I have described the gorgeousness of my expectations in those early days of my prelusive acquaintance with German literature. I have a little lingered in painting that glad aurora of my first pilgrimage to the fountains of the Rhine and of the Danube, in order adequately to shadow out the gloom and blight which soon afterwards settled upon the hopes of that golden dawn. In Kant, I had been taught to believe, were the keys of a new and a creative philosophy. Either "ejus ductu," or "ejus auspiciis"—that is, either directly under his guidance, or indirectly under any influence remotely derived from his principles—I looked confidingly to see the great vistas and avenues of truth laid open to the philosophic inquirer. Alas! all was a dream. Six weeks' study was sufficient to close my hopes in that quarter for ever. The philosophy of Kant—so famous, so commanding in Germany from about the period of the French Revolution—already, in 1805, I had found to be a philosophy of destruction, and scarcely in any one chapter so much as tending to a philosophy of reconstruction. It destroys by wholesale, and it substitutes nothing. Perhaps, in the whole history of man, it is an unexampled case that such a scheme of speculation—which offers nothing seducing to human aspirations, nothing splendid to the human imagination, nothing even positive and affirmative to the human understanding—should have been able to found an interest so broad and deep among thirty-five millions of cultivated men. The English reader who supposes this interest to have been confined to academic bowers, or the halls of philosophic societies, is most inadequately alive to the case. Sects, heresies, schisms, by hundreds, have arisen out of this philosophy; many thousands of books have been written by way of teaching it, discussing it, extending it, opposing it. And yet it is a fact that all its doctrines are negative—teaching, in no case, what we are, but simply what we are not, to believe—and that all its truths are barren. Such being its unpopular character, I cannot but imagine that the German people have received it with so much ardour from profound incomprehension of its meaning, and utter blindness to its drift: a solution which may seem extravagant, but is not so; for, even amongst those who have expressly commented on this philosophy, not one of the many hundreds whom I have myself read but has retracted from every attempt to explain its dark places. In these dark places lies, indeed, the secret of its attraction. Were light poured into them, it would be seen that they are culs-de-sac, passages that lead to nothing; but, so long as they continue dark, it is not known whither they lead, how far, in what direction, and whether, in fact, they may not issue into paths connected directly with the positive and the infinite. Were it known that upon every path a barrier faces you insurmountable to human steps—like the barriers which fence in the Abyssinian valley of Rasselas—the popularity of this philosophy would expire at once; for no popular interest can long be sustained by speculations which, in every aspect, are known to be essentially negative and essentially finite. Man's nature has something of infinity within itself, which requires a corresponding infinity in its objects. We are told, indeed, by Mr. Bulwer, that the Kantian system has ceased to be of any authority in Germany—that it is defunct, in fact—and that we have first begun to import it into England after its root had withered, or begun to wither, in its native soil. But Mr. Bulwer is mistaken. The philosophy has never withered in Germany. It cannot even be said that its fortunes have retrograded: they have oscillated: accidents of taste and ability in particular professors, or caprices of fashion, have given a momentary fluctuation to this or that new form of Kantianism—an ascendency, for a period, to various, and, in some respects, conflicting modifications of the transcendental system; but all alike have derived their power mediately from Kant. No weapons, even if employed as hostile weapons, are now forged in any armoury but that of Kant; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used above, all the modern polemic tactics of what is called metaphysics are trained and made to move either ejus ductu or ejus auspiciis. Not one of the new systems affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the Cartesian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to the purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of yielding even a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact decide the question of Kant's vitality. Qui bene distinguit bene docet. This is an old adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions, and the objects of the philosophic understanding must be presumed to have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with most precision, their general relations—so long as his terminology continues to be adopted. This test, applied to Kant, will show that his spirit yet survives in Germany. Frederick Schlegel, it is true, twenty years ago, in his lectures upon Literature, assures us that even the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to abandon his philosophic nomenclature. But the German philosophic literature, since that date, tells another tale. Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong; and, without going to Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to revise his sentence. Cousin—the philosophic Cousin, the only great name in philosophy for modern France—familiar as he is with North Germany, can hardly be presumed unacquainted with a fact so striking, if it were a fact, as the extinction of a system once so triumphantly supreme as that of Kant; and yet Mr. Bulwer, admiring Cousin as he does, cannot but have noticed his efforts to naturalize Kant in France. Meantime, if it were even true that transcendentalism had lost its hold of the public mind in Germany, prima facie, this would prove little more than the fickleness of that public which must have been wrong in one of the two cases—either when adopting the system, or when rejecting it. Whatever there may be of truth and value in the system will remain unimpeached by such caprices, whether of an individual or of a great nation; and England would still be in the right to import the philosophy, however late in the day, if it were true even (which I doubt greatly) that she is importing it.
Both truth and value there certainly is in one part of the Kantian philosophy; and that part is its foundation. I had intended, at this point, to introduce an outline of the transcendental philosophy—not, perhaps, as entering by logical claim of right into any biographical sketch, but as a very allowable digression in the record of that man's life to whom, in the way of hope and of profound disappointment, it had been so memorable an object. For two or three years before I mastered the language of Kant,[18] it had been a pole-star to my hopes, and in hypothesi, agreeably to the uncertain plans of uncertain knowledge, the luminous guide to my future life—as a life dedicated and set apart to philosophy. Such it was some years before I knew it: for at least ten long years after I came into a condition of valuing its true pretensions and measuring its capacities, this same philosophy shed the gloom of something like misanthropy upon my views and estimates of human nature; for man was an abject animal if the limitations which Kant assigned to the motions of his speculative reason were as absolute and hopeless as, under his scheme of the understanding and his genesis of its powers, too evidently they were. I belonged to a reptile race, if the wings by which we had sometimes seemed to mount, and the buoyancy which had seemed to support our flight, were indeed the fantastic delusions which he represented them. Such, and so deep and so abiding in its influence upon my life, having been the influence of this German philosophy, according to all logic of proportions, in selecting the objects of my notice, I might be excused for setting before the reader, in its full array, the analysis of its capital sections. However, in any memorial of a life which professes to keep in view (though but as a secondary purpose) any regard to popular taste, the logic of proportions must bend, after all, to the law of the occasion—to the proprieties of time and place. For the present, therefore, I shall restrict myself to the few sentences in which it may be proper to gratify the curiosity of some readers, the two or three in a hundred, as to the peculiar distinctions of this philosophy. Even to these two or three out of each hundred I shall not venture to ascribe a larger curiosity than with respect to the most general "whereabouts" of its position—from what point it starts, whence and from what aspect it surveys the ground, and by what links from this starting point it contrives to connect itself with the main objects of philosophic inquiry.
Immanuel Kant was originally a dogmatist in the school of Leibnitz and Wolf; that is, according to his trisection of all philosophy into dogmatic, sceptical, and critical, he was, upon all questions disposed to a strong affirmative creed, without courting any particular examination into the grounds of this creed, or into its assailable points. From this slumber, as it is called by himself, he was suddenly aroused by the Humian doctrine of cause and effect. This celebrated essay on the nature of necessary connexion—so thoroughly misapprehended at the date of its first publication to the world by its soi-disant opponents, Oswald, Beattie, &c., and so imperfectly comprehended since then by various soi-disant defenders—became in effect the "occasional cause" (in the phrase of the logicians) of the entire subsequent philosophic scheme of Kant; every section of which arose upon the accidental opening made to analogical trains of thought by this memorable effort of scepticism applied by Hume to one capital phenomenon among the necessities of the human understanding. What is the nature of Hume's scepticism as applied to this phenomenon? What is the main thesis of his celebrated Essay on Cause and Effect? For few, indeed, are they who really know anything about it. If a man really understands it, a very few words will avail to explain the nodus. Let us try. It is a necessity of the human understanding (very probably not a necessity of a higher order of intelligences) to connect its experiences by means of the idea of cause and its correlate, effect: and, when Beattie, Oswald, Reid, &c., were exhausting themselves in proofs of the indispensableness of this idea, they were fighting with shadows; for no man had ever questioned the practical necessity for such an idea to the coherency of human thinking. Not the practical necessity, but the internal consistency of this notion, and the original right to such a notion, was the point of inquisition. For, attend, courteous reader, and three separate propositions will set before your eyes the difficulty. First Prop., which, for the sake of greater precision, permit me to throw into Latin:—Non datur aliquid [A] quo posito ponitur aliud [B] a priori; that is, in other words, You cannot lay your hands upon that one object or phenomenon [A] in the whole circle of natural existences, which, being assumed, will entitle you to assume a priori, any other object whatsoever [B] as succeeding it. You could not, I say, of any object or phenomenon whatever, assume this succession a priori—that is, previously to experience. Second Prop. But, if the succession of B to A be made known to you, not a priori (by the involution of B in the idea of A), but by experience, then you cannot ascribe necessity to the succession: the connection between them is not necessary but contingent. For the very widest experience—an experience which should stretch over all ages, from the beginning to the end of time—can never establish a nexus having the least approximation to necessity; no more than a rope of sand could gain the cohesion of adamant by repeating its links through a billion of successions. Prop. Third. Hence (i.e. from the two preceding propositions), it appears that no instance or case of nexus that ever can have been offered to the notice of any human understanding has in it, or by possibility could have had, anything of necessity. Had the nexus been necessary, you would have seen it beforehand; whereas, by Prop. 1, Non datur aliquid, quo posito ponitur aliud a priori. This being so, now comes the startling fact, that the notion of a cause includes the notion of necessity. For, if A (the cause) be connected with B (the effect) only in a casual or accidental way, you do not feel warranted in calling it a cause. If heat, applied to ice (A) were sometimes followed by a tendency to liquefaction (B) and sometimes not, you would not consider A connected with B as a cause, but only as some variable accompaniment of the true and unknown cause, which might allowably be present or be absent. This, then, is the startling and mysterious phenomenon of the human understanding—that, in a certain notion, which is indispensable to the coherency of our whole experience, indispensable to the establishing any nexus between the different parts and successions of our whole train of notions, we include an accessary notion of necessity, which yet has no justification or warrant, no assignable derivation from any known or possible case of human experience. We have one idea at least—viz. the idea of causation—which transcends our possible experience by one important element, the element of necessity, that never can have been derived from the only source of ideas recognised by the philosophy of this day. A Lockian never can find his way out of this dilemma. The experience (whether it be the experience of sensation or the experience of reflection) which he adopts for his master-key never will unlock this case; for the sum total of human experience, collected from all ages, can avail only to tell us what is, but never what must be. The idea of necessity is absolutely transcendent to experience, per se, and must be derived from some other source. From what source? Could Hume tell us? No: he, who had started the game so acutely (for, with every allowance for the detection made in Thomas Aquinas of the original suggestion, as recorded in the Biographia Literaria of Coleridge, we must still allow great merit of a secondary kind to Hume for his modern revival and restatement of the doctrine), this same acute philosopher broke down confessedly in his attempt to hunt the game down. His solution is worthless.
Kant, however, having caught the original scent from Hume, was more fortunate. He saw, at a glance, that here was a test applied to the Lockian philosophy, which showed, at the very least, its insufficiency. If it were good even for so much as it explained—which Burke is disposed to receive as a sufficient warrant for the favourable reception of a new hypothesis—at any rate, it now appeared that there was something which it could not explain. But, next, Kant took a large step in advance proprio marte. Reflecting upon the one idea adduced by Hume as transcending the ordinary source of ideas, he began to ask himself whether it were likely that this idea should stand alone? Were there not other ideas in the same predicament; other ideas including the same element of necessity, and, therefore, equally disowning the parentage assigned by Locke? Upon investigation, he found that there were: he found that there were eleven others in exactly the same circumstances. The entire twelve he denominated categories; and the mode by which he ascertained their number—that there were so many and no more—is of itself so remarkable as to merit notice in the most superficial sketch. But, in fact, this one explanation will put the reader in possession of Kant's system, so far as he could understand it without an express and toilsome study. With this explanation, therefore, of the famous categories, I shall close my slight sketch of the system. Has the reader ever considered the meaning of the term Category—a term so ancient and so venerable from its connexion with the most domineering philosophy that has yet appeared amongst men? The doctrine of the Categories (or, in its Roman appellation, of the Predicaments) is one of the few wrecks from the Peripatetic philosophy which still survives as a doctrine taught by public authority in the most ancient academic institutions of Europe.[19] It continues to form a section in the code of public instruction; and perhaps under favour of a pure accident. For, though, strictly speaking, a metaphysical speculation, it has always been prefixed as a sort of preface to the Organon (or logical treatises) of Aristotle, and has thus accidentally shared in the immortality conceded to that most perfect of human works. Far enough were the Categories from meriting such distinction. Kant was well aware of this: he was aware that the Aristotelian Categories were a useless piece of scholastic lumber: unsound in their first conception; and, though illustrated through long centuries by the schoolmen, and by still earlier Grecian philosophers, never in any one known instance turned to a profitable account. Why, then, being aware that even in idea they were false, besides being practically unsuitable, did Kant adopt or borrow a name laden with this superfetation of reproach—all that is false in theory superadded to all that is useless in practice? He did so for a remarkable reason: he felt, according to his own explanation, that Aristotle had been groping (the German word expressive of his blind procedure is herumtappen)—groping in the dark, but under a semi-conscious instinct of truth. Here is a most remarkable case or situation of the human intellect, happening alike to individuals and to entire generations—in the situation of yearning or craving, as it were, for a great idea as yet unknown, but dimly and uneasily prefigured.
Sometimes the very brink, as it may be called, of such an idea is approached; sometimes it is even imperfectly discovered; but with marks in the very midst of its imperfections which serve as indications to a person coming better armed for ascertaining the sub-conscious thought which had governed their tentative motions. As it stands in Aristotle's scheme, the idea of a category is a mere lifeless abstraction. Rising through a succession of species to genera, and from these to still higher genera, you arrive finally at a highest genus—a naked abstraction, beyond which no farther regress is possible. This highest genus, this genus generalissimum, is, in peripatetic language, a category; and no purpose or use has ever been assigned to any one of these categories, of which ten were enumerated at first, beyond that of classification—i.e. a purpose of mere convenience. Even for as trivial a purpose as this, it gave room for suspecting a failure, when it was afterwards found that the original ten categories did not exhaust the possibilities of the case; that other supplementary categories (post-prœdicamenta) became necessary. And, perhaps, "more last words" might even yet be added, supplementary supplements, and so forth, by a hair-splitting intellect. Failures as gross as these, revisals still open to revision, and amendments calling for amendments, were at once a broad confession that here there was no falling in with any great law of nature. The paths of nature may sometimes be arrived at in a tentative way; but they are broad and determinate; and, when found, vindicate themselves. Still, in all this erroneous subtilisation, and these abortive efforts, Kant perceived a grasping at some real idea—fugitive indeed and coy, which had for the present absolutely escaped; but he caught glimpses of it continually in the rear; he felt its necessity to any account of the human understanding that could be satisfactory to one who had meditated on Locke's theory as probed and searched by Leibnitz. And in this uneasy state—half sceptical, half creative, rejecting and substituting, pulling down and building up—what was, in sum and finally, the course which he took for bringing his trials and essays to a crisis? He states this himself, somewhere in the Introduction to his Critik der reinen Vernunft; and the passage is a memorable one. Fifteen years at the least have passed since I read it; and, therefore, I cannot pretend to produce the words; but the substance I shall give; and I appeal to the candour of all his readers whether they have been able to apprehend his meaning. I certainly did not for years. But, now that I do, the passage places his procedure in a most striking and edifying light. Astronomers, says Kant, had gone on for ages, assuming that the earth was the central body of our system; and insuperable were the difficulties which attended that assumption. At length, it occurred to try what would result from inverting the assumption. Let the earth, instead of offering a fixed centre for the revolving motions of other heavenly bodies, be supposed itself to revolve about some one of these, as the sun. That supposition was tried, and gradually all the phenomena which, before, had been incoherent, anomalous, or contradictory, began to express themselves as parts of a most harmonious system. "Something," he goes on to say, "analogous to this I have practised with regard to the subject of my inquiry—the human understanding. All others had sought their central principle of the intellectual phenomena out of the understanding, in something external to the mind. I first turned my inquiries upon the mind itself. I first applied my examination to the very analysis of the understanding." In words not precisely these, but pretty nearly equivalent to them, does Kant state, by contradistinction, the value and the nature of his own procedure. He first, according to his own representation, thought of applying his investigation to the mind itself. Here was a passage which for years (I may say) continued to stagger and confound me. What! he, Kant, in the latter end of the 18th century, about the year 1787—he the first who had investigated the mind! This was not arrogance so much as it was insanity. Had he said—I, first, upon just principles, or with a fortunate result, investigated the human understanding, he would have said no more than every fresh theorist is bound to suppose, as his preliminary apology for claiming the attention of a busy world. Indeed, if a writer, on any part of knowledge, does not hold himself superior to all his predecessors, we are entitled to say—Then, why do you presume to trouble us? It may look like modesty, but is, in effect, downright effrontery, for you to think yourself no better than other critics; you were at liberty to think so whilst no claimant of public notice—as being so, it is most arrogant in you to be modest. This would be the criticism applied justly to a man who, in Kant's situation, as the author of a new system, should use a language of unseasonable modesty or deprecation. To have spoken boldly of himself was a duty; we could not tolerate his doing otherwise. But to speak of himself in the exclusive terms I have described does certainly seem, and for years did seem to myself, little short of insanity. Of this I am sure,—that no student of Kant, having the passage before him, can have known heretofore what consistent, what rational interpretation to give it; and, in candour, he ought to own himself my debtor for the light he will now receive. Yet, so easy is it to imagine, after a meaning is once pointed out, and the station given from which it shows itself as the meaning—so easy, under these circumstances, is it to imagine that one has, or that one could have, found it for one's self—that I have little expectation of reaping much gratitude for my explanation. I say this, not as of much importance one way or the other in a single case of the kind, but because a general consideration of this nature has sometimes operated to make me more indifferent or careless as to the publication of commentaries on difficult systems when I had found myself able to throw much light on the difficulties. The very success with which I should have accomplished the task—the perfect removal of the obstacles in the student's path—were the very grounds of my assurance that the service would be little valued. For I have found what it was occasionally, in conversation, to be too luminous—to have explained, for instance, too clearly a dark place in Ricardo. In such a case, I have known a man of the very greatest powers mistake the intellectual effort he had put forth to apprehend my elucidation, and to meet it half way, for his own unassisted conquest over the difficulties; and, within an hour or two after, I have had, perhaps, to stand, as an attack upon myself, arguments entirely and recently furnished by myself. No case is more possible: even to apprehend complex explanation, a man cannot be passive; he must exert considerable energy of mind; and, in the fresh consciousness of this energy, it is the most natural mistake in the world for him to feel the argument which he has by considerable effort appropriated to be an argument which he has originated. Kant is the most unhappy champion of his own doctrines, the most infelicitous expounder of his own meaning, that has ever existed. Neither has any other commentator succeeded in throwing a moonlight radiance upon his philosophy. Yet certain I am that, were I, or any man, to disperse all his darkness, exactly in that proportion in which we did so—exactly in the proportion in which we smoothed all hindrances—exactly in that proportion would it cease to be known or felt that there had ever been any hindrances to be smoothed. This, however, is digression, to which I have been tempted by the interesting nature of the grievance. In a jesting way, this grievance is obliquely noticed in the celebrated couplet—
"Had you seen but these roads before they were made,
You'd lift up your hands and bless Marshal Wade."
The pleasant bull here committed conceals a most melancholy truth, and one of large extent. Innumerable are the services to truth, to justice, or society, which never can be adequately valued by those who reap their benefits, simply because the transition from the early and bad state to the final or improved state cannot be retraced or kept alive before the eyes. The record perishes. The last point gained is seen; but the starting point, the point from which it was gained, is forgotten. And the traveller never can know the true amount of his obligations to Marshal Wade, because, though seeing the roads which the Marshal has created, he can only guess at those which he superseded. Now, returning to this impenetrable passage of Kant, I will briefly inform the reader that he may read it into sense by connecting it with a part of Kant's system from which it is in his own delivery entirely dislocated. Going forwards some thirty or forty pages, he will find Kant's development of his own categories. And, by placing in juxtaposition with that development this blind sentence, he will find a reciprocal light arising. All philosophers, worthy of that name, have found it necessary to allow of some great cardinal ideas that transcended all the Lockian origination—ideas that were larger in their compass than any possible notices of sense or any reflex notices of the understanding; and those who have denied such ideas will be found invariably to have supported their denial by a vitium subreptionis, and to have deduced their pretended genealogies of such ideas by means of a petitio principii—silently and stealthily putting into some step of their leger-de-main process everything that they would pretend to have extracted from it. But, previously to Kant, it is certain that all philosophers had left the origin of these higher or transcendent ideas unexplained. Whence came they? In the systems to which Locke replies they had been called innate or connate. These were the Cartesian systems. Cudworth, again, who maintained certain "immutable ideas" of morality, had said nothing about their origin; and Plato had supposed them to be reminiscences from some higher mode of existence. Kant first attempted to assign them an origin within the mind itself, though not in any Lockian fashion of reflection upon sensible impressions. And this is doubtless what he means by saying that he first had investigated the mind—that is, he first for such a purpose.
Where, then, is it, in what act or function of the mind, that Kant finds the matrix of these transcendent ideas? Simply in the logical forms of the understanding. Every power exerts its agency under some laws—that is, in the language of Kant, by certain forms. We leap by certain laws—viz., of equilibrium, of muscular motion, of gravitation. We dance by certain laws. So also we reason by certain laws. These laws, or formal principles, under a particular condition, become the categories.
Here, then, is a short derivation, in a very few words, of those ideas transcending sense which all philosophy, the earliest, has been unable to dispense with, and yet none could account for. Thus, for example, every act of reasoning must, in the first place, express itself in distinct propositions; that is, in such as contain a subject (or that concerning which you affirm or deny something), a predicate (that which you affirm or deny), and a copula, which connects them. These propositions must have what is technically called, in logic, a certain quantity, or compass (viz., must be universal, particular, or singular); and again they must have what is called quality (that is, must be affirmative, or negative, or infinite): and thus arises a ground for certain corresponding ideas, which are Kant's categories of quantity and quality.
But, to take an illustration more appropriately from the very idea which first aroused Kant to the sense of a vast hiatus in the received philosophies—the idea of cause, which had been thrown as an apple of discord amongst the schools by Hume. How did Kant deduce this? Simply thus: it is a doctrine of universal logic that there are three varieties of syllogism—viz., 1st, Categoric, or directly declarative [A is B]; 2d, Hypothetic, or conditionally declarative [If C is D, then A is B]; 3d, Disjunctive, or declarative by means of a choice which exhausts the possible cases [A is either B, or C, or D; but not C or D, ergo B]. Now, the idea of causation, or, in Kant's language, the category of Cause and Effect, is deduced immediately, and most naturally, as the reader will acknowledge on examination, from the 2d or hypothetic form of syllogism, when the relation of dependency is the same as in the idea of causation, and the necessary connexion a direct type of that which takes place between a cause and its effect.