Berkeley has unconsciously so contrived as to bring us continually into contact with those ultimate speculative problems which it has been contemporary fashion to regard as the private property of a single school. But throughout this work, his cautious and critical spirit has prevented him from being led captive by any of the shibboleths in which current thought deals so extensively. In one who respects Berkeley's profound piety, agnosticism can find no response, while, on the other side, appreciation of Locke's wholesome estimate of the insignificance of human faculty shows the egotistical pantheism of some German thinkers in all its naked absurdity.

Berkeley's philosophical development furnishes another confirmation of the truism, that psychological study of individual experience, like other forms of scientific research, implies certain metaphysical presuppositions. By the elucidation of these, the import, if not the scope, of knowledge may be largely altered. To this discussion modern speculation, in the direct line from Kant, has been devoted with some exclusiveness. For Berkeley's elevation of the conscious subject to what may be aptly called a position of independence, like his explanation of experience by reference to indwelling deity, was the result rather of a bare statement than of an articulated scheme. The scheme, the whole scheme, and nothing but the scheme, has since been the main quest of systematic thinkers. Where Berkeley had left an unbridged gap-a dualism between finite minds and the Infinite Mind-Kant attempted to construct a unity from the side of the finite, and furnished only with its scant resources. He had at first a dim perception, more clearly expressed, no doubt, in the

second edition of the 'Critique,' and brought at last to full consciousness in Fichte and Hegel, that the mechanical category of action and reaction, employed by Berkeley to describe the connection between the Divine Mind and finite intelligences, must be transcended. The implications of such a relationship had, in short, to be unravelled by a fresh analysis of mental action, and, in particular, by a reconsideration of the part played by mind in the constitution of ordinary experience.

III. Kant, and the Nominalist and Realist In-
terpretations of his System.

Prior to Kant, thinkers had assumed the truth of knowledge, and had tried to exhibit its ground and content. Led by the circumstances of historical development, he set himself the entirely new question, How is knowledge possible at all? His interpreters have been prone to regard his philosophy merely as a metaphysico-ethical system. While insisting upon his peculiar place in the historical development of thought, they have frequently disregarded the very conditions out of which his distinctive genius grew. But the critical philosophy is the key to modern speculation as much because it is an autobiographical record, as on account of its internal doctrine. Kant's personal experiences in the struggle for "more light" determined his work, both formally and materially, even more perhaps than his conscious system-making. The meeting-point of several theories, his intellect passed through successive phases, and at the last, in his completed doctrine, the traces of this transformation are everywhere evident.

Kant's first business, then, was to thrust aside the presuppositions of his predecessors, and with them the various consequences of which they had been productive. He did not assume knowledge, but he said, We have knowledge: how does it come into being? In particular, he pointed out that mind is not merely a passive receptacle of ideas, but that it has a certain constitutive power of its own: we declare, not only that two and two make four, but that this will always be so. Mind adds the element of universality and necessity. How does it do this? in other words, how are synthetic judgments a priori possible? They exist, but in obedience to what conditions? In the 'Critique of Pure Reason' he shows successively, first, that these mind - constituted judgments are abstract general statements, and are therefore subjectively a priori; second, that the a posteriori objects, to which these forms apply, are also mind-originated. "The understanding makes nature, but out of a material which it does not make." And thirdly, that, because form is dependent upon matter for its realisation, the a priori categories can only be applied within the limits of a posteriori sense experience. (Man, viewed purely as an intellectual being, knows phenomena, not realities. But Kant did not rest content with this. He went on to point out, in the Critique of Practical Reason,' that man, as a moral being, can get beyondphenomena to noumenal verities. (The central ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, which pure reason is condemned to pursue resultlessly, are thus vindicated in the sphere of the ethical consciousness.) Without them rational moral law could not be fulfilled; and this law is unconditionally laid upon man.

His

burden of duty is not greater than he can bear, and so the conditions of well-doing must be preserved.

Criticising, as he did, now Hume and the empiricists, now Leibniz and the Wolffians, Kant could not fail to be obscure, if not self-contradictory. The interpretations put upon the first edition of his Critique' caused him to introduce what many hold to be essential alterations in the second edition. Moreover, the sharp division between the intellect and the will, with the limitation of the former and the final vindication of the latter, has rendered possible a fragmentary interpretation of his system, based on a partial acceptance of its results.) Ample reasons have unquestionably existed for the recent remarkable upgrowth of Kantian literature, with its numerous controversies and variant readings of the thinker's meaning.

One may therefore reasonably inquire, What necessity is there for treating Kant's work according to a peculiar method? In stating his doctrine, why not abide by his own words and explain his ideas, as is customary in relation to other men, by reference to his own expression of them? In answering this question one best realises the special difficulties presented by Kant, and obtains insight into the causes which have led to such various and mutually exclusive interpretations of his system. Like every other thinker, he was so far bowed down by the weight of the past. The remnants of scholasticism traceable in the post-Leibnitian rationalism of Germany - in which he was trained - find place in the completed critical scheme. They supplied a ready-made framework, within which he attempted to build up his own new thought. The form of his theory, to be brief, was in essentials unsuited to its

matter. Hence, throughout, that series of imperfections, of misleading divisions, and of dubious formula which has done so much to obscure the writer's ultimate meaning.

To take but a few examples at random. The absolute distinction instituted between various faculties of the mind, as between Verstand and Vernunft, does not only affect readers of Kant to-day, it affected the philosopher himself. He gradually came to regard these faculties, which, in their abstraction from the self, have no real existence, as actual entities. Characteristic activities of thought, instead of being straightway referred to one ego, were viewed as proceeding from separate faculties endowed with a selfhood of their own. Understanding, Imagination, Judgment, Reason, though but elements in a single mind, were treated as if each possessed a fully furnished individuality peculiar to itself. Nay, more, each was in a manner banished to a region into which none of its fellows had right of entrance. On this account, if on no other, many are unable to admit that the different parts of the Critique' stand in organic relation to one another. A similar difficulty is caused by the separation between understanding and sense. Antagonistic in nature, these two factors of knowledge are brought into mutual connection only within a sphere which is void of ultimate truth. The shade of reality is a ghostly attendant upon man's mental being; the thinker need but try to grasp the actually existent to discover that he is deluding himself. (In the same way, the transition from the intellectual to the moral sphere is so abrupt as to amount, in the eyes of many, to no transition. It is the result of an after-thought, they say, and, as such, it