Kant’s transcendental teaching is summarily as follows: “Transcendental” is his epithet for what is neither empirical—i.e. to be derived from experience—nor yet transcendent—i.e. applicable beyond the limits of experience, Definition of “Transcendental.” the mark of experience being the implication of sense or of something which thought contra-distinguishes from its own spontaneous activity as in some sense “the given.” Those features in our organized experience are to be regarded as transcendentally established which are the presuppositions of our having that experience at all. Since they are not empirical they must be structural and belong to “the mind”—i.e. the normal human intelligence, and to like intelligence so far as like. If we set aside such transcendental conditions as belong to sensibility or to the receptive phase of mind and are the presuppositions of juxtaposition of parts, the remainder are ascribable to spontaneity or understanding, to thought with its unifying, organizing or focussing function, and their elucidation is the problem of transcendental analytic. It is still logic, indeed, when we are occupied with the transcendent objects of the discursive faculty as it is employed beyond the limits of experience where it cannot validate its ideas. Such a logic, however, is a dialectic of illusion, perplexed by paralogisms and helpless in the face of antinomies. In transcendental analytic on the other hand we concern ourselves only with the transcendental “deduction” or vindication of the conditions of experience, and we have a logic of cognition in which we may establish our epistemological categories with complete validity. Categories are the forms according to which the combining unity of self-consciousness (synthetic unity of apperception) pluralizes itself through the various functions involved in the constitution of objectivity in different types of the one act of thought, viz. judgment. The clue to the discovery of transcendental conditions Kant finds in the existence of judgments, most manifest in mathematics and in the pure science of nature, which are certain, yet not trifling, necessary and yet not reducible to identities, synthetic therefore and a priori, and so accounted for neither by Locke nor by Leibnitz. “There lies a transcendental condition at the basis of every necessity.”
Kant’s mode of conceiving the activity of thought in the constitution of objects and of their connexion in experience was thought to lie open to an interpretation in conformity with the spirit of his logic, in the sense that the form and the content Form of Matter of Thought. in knowledge are not merely distinguishable functions within an organic whole, but either separable, or at least indifferent one to the other in such a way as to be clearly independent. Thought as form would thus be a factor or an element in a composite unit. It would clearly have its own laws. It would be the whole concern of logic, which, since in it thought has itself for object, would have no reference to the other term of the antithesis, nor properly and immediately to the knowledge which is compact of thought in conjunction with something which, whatever it may be, is prima facie other than thought. There is too much textual warrant for this interpretation of Kant’s meaning. Doubtless there are passages which make against an extreme dualistic interpretation. Even in his “logic” Kant speaks of abstraction from all particular objects of thought rather than of a resolution of concrete thinking into thought and its “other” as separable co-operating factors in a joint product. He spoke throughout, however, as if form and content were mutually indifferent, so that the abstraction of form from content implied nothing of falsification or mutilation. The reserve, therefore, that it was abstraction and not a decomposing that was in question remained to the admirers of his logic quite nugatory. They failed to realize that permissible abstraction from specific contents or methods of knowledge does not obliterate reference to matter or content. They passed easily from the acceptance of a priori forms of thinking to that of forms of a priori thinking, and could plead the example of Kant’s logic.
Kant’s theory of knowledge, then, needed to be pressed to other consequences for logic which were more consonant with the spirit of the Critique. The forms of thought and what gives thought its particular content in concrete acts of thinking could not be regarded as subsisting in a purely external and indifferent relation one to the other. “Laws according to which the subject thinks” and “laws according to which the object is known” cannot be the concern of separate departments of inquiry. As soon divorce the investigation of the shape and material of a mirror from the laws of the incidence of the rays that form images in it, and call it a science of reflection! An important group of writers developed the conception of an adaptation between the two sides of Kant’s antithesis, and made the endeavour to establish some kind of correlation between logical forms and the process of “the given.” There was a tendency to fall back upon the conception of some kind of parallelism, whether it was taken to be interpretative or rather corrective of Kant’s meaning. This device was never remote from the constructions of writers for whom the teaching of Spinoza and Leibnitz was an integral part of their intellectual equipment. Other modes of correlation, however, find favour also, and in some variety. Kant is seldom the sole source of inspiration. His unresolved antithesis[131] is interpreted either diversely or with a difference of emphasis. And the light that later writers bring to bear on Kant’s logic and epistemology from other sides of his speculation varies in kind and in degree.
Another logical movement springs from those whom a correlation of fact within the unity of a system altogether failed to satisfy. There must also be development of the correlated terms from a single principle. Form and content must not only correspond one to the other. They must be exhibited as distinguishable moments within a unity which can at one and the same time be seen to be the ground from which the distinction springs and the ground in virtue of which it is over-ruled. Along this line of speculation we have a logic which claims that whatsoever is in one plane or at one stage in the development of thought a residuum that apparently defies analysis must at another stage and on a higher plane be shown so to be absorbed as to fall altogether within thought. This is the view of Hegel upon which logic comes to coincide with the progressive self-unfolding of thought in that type of metaphysic which is known as absolute, i.e. all-inclusive idealism. The exponent of logic as metaphysic, for whom the rational is the real is necessarily in revolt against all that is characteristically Kantian in the theory of knowledge, against the transcendental method itself and against the doctrine of limits which constitutes the nerve of “criticism.” Stress was to be laid upon the constructive character of the act of thought which Kant had recognized, and without Kant’s qualifications of it. In all else the claim is made to have left the Kantian teaching behind as a cancelled level of speculation.
Transcendental method is indeed not invulnerable. A principle is transcendentally “deduced” when it and only it can explain the validity of some phase of experience, some order of truths. The order of truths, the phase of experience Limitation of Transcendental Method. and its certainty had to be taken for granted. The sense, for example, in which the irreversibility of sequence which is the more known in ordine ad hominem in the case of the causal principle differs from merely psychological conviction is not made fully clear. Even so the inference to the a priori ground of its necessity is, it has been often pointed out, subject to the limitation inherent in any process of reduction, in any regress, that is, from conditionate to condition, viz. that in theory an alternative is still possible. The inferred principle may hold the field as explanation without obvious competitor potential or actual. Nevertheless its claim to be the sole possible explanation can in nowise be validated. It has been established after all by dialectic in the Aristotelian sense of the word. But if transcendental method has no special pride of place, Kant’s conclusion as to the limits of the competence of intellectual faculty falls with it. Cognition manifestly needs the help of Reason even in its theoretical use. Its speculation can no longer be stigmatized as vaticination in vacuo, nor its results as illusory.
Finally, to logic as metaphysic the polar antithesis is psychology as logic. The turn of this also was to come again. If logic were treated as merely formal, the stress of the problem of knowledge fell upon the determination of the Logic and Psychology. processes of the psychological mechanism. If alleged a priori constituents of knowledge—such rubrics as substance, property, relation—come to be explained psychologically, the formal logic that has perforce to ignore all that belongs to psychology is confined within too narrow a range to be able to maintain its place as an independent discipline, and tends to be merged in psychology. This tendency is to be seen in the activity of Fries and Herbart and Beneke, and was actualized as the aftermath of their speculation. It is no accident that it was the psychology of apperception and the voluntaryist theory or practice of Herbart, whose logical theory was so closely allied to that of the formal logicians proper, that contributed most to the development of the post-Kantian psychological logic. Another movement helped also; the exponents of naturalistic evolution were prepared with Spencer to explain the so-called a priori in knowledge as in truth a posteriori, if not to the individual at any rate to the race. It is of course a newer type of psychological logic that is in question, one that is aware of Kant’s “answer to Hume.” Stuart Mill, despite of his relation of antagonism to Hamilton and Mansel, who held themselves to be Kantian in spirit, is still wholly pre-Kantian in his outlook.
Kant’s influence, then, upon subsequent logic is least of all to be measured by his achievement in his professed contribution to technical logic. It may be attributed in some slight degree, perhaps, to incidental flashes of logical Summary. insight where his thought is least of what he himself calls logic, e.g. his exposition of the significance of synthetic judgments a priori, or his explanation of the function of imagery in relation to thought, whereby he offers a solution of the problem of the conditions under which one member of a group unified through a concept can be taken to stand for the rest, or again the way in which he puts his finger on the vital issue in regard to the alleged proof from essence to existence, and illustrations could be multiplied. But much more it belongs to his transformation of the epistemological problem, and to the suggestiveness of his philosophy as a whole for an advance in the direction of a speculative construction which should be able to cancel all Kant’s surds, and in particular vindicate a “ground of the unity of the supersensible which lies back of nature with that which the concept of freedom implies in the sphere of practice,”[132] which is what Kant finally asserts.
iv. After Kant.
Starting from the obvious antithesis of thought and that of which it is the thought, it is possible to view the ultimate relation of its term as that of mutual indifference or, secondly, as that of a correspondence such that while they retain their distinct character modification of the one implies modification of the other, or thirdly and lastly, as that of a mergence of one in the other of such a nature that the merged term, whichever it be, is fully accounted for in a complete theory of that in which it is merged.
The first way is that of the purely formal logicians, of whom Twesten[133] and in England H. L. Mansel may be regarded as typical. They take thought and “the given” as self-contained units which, if not in fact separable, are The Formal Logicians. at any rate susceptible of an abstraction the one from the other so decisive as to constitute an ideal separation. The laws of the pure activity of thought must be independently determined, and since the contribution of thought to knowledge is form they must be formal only. They cannot go beyond the limits of formal consistency or analytic correctness. They are confined to the determination of what the truth of any matter of thought, taken for granted upon grounds psychological or other, which are extraneous to logic, includes or excludes. The unit for logic is the concept taken for granted. The function of logic is to exhibit its formal implications and repulsions. It is questionable whether even this modest task could be really achieved without other reference to the content abstracted from than Mansel, for example, allows. The analogy of the resolution of a chemical compound with its elements which is often on the lips of those who would justify the independence of thought and the real world, with an agnostic conclusion as to non-phenomenal or trans-subjective reality, is not really applicable. The oxygen and hydrogen, for example, into which water may be resolved are not in strictness indifferent one to the other, since both are members of an order regulated according to laws of combination in definite ratios. Or, if applicable, it is double-edged. Suppose oxygen to be found only in water. Were it to become conscious, would it therefore follow that it could infer the laws of a separate or independent activity of its own? Similarly forms of thinking, the law of contradiction not excepted, have their meaning only in reference to determinate content, even though distributively all determinate contents are dispensable. The extreme formalist is guilty of a fallacy of composition in regard to abstraction.