“The sceptic is the taskmaster who constrains the dogmatic reasoner to develop a sound critique of the understanding and reason. When the latter has been made to advance thus far, he need fear no further challenge, since he has learned to distinguish his real possessions from that which lies entirely beyond them, and to which he can therefore lay no claim.... Thus the sceptical procedure cannot of itself yield any satisfying answer to the questions of reason, but none the less it prepares the way by awakening its circumspection, and by indicating the radical measures which are adequate to secure it in its legitimate possessions.”[96] “The first step in matters of pure reason, marking its infancy, is dogmatic. The second step is sceptical, and indicates that experience has rendered our judgment wiser and more circumspect. But a third step, such as can be taken only by fully matured judgment, is now necessary.... This is not the censorship but the critique of reason, whereby not its present bounds but its determinate [and necessary] limits, not its ignorance on this or that point, but in regard to all possible questions of a certain kind, are demonstrated from principles, and not merely arrived at by way of conjecture. Scepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. That can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed.”[97]
Locke.[98]—Cf. A 86 = B 119; A 270 = B 327; B 127.
On the unfavourable contrast between mathematics and metaphysics.[99]—Cf. Ueber die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze (1764), erste Betrachtung, and below, pp. 40, 563 ff.
The age of criticism.[100]—Kant considered himself as contributing to the further advance of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.[101] In view, however, of the contrast between eighteenth and nineteenth century thought, and of the real affiliations and ultimate consequences of Kant’s teaching, it seems truer to regard the Critical philosophy as at once completing and transcending the Aufklärung. Kant breaks with many of its most fundamental assumptions.
The Critique of Pure Reason.[102]—Kant here defines the Critique as directed upon pure reason.[103] Further, it is a criticism of knowledge which is “independent of all experience,” or, as Kant adds “free from all experience.” Such phrases, in this context, really mean transcendent. The Critique is here taken as being a Critical investigation of transcendent metaphysics, of its sources, scope, and limits.[104]
Opinion or hypothesis not permissible.[105]—Cf. below, p. 543 ff.
I know no enquiries, etc.[106]—The important questions raised by this paragraph are discussed below, p. 235 ff.
Jean Terrasson (1670-1750).[107]—The quotation is from his work posthumously published (1754), and translated from the French by Frau Gottsched under the title Philosophie nach ihrem allgemeinen Einflusse auf alle Gegenstände des Geistes und der Sitten (1762). Terrasson is also referred to by Kant in his Anthropologie, §§ 44 and 77. Terrasson would seem to be the author of the Traité de l’infini créé which has been falsely ascribed to Malebranche. I have translated this latter treatise in the Philosophical Review (July 1905).
Such a system of pure speculative reason.[108]—The relation in which this system would stand to the Critique is discussed below, pp. 71-2. Speculative does not with Kant mean transcendent, but merely theoretical as opposed to practical. Cf. B 25, A 15 = B 29, A 845 = B 873.
Under the title: Metaphysics of Nature.[109]—No such work, at least under this title, was ever completed by Kant. In the Kantian terminology “nature” signifies “all that is.” Cf. below, p. 580.