Religion and Science from Galileo to Bergson

by J. C. Hardwick

But it is neither necessary nor desirable to enter into the arguments by means of which Kant proved his thesis, which was that the human mind contains in itself certain principles of knowledge (e.g. the idea of cause and effect, the ideas of mathematics, and so on) which it does not owe to sense-experience.

Kant's Copernican Hypothesis.—Kant called these principles of knowledge, forms of thought or categories. The name, perhaps, is irrelevant to our purpose; all that we need to understand is that Kant turned the tables upon Locke. Locke said that the mind was a tabula rasa which passively received impressions from outside. Kant said that the mind is nothing of the kind; it is not passive, but active; it does not "receive" whatever is offered, it "selects" what it wants; and it imposes its own "forms of thought" upon the outside world.

Photography had not been invented at the time of this controversy, but Kant might have said: The mind is not a photographic plate receiving impressions from without, it rather resembles the lens which impressions must pass through, and be transformed by, before they can create a picture.

Kant had, in fact, by this theory, instituted a revolution. His new dogma was: The mind is the mould into which all our knowledge must be cast; and the constitution of our mind predetermines the shape that our knowledge takes.

Thus Kant had discovered that not only sensuous perception, but rational understanding also, has its forms and presuppositions. Just as we become aware of objects only by means of senses which perhaps hide or distort as much as they reveal; so also our rational knowledge is conditioned by the nature of our understanding, which dictates to reality the "forms" under which it can be understood and known.

Mechanism Undermined.—How did this affect the mechanical theory? The connection is obvious. Mechanism is nothing but one of the forms of thought that the mind imposes on phenomena. Just as Copernicus had discovered that it is due to our position on the earth that the heavenly bodies appear to move round us, so Kant had discovered that it is due to the nature of our senses and understanding that we perceive things in space and time, and understand them as being mechanically determined. The space and time, and the mechanical determinism are not in the things, but in our minds. The fact is that we can only grasp things under these forms. Space, time, mechanical causation are forms and laws, not of nature, but of the human intellect, which is so constituted as to see things in this way.

Thus those axioms of science and of mathematics which lie at the base of all exact knowledge, and which had hitherto been regarded as objective, i.e. as inherent in the nature of things, were shewn by Kant to be, as a matter of fact, subjective, that is (in Kant's own phrase) "they express the conditions under which alone we are able to apprehend or understand the object." Thus all knowledge is conditioned by our nature, by the framework, so to speak, not only of our senses but of our minds.

In this way the mechanical view was outflanked; that view certainly seems to us inevitable and certain, but this is due to the constitution of our minds; the world seems to us to be determined, just as it seems blue to a person wearing blue spectacles. But there is no sufficient reason for supposing that it is either determined or blue. The law of mechanical causation is an axiom, but it is a subjective axiom.

Appearance and Reality.—This may not seem much of an advance on Hume's position. Human knowledge still seems precarious, if we assume the mind to be a kind of dictator which imposes its own laws upon nature. And Kant indeed frankly admitted that neither our senses nor our reason were able to reveal to us things as they are, but only things as they seem; we grasp appearance, not reality, and (to use Kant's phraseology) phenomena not noumena. Thus Kant cut away the ground from under all rationalistic dogmatism; he shewed its presumptuous futility.

The Pathway to Reality.—Kant, however, did not remain satisfied with the negative results of his critical philosophy, valuable as these were. Reality, it is true, lies out of range of the human reason, but it is not entirely inaccessible to us, and scepticism about the ultimate nature of things is not the necessary corollary of Kant's, as it was of Hume's, philosophy.