An Introduction to Philosophy

by George Stuart Fullerton

Reid and various other philosophers have tried to come back to "Common Sense" and to stay there. Now, it is a good position to come back to for the purpose of starting out again. The experience of the plain man, the truths which he recognizes as truths, these are not things to be despised. Many a man whose mind has been, as Berkeley expresses it, "debauched by learning," has gotten away from them to his detriment, and has said very unreasonable things. But "Common Sense" cannot be the ultimate refuge of the philosopher; it can only serve him as material for investigation. The scholar whose thought is as vague and inconsistent as that of the plain man has little profit in the fact that the apparatus of his learning has made it possible for him to be ponderously and unintelligibly vague and inconsistent.

Hence, we may have the utmost sympathy with Reid's protest against the doctrine of representative perception, and we may, nevertheless, complain that he has done little to explain how it is that we directly know external things and yet cannot be said to know things except in so far as we have sensations or ideas.

51. THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY.—The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), was moved, by the skeptical conclusions to which Hume's philosophy seemed to lead, to seek a way of escape, somewhat as Reid was. But he did not take refuge in "Common Sense"; he developed an ingenious doctrine which has had an enormous influence in the philosophical world, and has given rise to a Kantian literature of such proportions that no man can hope to read all of it, even if he devotes his life to it. In Germany and out of it, it has for a hundred years and more simply rained books, pamphlets, and articles on Kant and his philosophy, some of them good, many of them far from clear and far from original. Hundreds of German university students have taken Kant as the subject of the dissertation by which they hoped to win the degree of Doctor of Philosophy;—I was lately offered two hundred and seventy-four such dissertations in one bunch;—and no student is supposed to have even a moderate knowledge of philosophy who has not an acquaintance with that famous work, the "Critique of Pure Reason."

It is to be expected from the outset that, where so many have found so much to say, there should reign abundant differences of opinion. There are differences of opinion touching the interpretation of Kant, and touching the criticisms which may be made upon, and the development which should be given to, his doctrine. It is, of course, impossible to go into all these things here; and I shall do no more than indicate, in untechnical language and in briefest outline, what he offers us in place of the philosophy of Hume.

Kant did not try to refute, as did Reid, the doctrine, urged by Descartes and by his successors, that all those things which the mind directly perceives are to be regarded as complexes of ideas. On the contrary, he accepted it, and he has made the words "phenomenon" and "noumenon" household words in philosophy.

The world which seems to be spread out before us in space and time is, he tells us, a world of things as they are revealed to our senses and our intelligence; it is a world of manifestations, of phenomena. What things-in-themselves are like we have no means of knowing; we know only things as they appear to us. We may, to be sure, talk of a something distinct from phenomena, a something not revealed to the senses, but thought of, a noumenon; but we should not forget that this is a negative conception; there is nothing in our experience that can give it a filling, for our experience is only of phenomena. The reader will find an unmistakable echo of this doctrine in Herbert Spencer's doctrine of the "Unknowable" and its "manifestations."

Now, Berkeley had called all the things we immediately perceive ideas. As we have seen, he distinguished between "ideas of sense" and "ideas of memory and imagination." Hume preferred to give to these two classes different names—he called the first impressions and the second ideas.

The associations of the word "impression" are not to be mistaken. Locke had taught that between ideas in the memory and genuine sensations there is the difference that the latter are due to the "brisk acting" of objects without us. Objects impress us, and we have sensations or impressions. To be sure, Hume, after employing the word "impression," goes on to argue that we have no evidence that there are external objects, which cause impressions. But he retains the word "impression," nevertheless, and his use of it perceptibly colors his thought.

In Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena we have the lineal descendant of the old distinction between the circle of our ideas and the something outside of them that causes them and of which they are supposed to give information. Hume said we have no reason to believe such a thing exists, but are impelled by our nature to believe in it. Kant is not so much concerned to prove the nonexistence of noumena, things-in-themselves, as he is to prove that the very conception is an empty one. His reasonings seem to result in the conclusion that we can make no intelligible statement about things so cut off from our experience as noumena are supposed to be; and one would imagine that he would have felt impelled to go on to the frank declaration that we have no reason to believe in noumena at all, and had better throw away altogether so meaningless and useless a notion. But he was a conservative creature, and he did not go quite so far.

So far there is little choice between Kant and Hume. Certainly the former does not appear to have rehabilitated the external world which had suffered from the assaults of his predecessors. What important difference is there between his doctrine and that of the man whose skeptical tendencies he wished to combat?