148. However, my opinion of the connection of modern pantheism with the Critik der reinen Vernunft is confirmed even by the Germans. "From these depths," says Rosenkranz, speaking of this work, "the results of the transcendental æsthetics and logic receive a new importance in the great problems of theology, cosmology, morals, and psychology, which was not even suspected by the dull sense of the greater part of its admirers. They know nothing of the chain which unites Fichte's Doctrine of Science, Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism, Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic, and Herbart's Metaphysics, with Kant's Critic....
"I may say that the English and French in particular will understand nothing of the development of German philosophy since Kant, until they have penetrated the Critic of Pure Reason, for we Germans always look to that.... Just as we use the houses, the palaces, the churches, but most of all the towers which rise over every thing to guide us in a large city; so also in contemporary philosophy, amid the labyrinth of its quarrels it is impossible to take a single step with security unless we keep our sight fixed on Kant's Critic. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Herbart made this work the great centre of their operations for attack or defence."[66]
149. I do not mean by this that the German philosophers since Kant have added nothing to the Critic of Pure Reason: I have already observed (in the seventh chapter of the first book) that the cause of the greater obscurity which is found in Fichte's words, proceeds from his having gone farther than Kant in his abstraction of all objectiveness both external and internal, placing himself in I know not what pure primitive act, from which he pretends to deduce every thing; in which he differs from the author of the Critic of Pure Reason, whose labors did not so absolutely annihilate the objectiveness of the internal world, and therefore his observations are less incomprehensible, and even present here and there some few luminous points: I only wished to show the baneful importance of Kant's works, to place those incautious persons on their guard, who, judging from what they have heard, are inclined to regard him as the great restorer of spiritualism and sound philosophy, when, in reality, he is the founder of the most pernicious schools which the history of the human mind has known, and would be one of the most dangerous writers that ever existed, were it not that the obscurity of his ideas, increased by the obscurity of their expression, renders him intolerable to the immense majority of readers, even of those versed in philosophical studies.
[CHAPTER XX].
CONTRADICTION OF PANTHEISM TO THE PRIMARY FACTS OF THE HUMAN MIND.
150. I do not know how any philosopher who has meditated on the human mind can incline to pantheism. The deeper we go into the me from which it is pretended to deduce such an absurd system, the more we discover the contradiction in which pantheism appears in respect to the primary ideas and facts of our mind. My development of this observation will be brief, for it turns on questions largely examined in their respective places.
151. We have seen (Bk. VI., Ch. V.) that the idea of number is found in every understanding, and experience teaches that we employ it explicitly or implicitly in almost all our words. We scarcely speak without using the plural, and this can have no meaning without the supposition of the idea of number. Pantheism reduces all existence to an absolute unity; multiplicity either has no real existence, or is limited to phenomena, which, in the judgment of some followers of this system, contain no reality of any sort, and, in the opinion of all pantheists, can contain no substantial reality. According to them, therefore, the idea of number either has no correspondence in the reality, or it relates only to modes of being, to the various modifications of the same being, and therefore does not extend to the beings themselves, for in this system there is only one being. If this be so, how is it that the idea of number exists in our understanding? how is it that we conceive not only many modes of being, but many beings? In the system of the pantheists not only is there no multiplicity of beings, but it is impossible that there should be; why, then, has our understanding this radical vice which necessarily leads it to conceive the multiplicity of things, if this multiplicity is absurd? why is this ideal defect confirmed by experience which also necessarily leads us to believe that there are many distinct things?
152. In the system of the pantheists our understanding is only a modification, a manifestation of the only substance; but it is impossible to explain this disagreement between the phenomenon and the reality, this necessary error into which the phenomenon of the substance leads us in respect to the substance itself. If we are a mere manifestation of the unity, why do we find the idea of multiplicity as a primitive fact within us? Why this continual contradiction between the being and its appearances? If we are all one same unit, whence do we obtain the idea of number? If the phenomena of experience are only evolutions, so to speak, of this one unit, why do we feel ourselves irresistibly inclined to suppose multiplicity in the phenomena, and to multiply the things in which they succeed?