CHAPTER VI

IMMANUEL KANT AND GERMAN IDEALISM

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I. ROADS TO KANT

EVER has a system of thought so dominated an epoch as the philosophy of Immanuel Kant dominated the thought of the nineteenth century. After almost three-score years of quiet and secluded development, the uncanny Scot of Königsburg roused the world from its "dogmatic slumber," in 1781, with his famous Critique of Pure Reason; and from that year to our own the "critical philosophy" has ruled the speculative roost of Europe. The philosophy of Schopenhauer rose to brief power on the romantic wave that broke in 1848; the theory of evolution swept everything before it after 1859; and the exhilarating iconoclasm of Nietzsche won the center of the philosophic stage as the century came to a close. But these were secondary and surface developments; underneath them the strong and steady current of the Kantian movement flowed on, always wider and deeper; until today its essential theorems are the axioms of all mature philosophy. Nietzsche takes Kant for granted, and passes on; 1 Schopenhauer calls the Critique "the most important work in German literature," and considers any man a child until he has understood Kant; Spencer could not understand Kant, and for precisely that reason, perhaps, fell a little short of the fullest philosophic stature. To adapt Hegel's phrase about Spinoza: to be a philosopher, one must first have been a Kantian.

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Therefore let us become Kantians at once. But it cannot

1 The Will to Power, vol. ii, part I.

2 The World as Will and Idea, London, 1883; vol. ii, p. 30.

be done at once, apparently; for in philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line. Kant is the last person in the world whom we should read on Kant. Our philosopher is like and unlike Jehovah; he speaks through clouds, but without the illumination of the lightningflash. He disdains examples and the concrete; they would have made his book too long, he argued.1 (So abbreviated, it contains some 800 pages.) Only professional philosophers were expected to read him; and these would not need illustrations. Yet when Kant gave the MS. of the Critique to his friend Herz, a man much versed in speculation, Herz returned it half read, saying he feared insanity if he went on with it. What shall we do with such a philosopher?

Let us approach him deviously and cautiously, beginning at a safe and respectful distance from him; let us start at various points on the circumference of the subject, and then grope our way towards that subtle center where the most difficult of all philosophies has its secret and its treasure.

1. From Voltaire to Kant

The road here is from theoretical reason without religious faith, to religious faith without theoretical reason. Voltaire means the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia, the Age of Reason. The warm enthusiasm of Francis Bacon had inspired all Europe (except Rousseau) with unquestioning confidence in the power of science and logic to solve at last all problems, and illustrate the “infinite perfectibility” of man. Condorcet, in prison, wrote his Historical Tableau of the Progress of the Human Spirit (1793), which spoke the sublime trust of the eighteenth century in knowledge and reason, and asked no other key to Utopia than universal education. Even the steady Germans had their Aufklärung, their rationalist, Christian Wolff, and their hopeful Lessing. And

1 The Critique of Pure Reason, London, 1881; vol. ii, p. xxvii. All subsequent references are to volume two.

the excitable Parisians of the Revolution dramatized this apotheosis of the intellect by worshipping the "Goddess of Reason,"-impersonated by a charming lady of the streets.

In Spinoza this faith in reason had begotten a magnificent structure of geometry and logic: the universe was a mathematical system, and could be described à priori, by pure deduction from accepted axioms. In Hobbes the rationalism of Bacon had become an uncompromising atheism and materialism; again nothing was to exist but "atoms and the void." From Spinoza to Diderot the wrecks of faith lay in the wake of advancing reason: one by one the old dogmas disappeared; the Gothic cathedral of medieval belief, with its delightful details and grotesques, collapsed; the ancient God fell from his throne along with the Bourbons, heaven faded into mere sky, and hell became only an emotional expression. Helvetius and Holbach made atheism so fashionable in the salons of France that even the clergy took it up; and La Mettrie went to peddle it in Germany, under the auspices of Prussia's king. When, in 1784, Lessing shocked Jacobi by announcing himself a follower of Spinoza, it was a sign that faith had reached its nadir, and that Reason was triumphant.

David Hume, who played so vigorous a rôle in the Enlightenment assault on supernatural belief, said that when reason is against a man, he will soon turn against reason. Religious faith and hope, voiced in a hundred thousand steeples rising out of the soil of Europe everywhere, were too deeply rooted in the institutions of society and in the heart of man, to permit their ready surrender to the hostile verdict of reason; it was inevitable that this faith and this hope, so condemned, would question the competence of the judge, and would call for an examination of reason as well as of religion. What was this intellect that proposed to destroy with a syllogism the beliefs of thousands of years and millions of men? Was it infallible? Or was it one human organ like any other, with strictest limits to its functions and its powers? The time