Kant’s Teaching.
Kant undertook a work which no one before him had attempted. Instead of criticising, as was then the fashion, the result of our knowledge, whether in religion or in history, or science, he shut his eyes resolutely to all that philosophy, whether sensualistic or spiritualistic asserted as true, and making Descartes his starting point he boldly went to the root of the matter; he questioned whether human reason had the power of perceiving the truth, and in cases where this power existed—but with limits—he sought to discover why these limits existed. He therefore resolved to subject reason itself to his searching analysis, and thus to assist, as it were, at the birth of thought. He accomplished this extraordinary task with an ease of which no one previously would have been capable.
The world is governed by immutable laws, and the human race is subject to them. Kant gives an account of those which it must necessarily obey in order to pass from a passive “mirror” into a conscious mind.