This classification must, as we have stated, be of a date prior to Kant’s discovery of the table of categories. That is quite clear from its ignoring the category of reciprocity, and from its combination of the other two categories of relation with the merely quantitative category of whole and part. For though the last is also entitled composition and co-ordination, it is conceived in these particular Reflexionen in exclusively quantitative terms. When Kant formulated the “metaphysical” deduction of the categories he was, of course, compelled to recast the classification, and did so in the only possible manner, consistent with his architectonic, by substituting the category of reciprocity for that of whole and part,[1349] and by taking the new heading, obtained through combination of reciprocity with the Idea of the unconditioned, as equivalent to the Idea of Divine Existence. But this could not be done without dislocating the entire scheme. The category of ground and consequence is deprived of its chief application, that expressed in the cosmological argument; and in order to provide a new content for it, Kant is compelled to force upon it the problems previously classified under the displaced category of whole and part. Even so, the problem of the causa sui cannot be eliminated, and reappears, partly as the problem of freedom, and partly as the modal problem of necessary existence.
The identification of the theological Idea with the category of reciprocity has a further consequence. It carries the problem of Divine Existence outside the sphere of the problems of infinity, and necessitates a very different treatment from that which it would naturally have received at Kant’s hands, if developed in its connection with his own Critical teaching. He is driven to expound it in the extreme rationalistic form in which it had been formulated by Leibniz and Wolff, as a doctrine of the Ens realissimum.
Prior to the rearrangement, necessitated by recognition of the category of reciprocity, Kant would seem to have expected to bring the entire body of Wolffian metaphysics within the scope of a general doctrine of antinomy. The problems of the divisible and the indivisible, of the simple and the complex, leading as they do to discussion of the presuppositions underlying the Leibnizian monadology, concern spiritual as well as material substance. Similarly, the main problems of theology would have been treated in connection with the cosmological inference to a first cause, and with the discussion of the possibility of first beginnings in space and time.[1350]
The sections in the Critique devoted to the antinomies reveal, in many ways, Kant’s original design. It is especially noticeable in his discussion of the third and fourth antinomies. The problems of freedom and of necessary existence are by no means treated in merely cosmological fashion. Indeed Kant makes no pretence of concealing their psychological and theological implications. Even the first and second antinomies have obvious bearings of a similar character. But it is in the section entitled The Interest of Reason in this Self-conflict[1351] that the broader significance of the antinomies finds its fullest expression. In its suggestive contrast of the two possible types of philosophy, Epicurean and Platonic, the argument entirely transcends the bounds prescribed to it by its cosmological setting. As we follow the comprehensive sweep of its argument, we can hardly avoid regretting that Kant failed to keep to his original plan, as here unfolded,[1352] of expounding the self-conflict of Reason in the form of a broad judicial statement of the grounds and claims of the two opposing authorities which divide the allegiance of the human spirit, namely, the intellectual and the moral, science with its cognitive demands on the one hand, the consciousness of duty with its no less imperious prescriptions on the other. The materialist philosophies would then have been presented as inevitably arising when intellectual values are made supreme; and the Idealist philosophies as equally cogent when moral values are taken as primary and are allowed to determine speculative tenets. Against this background of conflicting dogmatisms the comprehensive and satisfying character of the Critical standpoint would have stood out the more clearly; and its historical affiliations, its debt to the sceptics and materialists, no less than to the Idealists, would have been depicted in more adequate terms. As it is, in the chapters on the Paralogisms and the Ideal of Pure Reason there is almost entire failure to recognise the possibility of a naturalistic solution of the problems with which they deal, and Kant so far succumbs to the outworn influences of his day and generation—the very influences from which the Critical philosophy, consistently developed, is a final breaking away—as to maintain, almost in the manner of the English Deists, of Voltaire and Rousseau, that God, Freedom, and Immortality are conceptions which the mind must necessarily form, and in the validity of which it must spontaneously believe. Kant is here, indeed, interpreting “natural reason” in the light of his own personal history. The Christian beliefs, in which he had been nurtured from childhood, and their rationalist counterparts in the Wolffian philosophy, had become, as it were, a second nature to him; and the resistance, which in his own person they had offered to the development of Critical teaching, he not unnaturally interpreted as evidence of their being imposed by the very structure of reason. He transforms the metaphysical sciences in their Wolffian form into inevitable illusions of the human mind.[1353]
There is evidence that the theological problems were the first to be withdrawn from the sphere of the “sceptical method,”[1354] peculiar to the antinomies. Thus Reflexion ii. 125[1355] states that “metaphysics proper consists of cosmologia rationalis and theologia naturalis”—rational psychology being, as it would seem, still included within cosmology.[1356] What the considerations were which induced Kant to claim similarly independent treatment for rational psychology, we can only conjecture. For a time, while still holding to the bipartite division, he would seem to have made the further change of also separating psychology from cosmology, classing psychology and theology together as subdivisions of the rational science of soul.
”[Metaphysics has two parts]: the first is cosmology, the second rational doctrine of soul, pneumatology and theology.”[1357]
A main factor deciding Kant in favour of a dogmatic, non-sceptical treatment of rational psychology may have been the greater opportunity which it seemed to afford him of connecting its doctrines with the teaching of the Analytic, and especially with his central doctrine of apperception. But to whatever cause the decision was due, it resulted in the impoverishment of the second antinomy, through withdrawal of the more important half of its natural content. This antinomy could no longer be made to comprehend a discussion of the logical bases of monadology, and of its professed proofs of the simplicity and immortality of the soul. Nothing is left to it save the discussion of the monadistic theory of matter (somatologia pura).[1358] This change has also, as already noted, the unfortunate effect of precluding Kant from recognition of the physical application of the category of substance. By the simple he means the substantial, and yet he may not say so; his architectonic forbids.
I may hazard the further suggestion that Kant’s interpretation of rational psychology in terms of the Critical doctrine of apperception is of earlier date than his doctrine of transcendental illusion. For the chapter on the Paralogisms seems in its first form to have contained no reference to that latter doctrine.[1359] The few passages which take account of it, all bear evidence of being later intercalations. This is the more remarkable in that the Paralogisms can easily be shown to be typical examples of transcendental illusion. Indeed, neither the antinomies nor the theological Ideal conform to its definition in the same strict fashion.
The problem as to whether the doctrine of transcendental illusion and the deduction of the Ideas from the three species of syllogism originated early or late, is largely bound up with the question as to when Kant finally adopted the terms Analytic and Dialectic as titles for the two main divisions of his Transcendental Logic. That Kant was at first very uncertain as to what the main divisions of his system ought to be, appears very clearly from the Reflexionen.[1360] To his teaching as a whole he usually applies the title Transcendental Philosophy, and in Reflexion ii. 123 he enumerates the following subdivisions within it: Aesthetic, Logic, Critique, and Architectonic. By Critique Kant must here mean what in other Reflexionen he names Discipline, and which he finally named Dialectic. As thus identified with the Discipline, the Dialectic is at times viewed as a division of a Methodology or Organon, whose other divisions are entitled Canon and Architectonic.[1361] This earlier scheme may therefore be represented as follows:
| Transcendental Philosophy– | Doctrine of Elements | Aesthetic. Logic. |
| Critique = Discipline [correspondingto the Dialecticof the Critique]. | ||
| Doctrine of Methods (Methodology) | Canon. Architectonic. |