§ [175]. The restriction which Kant puts upon his method is quite essential to its meaning. I deduce the categories, for example, just in so far as I find them to be necessary to perception. Without them my perception is blind, I make nothing of it; with them my experience becomes systematic and rational. But categories which I so deduce must be forever limited to the rôle for which they are defined. Categories without perceptions are "empty"; they have validity solely with reference to the experience which they set in order. Indeed, I cannot even complete that order. The orderly arrangement of parts of experience suggests, and suggests irresistibly, a perfect system. I can even define the ideas and ideals through which such a perfect system might be realized. But I cannot in the Kantian sense attach reality to it because it is not indispensable to experience. It must remain an ideal which regulates my thinking of such parts of it as fall within the range of my perception; or it may through my moral nature become the realm of my living and an object of faith. In short, Kant's is essentially a "critical philosophy," a logical and analytical study of the special terms and relations of human knowledge. He denies the validity of these terms and relations beyond this realm. His critiques are an inventory of the conditions, principles, and prospects of that cognition which, although not alone ideally conceivable, is alone possible.
The Post-Kantian Metaphysics is a Generalization of the Cognitive and Moral Consciousness as Analyzed by Kant. The Absolute Spirit.
§ [176]. With the successors of Kant, as with the successors of Socrates, a criticism becomes a system of metaphysics. This transformation is effected in the post-Kantians by a generalization of the human cognitive consciousness. According to Kant's analysis it contains a manifold of sense which must be organized by categories in obedience to the ideal of a rational universe. The whole enterprise, with its problems given in perception, its instruments available in the activities of the understanding, and its ideals revealed in the reason, is an organic spiritual unity, manifesting itself in the self-consciousness of the thinker. Now in absolute idealism this very enterprise of knowledge, made universal and called the absolute spirit or mind, is taken to be the ultimate reality. And here at length would seem to be afforded the conception of a being to which the problematic and the rational, the data and the principles, the natural and the ideal, are alike indispensable. We are now to seek the real not in the ideal itself, but in that spiritual unity in which appearance is the incentive to truth, and natural imperfection the spring to goodness. This may be translated into the language which Plato uses in the "Symposium," when Diotima is revealing to Socrates the meaning of love. The new reality will be not the loved one, but love itself.
"What then is Love? Is he mortal?"
"No."
"What then?"
"As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but is a mean between them."
"What is he then, Diotima?"
"He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal."[359:3]
Reality is no longer the God who mingles not with men, but that power which, as Diotima further says, "interprets and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and rewards of the gods."