CHAPTER IX.
THE ATTEMPT AT A CRITICAL SOLUTION: KANT.
The Criticism of Pure Reason has been described by its author as a generalisation of Hume's problem. Hume, he thought, had treated his question on the 'relations of ideas' in their bearing upon 'matters of fact' mainly with reference to the isolated case of cause and effect. Kant extended the inquiry so as to comprise all those connective and unifying ideas which form the subject-matter of metaphysics. In his own technical language—which has lost its meaning for the present day—he asked, 'Are Synthetic judgments a priori possible?'—a question which in another place he has translated into the form, 'Is the metaphysical faith of men sound, and is a metaphysical science possible?' By a metaphysics he meant in the first instance the belief in a more than empirical reality, and secondly the science which should give real knowledge of God, Freedom and Immortality,—a science whose objects would be God, the World, and the Soul. From a comparatively early date (1762-4) Kant had been inclined to suspect and distrust the claims of metaphysics to replace faith, and to give knowledge of spiritual reality; and he had tried to vindicate for the moral and religious life an independence of the conclusions and methods of the metaphysical theology and psychology of the day. But it was not till some years later—in 1770—that he formulated any very definite views as to the essential conditions of scientific knowledge: and it was not till 1781 that his theory on the subject was put together in a provisionally complete shape.
What then are the criteria of a science? When is our thought knowledge, and of objective reality? In the first place, there must be a given something—a sens-datum—an 'impression' as Hume might have said. If there be no impression, therefore, there can be no scientific idea, no real knowledge. There must be the primary touch—the feeling—the affection—the je ne sais quoi of contact with reality. Secondly, what is given can only be received if taken up by the recipient, and in such measure as he is able to appropriate it. The given is received in a certain mode. In the present case, the sensation is apprehended and perceived under the forms of space and time. Perception, in other words, whatever may be its special quality or its sensuous material, is always an act of dating and localisation. The distinction between the mere lump of feeling or sensibility and the perception is that the latter implies a field of extended and mutually excluding parts of space, and a series of points of time, both field and series being continuous, and, so far as inexhaustibility goes, infinite. Thirdly, even in the reception of the given there is a piece of action and spontaneity. If the more passive recipiency be called Sense, this active element in the adaptation may be termed Intellect. Intellect is a power or process of choice, selection, comparison, distinguishing and dividing, analysis and synthesis, affirmation and negation, numeration, of judgment and doubt, of connexion and disjunction, differentiation and integration. Its general aspect is by Kant sometimes described as Judgment—the act of thought which correlates by distinguishing; sometimes as Apperception, and the unity of apperception. It is, i. e., an active unity and a synthetic energy; it unifies, and always unifies. It links perception to perception, correlating one with another—interpreting one by another; estimating the knowledge-value of one by the rest. It thus 'apperceives.' It is a faculty of association and consociation of ideas. But the association is inward and 'ideal' union: the one idea interpenetrates and fuses with the other, even while it remains distinct.
Kant's work may be described—in its first stage—as an analysis and a criticism of experience. The term Experience is an ambiguous one. It sometimes means what has been called the 'raw material' of experience: the crude, indigested mass of poured-in matter-of-knowledge. If there be such a shapeless lump anywhere,—which has to be considered presently—it, at any rate, is not on Kant's view properly entitled to the name of Experience. The Given must be felt and apprehended: and—to put the point paradoxically—to be felt it must be more than felt,—it must be perceived. It must, in other words, be projected—set in space and time: let out of the mere dull inner subjectivity of feeling into the clear and distinct outer subjectivity of perception. But, again, to be perceived, it must be apperceived: to be set in time and space, it must first of all be in the hands of the unifying consciousness, which is the lord of time and space. For in so far as space and time mean a place and an order—in so far as they mean more than an empty inconceivable receptacle for bulks of sensation, in the same degree do they presuppose an intellectual, synthetic genius, which is in all its perceptions one and the same,—the fundamental, original unity of consciousness. And this analysis of experience is transcendental.' Beginning with the assumed datum—the object of or in experience—it shows that this object which is supposed to be there—to exist by itself and wait for perception—is created by and in the very act which apprehends it. Climbing up and rising above its habitual absorption in the thing, consciousness (that of the philosophic observer and analyst) sees the thing in the act of making, and watches its growth.
We have seen that Kant made free use of the metaphor of giving and receiving. But it is hardly possible to use such metaphors and retain independence of judgment. The associations customarily attached to the figurative language carry one away easily, and often for a long way, on the familiar paths of imagination. The analogy is used even where—if all were looked into—its terms become meaningless. No reader of Locke can have failed, e. g., to notice how he is misled by his own images of the dark room and the empty cabinet:—images, useful and perhaps even necessary, but requiring constant restraint in him who would ply them wisely and to his reader's good. From what has been said above it will be clear that the acquisition of experience, the growth of knowledge, is a unique species of gift and acceptance. The consciousness which Kant describes may be the consciousness of John Doe or Richard Roe: but as Kant describes it, the limitations of their personality, i.e. of their individual body and soul, have been neglected. It is consciousness in general which is Kant's theme, just as it is granite in general—and not the block in yonder field,—which is the theme of the geologist. Once get that clear, and you will also see clearly that consciousness is at once giver and recipient—neither or both: at once receptivity and spontaneity. But—you may reply—does not the material object act (chemically, optically, mechanically, &c.) on the sense-organ on the periphery of my body, does not the nerve-string convey the impression to the brain; and is not perception the effect of that process, in which the material object is the initial cause?
In this exposition—which is not unknown in vulgar philosophy—there is a monstrous, almost inextricable, complication of fact with inference, of truth with error. So long as there is an uncertainty—and metaphysicians themselves, we may be reminded, are not agreed upon the matter—as to what we are to understand by cause, effect, and act, what an impression is, and how brain and intelligence mutually stand to each other, it is hardly possible to pronounce judgment upon this mode of statement. Yet perhaps we may go so far as to say that while the terms quoted bear an intelligible meaning when applied within the physiological process they are vain when used of relations of mind to body. There is a sense in which we may speak of the action of mind on body, and of body on mind: but what we mean would perhaps be more unmistakably expressed by saying that the higher intellectual and volitional energies are never in our experience entirely independent of the influences of the lower sensitive and emotional nature. In the metaphysical sense which the terms are here made to bear, they mislead. Action and re-action can only take place in the separateness of space, where one is here and another there: (though, be it added, they cannot take place even on these terms, unless the here and the there be somehow unified in a medium which embraces both). Mens, said Spinoza, is the idea corporis[1]: he would hardly have said Corpus habet ideam. What he meant would scarcely have been well described by calling it a parallelism or mutual independence, yet with harmony or identity, of body and mind. Apart from body, no doubt, mind is for him a nullity: for body is what gives it reality. But, on the other hand, Mind is the enveloping and including 'Attribute' of the two: idealism overlaps realism.
This was the fundamental proposition which Kant contended for; what he spoke of as his own Copernican discovery: though, in reality, for the student of the history of philosophy it was only the re-statement, in some respects the clearer statement, of the idealism which even Hume, not to mention Spinoza and Leibniz, had maintained. The world of experience—the empirical, objective, and real world—is a world of ideas, of representations which have place only in mind, of appearances. Space and time are subjective: the forms of thought are subjective: and yet they constitute phenomenal or empirical or real objectivity. Such language is—it would seem inevitably—misunderstood: and in his second edition, Kant—besides many other minor modifications of statement,—had to defend himself by inserting a 'confutation of idealism,' i.e. of the theory which holds that the existence of objects outside us in space is doubtful, if not even impossible. But no end of argument will ever confute the view that Kant's doctrine is such idealism: until people can be got to rise to a new view of what is subjectivity—what is an idea—and what is existence outside us.
By 'subjective' the world is in the way of understanding what is due to personal prepossession, void of general acceptability, a product of individual feeling, peculiar and inexplicable tastes. By subjective Kant means what belongs to the subject or knowing mind as such and in its generality: what is constitutive of intelligence in general, what sense and intellect are semper et ubique. Into the question how the human being came to have such an intellectual endowment—the question which Nativist psychology is supposed to settle in one way; and Evolutionism in another—Kant does not enter; he merely says where there is knowledge, there is a knower,—a knowing subject so constituted. It comes after all to the tautology that the reality we know is a known reality: that knowledge is a growth in the knower, and not an accidental product due to things otherwise unknown. The predicate (or category) 'is' is contained, implicit, in the predicate 'is known,' or what 'is' puts implicitly, 'is known' puts explicitly and truly.
By 'appearance' the world understands a sham, or at least somewhat short of reality. By appearance Kant understands a reality which has appeared: or, as that is going too far, a something which is real so far as it goes (a prima facie fact), but only a candidate for admission into the circle of reals. And such reality depends on nothing more than its thorough-going coherence with other appearances, its explaining the rest, and being in turn explained by them,—its absolute adaptation to its environment. And this environment all lies in the common field of consciousness, and in the one correlating and unifying apperceptivity of the ego,—that Ego which is the inseparable comrade, vehicle, and judge, of all our perceptions. It is the appearance—but as yet not the appearance of something,—but rather an appearance to or for something.