It is therefore essential to it that it exists always only with reference to the process of going through it, but not independently thereof. On the other hand, in the assumption of definite limits lies also the assumption of a whole that exists absolutely and independently of the process of measuring it. Hence only the thesis makes the false assumption of a universe existing in itself, in other words, of a universe given prior to all knowledge, to which knowledge came as a mere addition. The antithesis at the outset is absolutely at variance with this assumption; for the infinity of the series, which it asserts merely on the guidance of the principle of sufficient reason, can exist only in so far as the regressus is carried out, not independently thereof. Just as the object in general presupposes the subject, so does the object, determined as an endless chain of conditions, also necessarily presuppose in the subject the kind of knowledge corresponding thereto, namely the constant pursuit of the links. This, however, is just what Kant gives as the solu-tion of the dispute, and so often repeats: “The infinite magnitude of the world is only through the regressus, not before it.” This solution that he gives to the antinomy is therefore really only the decision in favour of the antithesis. That truth already lies in the assertion of the antithesis, just as it is entirely inconsistent with the assertions of the thesis. If the antithesis had asserted that the world consisted of infinite series of grounds and consequents, and yet existed independently of the representation and its regressive series, and thus in itself, and therefore constituted a given whole, then it would have contradicted not only the thesis, but itself also. For an infinite can never be entirely given, nor can an endless series exist, except in so far as it is endlessly run through; nor can a boundless constitute a whole. Therefore that assumption, of which Kant asserted that it had misled both sides, belongs only to the thesis.

It is a doctrine of Aristotle that an infinite can never be actu, in other words, actual and given, but merely potentiâ. Oὐϰ ἔστιν ἐνεργείᾳ εἷναι τὸ ἄπειρον . . . ἀλλ’ ἀδύνατον τὸ ἐντελεχείᾳ ὂν ἄπειρον (infinitum non potest esse actu: ... sed impossible, actu esse infinitum).²⁴⁸ Metaphysics, x.10. Further: ϰατ’ ἐνέργειαν μὲν γὰρ οὐδέν ἐστιν ἄπειρον, δυνάμει δὲ ἐπὶ τὴν διαίρεσιν (nihil enim actu infinitum est, sed potentia tantum, nempe divisione ipsa).²⁴⁹ De Generatione et Corruptione, i, 3. He deals with this at great length in the Physics, iii, 5 and 6, where to a certain extent he gives the perfectly correct solution of all the antinomic theses and antitheses. In his brief way, he describes the antinomies, and then says: “A mediator (διαιτητής) is required”; according to which he gives the solution that the infinite, both of the world in space and in time and in division, is never before the regressus or progressus, but in it. This truth, therefore, lies in the correctly apprehended concept of the infinite. We therefore misunderstand ourselves if we imagine we conceive the infinite, be it of whatever kind it may, as something objectively present and finished, and independent of the regressus.

Indeed, if, reversing the procedure, we take as the starting-point that which Kant gives as the solution of the antinomy, the assertion of the antithesis already follows therefrom. Thus, if the world is not an unconditioned whole, and does not exist in itself, but only in the representation; and if its series of grounds and consequents do not exist before the regressus of the representations of them, but only through this regressus, then the world cannot contain definite and finite series, since their determination and limitation would necessarily be independent of the representation that then comes only as an addition; on the contrary, all its series must be endless, in other words, incapable of exhaustion by any representation.

On p. 506 (V, 534) Kant tries to prove from the falseness of both sides the transcendental ideality of the phenomenon, and begins: “If the world is a whole existing in itself, it is either finite or infinite.” But this is false; a whole existing in itself cannot possibly be infinite. On the contrary, that ideality could be inferred in the following way from the infinity of the series in the world: If the series of grounds and consequents in the world are absolutely without end, then the world cannot be a given whole independent of the representation, for such a thing always presupposes definite limits, just as, on the contrary, infinite series presuppose infinite regressus. Therefore, the presupposed infinity of the series must be determined through the form of ground and consequent, and this in turn through the form of knowledge of the subject. Hence the world, as it is known, must exist only in the mental picture or representation of the subject.

I am unable to decide whether Kant himself was or was not aware that his critical decision of the argument was really a statement in favour of the antithesis. For it depends on whether what Schelling has somewhere very appropriately called Kant’s system of accommodation extended so far, or whether Kant’s mind was here involved in an unconscious accommodation to the influence of his time and environment.

The solution of the third antinomy, whose subject was the Idea of freedom, merits special consideration, in so far as for us it is very remarkable that Kant is obliged precisely here, in connexion with the Idea of freedom, to speak in greater detail about the thing-in-itself, hitherto seen only in the background. This is very easy for us to understand after we have recognized the thing-in-itself as the will. In general, this is the point where Kant’s philosophy leads to mine, or mine springs from his as its parent stem. We shall be convinced of this if we read with attention pp. 536 and 537 (V, 564 and 565) of the Critique of Pure Reason, and further compare with this passage the introduction to the Critique of Judgement, pp. xviii and xix of the third edition, or p. 13 of the Rosenkranz edition, where it is even said: “The concept of freedom can in its object (for this indeed is the will) present a thing-in-itself to our minds. but not in perception; the concept of nature, on the other hand, can present its object to our minds in perception, but not as thing-in-itself.” But in particular, let us read § 53 of the Prolegomena concerning the solution of the antinomies, and then honestly answer the question whether all that is said does not sound like a riddle to which my teaching is the solution. Kant did not arrive at a conclusion to his thinking; I have merely carried his work into effect. Accordingly, what Kant says merely of the human phenomenon, I have extended to every phenomenon in general which differs from the human only in degree, namely that their essence-in-itself is something absolutely free, in other words, a will. How fruitful this insight is in connexion with Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of space, time, and causality, follows from my work.

Kant has nowhere made the thing-in-itself the subject of a special discussion or clear deduction, but whenever he makes use of it, he at once brings it in through the conclusion that the phenomenon, and hence the visible world, must have a ground or reason, an intelligible cause, which is not phenomenon, and which therefore does not belong to any possible experience. This he does after having incessantly urged that the categories, and thus also the category of causality, had a use in every way restricted only to possible experience; that they were mere forms of the understanding serving to spell out the phenomena of the world of sense, beyond which, on the other hand, they had no significance at all, and so on. He therefore most strictly forbids their application to things beyond experience, and rightly explains, and at the same time overthrows, all previous dogmatism as resulting from a violation of this law. The incredible inconsistency Kant here committed was soon noticed, and used by his first opponents for attacks to which his philosophy could not offer any resistance. For we certainly apply the law of causality, wholly a priori and prior to all experience, to the changes felt in our organs of sense. But on this very account this law is just as much of subjective origin as these sensations themselves are; and therefore it does not lead to the thing-in-itself. The truth is that on the path of the representation we can never get beyond the representation; it is a closed whole, and has in its own resources no thread leading to the essence of the thing-in-itself, which is toto genere different from it. If we were merely representing beings, the way to the thing-in-itself would be entirely cut off from us. Only the other side of our own inner nature can vouchsafe us information regarding the other side of the being-in-itself of things. I have pursued this path. However, Kant’s inference of the thing-in-itself, forbidden by himself, obtains some extenuation from the following. He does not, as truth demanded, lay down the object simply and positively as conditioned by the subject, and vice versa, but only the manner of the object’s appearance as conditioned by the subject’s forms of knowledge, which therefore also come a priori to consciousness. Now what, in contrast to this, is known merely a posteriori, is for him already immediate effect of the thing-in-itself, which becomes phenomenon only in its passage through those forms that are given a priori. From this point of view, it is to some extent clear how he could fail to notice that being-object in general belongs to the form of the phenomenon, and is just as much conditioned by being-subject in general as the object’s mode of appearing is conditioned by the subject’s forms of knowledge; hence that, if a thing-in-itself is to be assumed, it cannot be an object at all, which, however, he always assumes it to be; but such a thing-in-itself would have to lie in a sphere toto genere different from the representation (from knowing and being known), and therefore could least of all be inferred according to the laws of the connexion of objects among themselves.

Precisely the same thing happened to Kant with the demonstration of the thing-in-itself as with the demonstration of the a priori nature of the law of causality; both doctrines are correct, but their proof is false. They belong therefore to correct conclusions from false premisses. I have retained both, yet I have established them in an entirely different way and with certainty.

I have not introduced the thing-in-itself surreptitiously or inferred it according to laws that exclude it, since they already belong to its phenomenon; moreover, in general I have not arrived at it by roundabout ways. On the contrary, I have demonstrated it directly, where it immediately lies, namely in the will that reveals itself to everyone immediately as the in-itself of his own phenomenon.

It is also from this immediate knowledge of one’s own will that in human consciousness the concept of freedom arises; for certainly the will as world-creating, as thing-in-itself, is free from the principle of sufficient reason, and thus from all necessity, and hence is completely independent, free, and indeed almighty. Yet actually this holds good only of the will in itself, not of its phenomena, not of the individuals, who, just through the will itself, are unalterably determined as its phenomena in time. But in the ordinary consciousness not clarified by philosophy, the will is at once confused with its phenomenon, and what belongs only to the will is attributed to the phenomenon. In this way arises the delusion of the individual’s unconditioned freedom. Precisely on this account, Spinoza rightly says that even the projected stone would believe, if it had consciousness, that it was flying of its own free will. For the in-itself even of the stone is certainly the one and only free will; but, as in all its phenomena, so here also where it appears as stone, it is already fully determined. Enough has already been said about all this, however, in the main part of this work.

By failing to recognize and overlooking this immediate origin of the concept of freedom in every human consciousness, Kant now (p. 533; V, 561) places the origin of that concept in a very subtle speculation. Thus through this speculation, the unconditioned, to which our reason (Vernunft) must always tend, leads to the hypostasizing of the concept of freedom, and the practical concept of freedom is supposed to be based first of all on this transcendent Idea of freedom. In the Critique of Practical Reason, § 6, and p. 185 of the fourth (p. 235 of the Rosenkranz) edition, he again derives this last concept differently, namely from the fact that the categorical imperative presupposes it. Accordingly, he says that the speculative Idea is only the primary source of the concept of freedom for the sake of this presupposition, but that here it really obtains significance and application. Neither, however, is the case; for the delusion of a perfect freedom of the individual in his particular actions is most vivid in the conviction of the least cultured person who has never reflected. It is therefore not founded on any speculation, though it is often assumed by speculation from without. On the other hand, only philosophers, and indeed the profoundest of them, and also the most thoughtful and enlightened authors of the Church, are free from the delusion.

Therefore it follows from all that has been said that the real origin of the concept of freedom is in no way essentially an inference either from the speculative Idea of an unconditioned cause, or from the fact that the categorical imperative presupposes it, but springs directly from consciousness. In consciousness everyone recognizes himself at once as the will, in other words, as that which, as thing-in-itself, has not the principle of sufficient reason for its form, and itself depends on nothing, but rather everything else depends on it. Not everyone, however, recognizes himself at once with the critical and reflective insight of philosophy as a definite phenomenon of this will which has already entered time, one might say as an act of will distinguished from that will-to-live itself. Therefore, instead of recognizing his whole existence as an act of his freedom, he looks for freedom rather in his individual actions. On this point I refer to my essay On the Freedom of the Will.

Now if Kant, as he here pretends, and also apparently did on previous occasions, had merely inferred the thing-in-itself, and that moreover with the great inconsistency of an inference absolutely forbidden by himself, what a strange accident it would then be that here, where for the first time he comes nearer to the thing-in-itself and elucidates it, he should at once recognize in it the will, the free will proclaiming itself in the world only through temporal phenomena! Therefore I actually assume, though it cannot be proved, that whenever Kant spoke of the thing-in-itself, he always thought indistinctly of the will in the obscure depths of his mind. Evidence of this is given in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, pp. xxvii and xxviii in the Rosenkranz edition, p. 677 of the supplements.²⁵⁰

For the rest, it is just this intended solution of the sham third antinomy that gives Kant the opportunity to express very beautifully the profoundest ideas of his whole philosophy; thus in the whole of the “Sixth Section of the Antinomy of Pure Reason”; but above all, the discussion of the contrast between the empirical and intelligible characters, pp. 534-550 (V, 562-578), which I number among the most admirable things ever said by man. (We can regard as a supplementary explanation of this passage a parallel passage in the Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 169-179 of the fourth, or pp. 224-231 of the Rosenkranz edition). But it is all the more regrettable that this is not in its right place here, in so far as, on the one hand, it is not found in the way stated by the exposition, and could thus be deduced otherwise than it is, and, on the other, in so far as it does not fulfil the purpose for which it is there, namely the solution of the pretended antinomy. From the phenomenon is inferred its intelligible ground or reason, the thing-in-itself, by the inconsistent use, already sufficiently condemned, of the category of causality beyond all experience. For this case the will of man (to which Kant gives the title of reason or Vernunft quite inadmissibly and by an unpardonable breach of all linguistic usage) is set up as this thing-in-itself with an appeal to an unconditioned ought, to the categorical imperative that is postulated without more ado.

Now instead of all this, the plain, open procedure would have been to start directly from the will, to demonstrate this as the in-itself of our own phenomenon, recognized without any mediation, and then to give that description of the empirical and intelligible characters, to explain how all actions, though necessitated by motives, are nevertheless ascribed both by their author and by the independent judge necessarily and positively to the former himself and alone, as depending solely on him, to whom guilt and merit are therefore attributed in respect of them. This alone was the straight path to the knowledge of that which is not phenomenon, of that which in consequence is not found in accordance with the laws of the phenomenon, but which reveals itself through the phenomenon, becomes knowable, objectifies itself, namely the will-to-live. Then this would have had to be described, merely by analogy, as the in-itself of every phenomenon. But then, of course, it could not have been said (p. 546; V, 574) that in the case of inanimate, and indeed animal, nature no faculty can be thought except as sensuously conditioned. In Kant’s language, this is really to say that the explanation according to the law of causality also exhausts the innermost essence of those phenomena, whereby in their case the thing-in-itself, very inconsistently, is abolished. Through the wrong position and the roundabout deduction conforming with it which the thing-in-itself has received in Kant’s work, the whole conception of it has been falsified. For the will or thing-in-itself, found by investigating an unconditioned cause, here appears related to the phenomenon as the cause to the effect. This relation, however, occurs only within the phenomenon, and therefore presupposes it. It cannot connect the phenomenon itself with that which lies outside the phenomenon, and is toto genere different from it.

Further, the purpose intended, namely the solution of the third antinomy by the decision that both sides, each in a different sense, are right, is not achieved at all. For neither the thesis nor the antithesis speaks in any way of the thing-in-itself, but entirely of the phenomenon, of the objective world, of the world as representation. It is this, and absolutely nothing else, of which the thesis tries to show, by means of the sophism we have exposed, that it contains unconditioned causes; and it is also this of which the antithesis rightly denies that it contains such causes. Therefore the whole exposition of the transcendental freedom of the will, here given in justification of the thesis, namely in so far as the will is thing-in-itself, is nevertheless really and truly a µετάβασις εἰς ἄλλo γένος,²⁵¹ excellent as it is in itself. For the transcendental freedom of the will which is expounded is by no means the unconditioned causality of a cause, which the thesis asserts, because a cause must be essentially phenomenon, not something toto genere different lying beyond every phenomenon.

If it is a question of cause and effect, then the relation of the will to its phenomenon (or of the intelligible character to the empirical) must never be drawn in, as is done here, for it is entirely differ-ent from the causal relation. However, here also, in this solution of the antinomy, it is said with truth that man’s empirical character, like that of every other cause in nature, is unalterably determined, and hence that actions necessarily result from it in accordance with external influences. Therefore in spite of all transcendental freedom (i.e. independence of the will-in-itself of the laws of the connexion of its phenomenon), no person has the capacity of himself to begin a series of actions, a thing which, on the contrary, was asserted by the thesis. Therefore freedom also has no causality, for only the will is free, and it lies outside nature or the phenomenon. The phenomenon is only the objectification of the will, and does not stand to it in a relation of causality. Such a relation is met with only within the phenomenon, and thus presupposes this; it cannot include the phenomenon itself, and connect it with what is expressly not phenomenon. The world itself is to be explained only from the will (for it is the will itself in so far as this will appears), and not through causality. But in the world, causality is the sole principle of explanation, and everything happens solely in accordance with laws of nature. Therefore right is entirely on the side of the antithesis; for this sticks to the point in question, and uses the principle of explanation which is valid with regard thereto; hence it needs no apology. The thesis, on the other hand, is supposed to be drawn by an apology from the matter, that first passes over to something quite different from the point in question, and then takes over a principle of explanation which cannot be applied there.

The fourth antinomy, as I have said already, is according to its innermost meaning tautological with the third. In the solution to it, Kant develops still more the untenability of the thesis. On the other hand, he advances no grounds for its truth and its pretended compatibility with the antithesis, just as, conversely, he is unable to bring any against the antithesis. He introduces the assumption of the thesis only in the form of a request, and yet he himself calls it (p. 562; V, 590) an arbitrary presupposition, whose object in itself might well be impossible, and shows merely an utterly impotent attempt to provide for it somewhere a snug little place, secure from the prevailing might of the antithesis, simply in order not to disclose the emptiness of the whole of his favourite pretence of the necessary antinomy in man’s faculty of reason.

There now follows the chapter on the Transcendental Ideal, which at once takes us back to the rigid scholasticism of the Middle Ages. We think we are listening to Anselm himself. The ens realissimum, the comprehensive totality of all realities, the content of all affirmative propositions, appears, and in fact claims to be a necessary idea of our faculty of reason! I for my part must confess that to my faculty of reason such an idea is impossible, and that from the words which express it I am unable to think of anything definite.

Moreover, I do not doubt that Kant was compelled to write this strange chapter, so unworthy of him, merely by his fondness for architectonic symmetry. The three principal objects of scholastic philosophy (which if understood in the wider sense, as we have said, can be regarded as continuing down to Kant), namely the soul, the world, and God, were supposed to be derived from the three possible major premisses of syllogisms, although it is obvious that they have arisen and can arise simply and solely through the unconditioned application of the principle of sufficient reason. After the soul had been forced into the categorical judgement, and the hypothetical was used for the world, there was nothing left for the third Idea but the disjunctive major premiss. Fortunately, there was to be found in this sense a preparatory work, namely the ens realissimum of the scholastics, together with the ontological proof of the existence of God, put forward in a rudimentary fashion by Anselm, and then perfected by Descartes. This was gladly made use of by Kant, for he was also reminded somewhat of an earlier Latin work of his youth. However, the sacrifice Kant made in this chapter to his love for architectonic symmetry is exceedingly great. In defiance of all truth, what must be regarded as the grotesque notion of a comprehensive totality of all possible realities is made into an idea that is necessary and essential to reason (Vernunft). For deriving this, Kant resorts to the false allegation that our knowledge of individual things arises from a progressive limitation of universal concepts, and consequently even of a most universal concept of all, which would contain all reality in itself. Here he is just as much in contradiction with his own teaching as he is with the truth; for the very reverse is the case. Our knowledge, starting from the particular, is extended to the general, and all general concepts result through abstraction from real, individual things known through perception, and this can be continued right up to the most universal of all concepts, which then includes everything under it, but almost nothing in it. Thus Kant has here turned the procedure of our faculty of knowledge completely upside down. Therefore he might well be accused of having given rise to a philosophical charlatanism that has become famous in our day. Instead of recognizing concepts as ideas abstracted from things, this charlatanism, on the contrary, makes the concepts the first thing, and sees in things only concrete concepts, thus coming forward with a world turned upside down as a philosophical buffoonery naturally bound to meet with great acceptance.