Later on, you will reject all their truths, with horror, perhaps with indignation and disgust, even with utter indifference. You will not consent to accept that our life is only a shadow of actual reality, you will revolt against Spinoza's God, who cannot love, yet demands love for himself, Kant's categorical imperative will seem to you a cold monster,—but you will never forget Plato, or Spinoza, or Kant, and will for ever keep your gratitude to them, who made you believe that authority is given to mortals. Then you will understand that there are no errors and no truths in philosophy; that errors and truths are only for him above whom is set a superior authority, a law, a standard. But philosophers themselves create laws and standards. This is what we are taught by the history of philosophy; this is what is most difficult for man to master and understand. I have already said that the historians of philosophy draw quite a different moral from the study of the great human creations.
Science and Metaphysics
In his autobiography Spencer confesses that he had really never read Kant. He had had The Critique of Pure Reason in his hands, and had even read the beginning, the Transcendental Aesthetic, but the beginning convinced him it was no use for him to read further. Once a man had made the unconvincing admission which Kant had made, by accepting the subjectivity of one form of perception, of space and time, he could not be seriously taken into account. If he is consistent, all his philosophy will be a system of absurdity and nonsense; if he is inconsistent,—the less attention does he deserve.
Spencer confidently asserts that, once he could not accept Kant's fundamental proposition, he not only could not be a Kantian any more, but he found it useless even to become further acquainted with Kant's philosophy. That he did not become a Kantian is nothing to grieve over—there are Kantians enough without him—but that he did not acquaint himself with Kant's principal works, and above all with the whole school that rose out of Kant, may be sincerely regretted. Perhaps, as a new man, remote from Continental traditions, he would have made a curious discovery, and would have convinced himself that it was not at all necessary to accept the proposition of the subjectivity of space and time in order to become a Kantian. And perhaps with the frankness and simplicity peculiar to him, which is not afraid to be taken for naïveté, he would have told us that not a single Kantian (Schopenhauer excepted), not even Kant himself, has ever seriously accepted the fundamental propositions of the Transcendental Aesthetic, and therefore has never made from them any conclusions or deductions whatever. On the contrary, the Transcendental Aesthetic was itself a deduction from another proposition, that we have synthetic judgments a priori. The original rôle of this, the most original of all theories ever invented, was to be a support and an explanation of the mathematical sciences. It had never had an independent, material content, susceptible of analysis and investigation. Space and time are the eternal forms of our perception of the world: to this, according to the strict meaning of Kant's teaching, nothing can be added, and nothing abated. Spencer, not having read the book to the end, imagined that Kant would begin to make deductions and became nervous. But if he had read the book to the end, he would have been convinced that Kant had not made any deductions, and that the whole meaning of The Critique of Pure Reason indeed is that from the propositions of the Transcendental Aesthetic no deductions can be made. It is now about a hundred and fifty years since The Critique of Pure Reason appeared. No philosophic work has been so much studied and criticised. And yet where are the Kantians who attempt to make deductions from the proposition as to the subjectivity of space and time? Schopenhauer is the only exception. He indeed took the Kantian idea seriously, but it may be said without exaggeration that of all Kantians the least like Kant was Schopenhauer.
The world is a veil of Maia. Would Kant really have agreed to such an interpretation of his Transcendental Aesthetic? Or what would Kant have said, if he had heard that Schopenhauer, referring to the same Aesthetic in which he saw the greatest philosophic revelation, had admitted the possibility of clairvoyance and magic? Probably Spencer thought that Kant would himself make all these deductions, and therefore threw away the book which bound him to conclusions so absurd. It is a pity that Spencer was in such a hurry. Had he acquainted himself with Kant, he would have been convinced that the most absurd idea might serve a very useful purpose; and that there is not the least necessity to make from an idea all the deductions to which it may lead. A man is a free agent and he can deduce if he has a mind to; if he has not, he will not; and there is no necessity to judge the character of a philosophic theory by its general postulates. Even Schopenhauer did not exploit Kant's theory to the full, which, if it had really divined the truths hitherto hidden from men, would have not only put an end to metaphysical researches, but also have given an impulse and a justification to perfectly new experiments which from the previous standpoint were quite mad and unimaginable. For if space and time are forms of our human perception, then they do indeed hide the ultimate truth from us. While men knew nothing of this, and, simple minded, accepted the visible reality for the actual real, they could not of course dream of true knowledge. But from the moment when the truth was revealed to them through Kant's penetration, it is clear that their true task was to use every possible means to free themselves from the harness and to break away from it, while consolidating all those judgments which Kant calls synthetic judgments a priori for all eternity.
And the new, the critical metaphysics, which should take account of the stupid situation in which these had hitherto found themselves who saw in apodeictic judgments eternal truths, had a great task to set herself: to get rid at all costs of apodeictic judgments, knowing them for false. In other words, Kant's task should not have been to minimise the destructive effect of Hume's scepticism, but to find a still more deadly explosive to destroy even those limits which Hume was obliged to preserve. It is surely evident that truth lies beyond synthetic judgments a priori, and that it cannot at all resemble an a priori judgment, and in fact cannot be like a judgment of any kind.
And it must be sought by methods quite different from those by which it has been sought hitherto. To some extent Kant attempted to describe how he represented to himself the meaning hidden beneath the words: 'Space and time are subjective forms of perception.' He even gave an object-lesson, saying that perhaps there are beings who perceive the world otherwise than under the forms of space and time: which means that for such beings there is no change. All that we perceive by a succession of changes, they perceive at once. To them Julius Caesar is still alive, though he is dead; to them the twenty-fifth century A.D., which none of us will live to see, and the twenty-fifth century B.C., which we reconstruct with such difficulty from the fragmentary traces of the past which have accidentally been preserved to us, the remote North Pole, and even the stars which we cannot see through the telescope—all are as accessible to them as to us the events which are taking place before our eyes. Nevertheless Kant, in spite of all temptation to acquire the knowledge to which such beings have access, notwithstanding his profound conviction of the truth of his discovery, did nothing to dispel the charm of forms of perception and categories of the reason, or to tear the blinkers from his eyes and see all the depth of the mysterious reality hitherto hidden from us. He does not even give a little circumstantial explanation why he considered such a task impracticable, and he confines himself to the dogmatic assertion that man cannot conceive a reality beyond space and time. Why? It is a question of immense importance. Compared with it all the problems of The Critique of Pure Reason are secondary. How is mathematics possible, how are natural sciences possible?—these are not even questions at all compared to the question whether it is possible to free ourselves from conventional human knowledge in order to attain the ultimate, all-embracing truth.
Herein the Kantians display an even greater indifference than Kant himself: they are even proud of their indifference, they plume themselves upon it as a high virtue. They assert that truth is not beyond synthetic judgments a priori, but indeed in them; and that it is not the Creator who put blinkers upon us, but we ourselves devised them, and that any attempt to remove them and look open-eyed upon the world is evidence of perversity. If the old Serpent appeared nowadays to seduce the modern Adam, he would retire discomfited. Even Eve herself would be no use to him. The twentieth-century Eve studies in a university and has quite sufficiently blunted her natural curiosity. She can talk excellently well of the teleological point of view and is quite as proof as man against temptation. I do not share Kant's confidence that space and time are forms of our perception, nor do I see a revelation in it. But if I had once accepted this apocalyptic assertion, and could think that there was some truth in it, I would not depart from it to positive science.
It is a pity that Spencer did not read The Critique of Pure Reason to the end. He would have convinced himself of an important truth: that a philosopher has no need to take into consideration all the deductions from his premisses. He need only have goodwill, and he can draw from the most paradoxical and suspicious premisses conclusions which are fully conformable to common-sense and the rules of decency. And since Kant's will was as good as Spencer's, they would have agreed perfectly in their deductions, though they were so far apart from each other in their premisses.