MA S TER NEGA TIVE NO. 93-81187-21 MICROFILMED 1993 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or other reproduction is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research." If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: WITTER, CHARLES E. TITLE: PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS PLACE: CHICAGO DA TE : 913 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT BIBLIOGRAPHIC MTrROFORM TARCFT Master Negative # Restrictions on Use: Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record Witter, Charles Edgar. ^, • Pragniatic dements in Kant's philosopliv Charles Edc^ar Witter. CIiiea.iro, 1913. V. Id p. 24^"*. Thesis (i-ir. D.)— I'niversity of Cliicngo, 1912. Bibliography: p. 74-76. by ' '^•^'^' '""•'■' ' '- ' 'W 2 rrncmatism (Philosophy) Lil>r;iry of CoiiKrcss I'liiv. of Chicni-o I.il.r. I.I-I.IO.'I B2798.\\«5 FILM SIZE: iilj^j!^ IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA REDUCTION RATIO:_^ / / ^ IB IIB DATE FILMED:__3_:2-J_^ir_ INITIALS IIA FILMED BY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONIS. INC WOOPBRrPGErCT ,*b^ % c Association for Information and Image Management 1 1 00 Wayne Avenue. Suite 1 1 00 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 1 2 3 Uii llllllllllllllllllllHIlllllllllll lllllllllllllllllllll lllllllllll 7 8 lllllllllll m 10 11 J iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii 12 13 14 15 mm iiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiii m T 1 Inches 1.0 1^ 28 1.4 25 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 I.I 1.25 MPNUFfiCTURED TO RUM STRNDfiRDS BY APPLIED IMRGE, INC. O V ■% -^^^ '^ '?' ^.^f "' '"^*'^'"^*'^^- '^ -^^ --"4 ^e held hat 1 Kant had placed less rationalistic confidence in the a nriori certainty of mathematical knowledge, he would have succeeded hfZ he emphasis from constitutive to regulative in the treatment of al h"! reason. It seems deplorable that his criticism could not, at the outset have been urned to a more minute and genetic inquiry into the rli character of geometry. He says: y mio ine real On the necessity of an a priori representation of space rests the aoodirtir L" ,, , '"'"""'" °' ^^"^ "«^« a ^<"«^ept gained a posteriori TZlnce Z\^ necessity, but only something taught in each case by experience^ Whatever is derived from experience possesses a relative generalitv tht' t7 "" :"^"«-"- We should therefore not be able toTy Tor ttan meth' require the assistance of the mind's hypothe- ses, of ideas, to keep the "facts" from being meaningless or inadequate. Mill saw cleariy, however, just in this connecdon, that the idea must develop within the same experience in which the facts play their part. Kant's confidence that the steps of the great mathematicians like Newton "became a highway on which the latest posterity may march with perfect confidence"* might have been rudely shaken could he have foreseen the efforts of a non-Euclidean geometr>^ coupled with its appropriate non-Newtonian mechanics, to describe our worid as exactly as the Euclidean can do it. In the words of Lobachewsky, " We cognize directly in nature only motion, without which all the impressions our senses receive become impossible. All other ideas, for example geometric, though tied up implicitly in the properties of motion, are artificial products of our minds; and consequently space, by its ow^n self, abstractly, for us does not exist."* If Kant had been less cavalier toward the psychological aspects of his problem, he might have realized, as have later thinkers, that geometry arose originally out of man's interest in the spatial relations of physical bodies about him, numerous facts testifying to its empirical origin; and that its development cannot be made intelligible apart from consideration of these. "The per- ception of space as a continuous whole goes back to such empirical elements as sensations of movement, sight, touch, the statical sense of the semicircular canals, the power of orienting the body with reference to presented stimuli."3 The unitary conception of space resulting from all these factors is a complex phenomenon and is determined by the sensory factors that contribute to it. This is e\idenced by the fact that psychological spaces which correspond to the different senses are not entirely identical. The unitary space-perception of a man blind from birth is of one sort and that of one of unimpaired vision is of another sort. Different forms of geometry have developed in accordance with these differences of sensory material and have been characterized as * Mueller's trans., p. 583. ' Lobachewsky, New Principles of Geometry, p. 15 (Ed. Bruce Halstead). 3 Ladd, op. cit., p. 229. 13 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY motor, visual, etc., as they have placed chief emphasis on one or another of these sensory factors. Euclid's geometry is largely motor. Pro- jective geometry is visual. Moreover these psychological distinctions have played no inconsiderable part in the discussions as to the validity of these competitive systems of geometry.* We might digress at this point also to say that Kant's confidence in the growing science of mathematical physics, the other field on which he drew for illustrations of necessary a priori judgments, might have been similarly shaken if the discoveries of radium and uranium had occurred in his day, and he would have been spared the error — in opposition to Hume — of getting too much fixity in his judgments, even allowing for his scrupulous care to adhere to general principles and not to pass over to specific laws. When such universally accepted rubrics as the atomic theory find themselves partly, at least, discredited by the advance of science, it is well not to try to make our physics too mathematical. It may be as difiicult to apply mathematics in this rigid way to physics as Locke found it was to apply that science to ethics and for just the same reason, namely, because the facts are not all in or because the facts actually change. From the pragmatic or functional standpoint the facts in any science are only provisionally or tentatively given. Nothing can be said to be absolutely fixed, unless it be the fact of struggle, growth, purposive endeavor. Facts change, or if this seems harsh to the realist or the idealist, what seem to be unquestionable facts actually change, and for hum.an experience this comes to the same thing. Truths are relative to the conditions, situations, problems in connection with which they take their genesis and as solutions for which they are for- mulated. When these problems and conditions change so-called truths are reformulated pari passu with the changes or advances. The so-called facts and truths of a given age come, therefore, to bear all the ear-marks of postulates or hypotheses. With a forward look and for the purpose they serve they are true and seemingly eternally true. From the back- ward look of succeeding ages they are revalued and often superseded. This is the fact of history, whatever may seem to be the verbal difiSculties in the appraisement of them and of the fact. But, returning to Kant's own treatment of space, we find that he inevitably moves away from the transcendental to a functional statement himself whenever he approximates the real value of this category. Space does not represent any quality of objects by themselves, or objects m their relation to one another; i.e., space does not represent any determination » Withers, Euclid's Parallel Postulate. SPACE AND TIME 13 which IS inherent in the objects themselves, and would remain, even if all subjective conditions of intuition were removed. For no determination of objects, whether belonging to them absolutely or m relation to others can enter mto our intuition before the actual existence of the objects themselves that IS to say, they can never be intuitions a priori. It is therefore from the human standpoint only that we can speak of space, extended objects etc If we drop the subjective condition under which alone we can gain 'external mtuition, that is so far as we ourselves may be affected by objects, the repre- sentation of space means nothing. For this predicate is applied to objects only in so far as they appear to us, and are objects of our senses. Our dis- cussions teach therefore, the reality, i.e., the objective validity, of space with regard to all that can come to us externally as an object, but likewise the Ideality of space with regard to things when they are considered in themselves by our reason, and independent of the nature of our senses.' And since these independent things have utterly no significance for us the meaning of space is limited to its functional use, whatever may be true of Its genetic development. Kant adds: We maintain the empirical reality of space, so far as every possible external experience is concerned, but at the same time its transcendental ideality that IS to say, we maintain that space is nothing if we leave out of consideration the conditions of a possible experience, and accept it as something on which things Dy themselves are in any way dependent.' In these utterances we have clearly stated the contradictory elements of the functional and the transcendental. Inasmuch as Kant constantly shows the futility of talking about an object outside ''the conditions of a possible experience," we are warranted in holding that the only really valuable ingredient in his whole treatment of space is the functional-- that which pertains to space "with regard to all that can come to us externally as an object.'^ Even in the phrase "externally as an object" we have, of course, an abstraction the futility of which Kant is aiming all along to show. He does not realize the pitfalls into which he is betrayed by his own abstract terms. It was long ago pointed out that this manner of separating the elements of -poor sensation" and of mental powers is a work of mythology. My space-intuitions occur not in two times but in one. There is not one moment of passive, inextensive sensation, succeeded by another of active extensive perception but the form I see is as immediately felt as the color which fills It out. That the higher parts of the mind come in, who can deny ? They add and subtract, they compare and measure, they reproduce and abstract. They mweave the space-sensations with inteUectual relations: but » Mueller's trans., pp. 20, 22. » ibid. i\ 14 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY SPACE AND TIME these relations are the same when they obtain between the elements of the space-system as when they obtain between any of the other elements of which the world is made.* Kant's mistake here as elsewhere in his '' Anschauung with necessity" is in holding to a sensation-atomism, the view that originally a thing of sensation is given in consciousness which must first be brought into an orderiy connection by the intellect. Yet what his whole deduction establishes is the fact that in sensation we have just one whole organic experience, that sensation existing by itself, apart from experience, is a meaningless expression. It is worthy of repetition, however, that Kant removes at one fell stroke the whole structure of naive realism in this treatment of space and time. He says: ''If we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear."' In the words of Watson, "Kant rules out the doctrine of Newton that space is a real thing, the doctrine of Locke that it is a property of real things, and the doctrine of Leibnitz that it is a relation of real things."^ In amendment of this the pragmatist would add simply, of real things as abstracted from our own mental needs and activity. To recapitulate, then, we find Kant oscillating between the two uses of his fundamental forms of perception— space and time. Rightly repudiating an empiricism that resolved experience into unrelated atoms leaving in reality no experience whatever, he seeks a way of securing unity. To do this he thinks it necessary to introduce a transcendental element — spaceless and timeless. His argument proceeds not by introspection but by formal reasoning. Assuming, in contradiction to all that he is setting himself to prove, that original sense-elements do exist in this primordial condition, he clamps down upon them his tran- scendental forms of space and time. He conceives space as a unity, holding unconsciously the mathematical viewpoint and failing to note the psychological development of our actual space experiences. His argument is valid only if we concede the premises — the original unrelated elements. Pragmatists do concede the fact of unity but deny the need of the transcendental. Kant himself exposes the weakness of his original assumption in proceeding to show that space and time are never » James, Psychology, II, 275. * Aesthetic (Mahaffy's trans.), II, 59. 3 The Philosophy of Kant Explained (larger work), p. 90. 15 found as empty concepts, as mere preconditions to sensible experience but as inevitably fast bound up with concrete material itself asTn vaSv functioning in situations of experience which preclude n abs^t^^^^^^^^^^^^^ sense-elements on one side and forms of perception on the othe^^^ H^^^ does not, however, reach explicitly the pragmatic insight that our THE MIND'S CONSTRUCTION OF NATURE Kant's unconscious shifting from the transcendental to the functional runs through his twofold use of the categories in his "Deduction of the Categories," and his essential agreement with pragmatic doctrine, in so far as he keeps to the proper use of his concepts, comr^ to light in his teaching of the mind's determination of nature. Kant realizes clearly the difficulty involved in regarding the work of thought as merely reporting, representing, or pointing at an external, fixed reality. It is precisely this realization that leads him to introduce a transcendental logic, as over against the traditional analytic logic of the schools. He wants synthetic, not merely analytic judgments. With Locke he feels the need of something more than "trifling judg- ments." He wants thought to go forward and it cannot move onward if its task is merely to record something ready, given. In accounting for synthetic a priori judgments, in the deduction of his categories, he does just what this latest movement of philosophic thought has made prominent, namely, he shows that thought is constructive, that it functions in determining experience, and that it is the conditio sine qua non for an orderly, harmonious experience. He declares: "When we si>eak of the categories being necessary for our experience, what do we mean by experience? We mean a great complex, embracing a vast number of objects, and we also mean the legitimate and orderly con- nection of these objects into a great harmony or unity."' His very theme has a pragmatic tone— How is experience possible ? He substitutes for the Greek objects (as Windelband terms them) given objects of which knowledge is the copy— experience, or what he calls phenomenal appearance. He does not seem to realize that in the phenomenal itself we may get real objects, the only objects that can be real for us, although this is implicitly suggested over and over in his thought. Indeed it is in places more than suggested. He does not actually oppose "phenomenal" to "real." In refuting idealism he expressly says in one place that the phenomenal does not exclude reality, but from the pragmatic standpoint he weakens this assertion by adding, "We cannot possibly know the thing by the senses as it is in itself."' This involves an assumption that pragmatism does not make. But we are concerned now to see his pragmatic concessions. The old analytic logic, he says, dealt only with the forms of thought. Transcendental » Prolegomena, p. 65. ' Ibid., p. 43- 16 THE mind's construction OF NATURE jj logic Will enable us to determine the positive contents of knowledge Z^Zrr^'' ' "'"'^" ^^ ^^"^^^^-^y' - -"t a criterion of truth Itself We want not merely to lay down the negative conditions of knowledge (although this is what the limited application of hi revolution of thought amounted to in his first CriHgue)^ut we want to also?;;;: " ^'"" " """''^ '"'^^"^^^^^"- »- p-^-^^- ^^^ the frr'' k^'k'"^^ Kantianism agree that we ourselves help to make h r al ty which we know. When Kant asks, How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible, the answer runs that we know the part of reality which we ourselves make out of pure reason, without experience. But realitrT V' Tl' 'f''' "^ '^ "^'^ ^"^ ^^^ ^^^ -f--nced reality Pragmatism defends the view that we construct ourVeality- our orderly worid-step by step, starting with provisionally given facts and postulating one hypothesis after another as ordering 'principS Kant makes no attempt psychologically to detail the operations by that we participate in the process is sound pragmatic doctrine. At this point James raises a protest: "Superficially this sounds like Kant's view, but between categories fulminated before nature began, and cate- ra onahsm and empiricism yawns. To the genuine Kantianer, Schiller wi 1 always be to Kant as a satyr to Hyperion."^ This expresses what others have deemed to be one of the greatest differences between Kant and the pragmatist. It overiooks, however, the fact that Kant is not concerned with the psychological problem of the genetic origin of the categories, but with the epistemological problem of their value and func ion in experience. We are far from denying that it is precisely a justification he explicitly says: "We are discussing not the origin of expenence, but of that which lies in experience. The former pertains to empirical psychology , and would even then never be adequately explained WI hou the latter, which belongs to the Kritik of cognition, and particu- lariy of the understanding."^ A little concession on Kant's part to the ongin of experience" would have helped him to be more dynamic less mechanical and structural. It would have enabled him to carry' ^l^TTT. '"''f '''''''' ^^ '^'^^^' "^' '" ''' ^^"^^^'^ consequences, which he failed to do. As Schiller says, " Kant did not grasp all that ii contained in ^r^-the real nature of our knowing not as a mechanical ' ^^^Hfnatism, p. 249. . Prolegomena, p. 61. i8 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT*S PHILOSOPHY operation of pure intellect, but as a function motived by our needs, ends. He did not see that fundamental axioms (like causation) which he regarded as facts of mental structure originate in subjective demands."* But, allowing for this limitation already discussed, it is with the doctrine of a constructed experience just the same that Kant and we are here concerned. Kant sees that nature does not prescribe laws to our understanding, for in that case we should have only empirical knowledge. He means by this that we should have only accidents, fragments, dead copies. For an a priori knowledge of nature our understanding must prescribe laws to nature. This means, to make use of trite allusions, that he cannot rest satisfied with the conception of the mind as an empty casket or a blank tablet whose sole function can be to take in or register what falls into or strikes it from an external source. That was just where Locke and Hume left the matter. Mill expressed the same reaction when he later asked. How can a series of impressions know itself as a series? Kant says: *'The understanding creates its laws not from nature, but prescribes them to it."' Here again is the cardinal error of separating two aspects of the knowing process, instead of treating that process as just one whole fact. But the problem had been transmitted to Kant in this form and our interest is in the hints given of the functional use of the categories. It is only to nature as phenomena or as a group of phenomena that the mind thus prescribes its laws. Our understand- ing cannot determine nature as a thing-in-itself or as a system of things- in-themselves. ''The cognition of what cannot be an object of experi- ence would be hyperphysical, and concerning that the subject of our present discussion has nothing to say, but only concerning the cognition of nature, the reality of which can be confirmed by experience. Our inquiry here extends not to things-in-themselves, but to things as objects of possible experience, and the complex of these is what we properly designate as nature."-* We are, therefore, justified in holding that the distinction between phenomena and noumena, while it constitutes an obstacle to a thoroughly consistent pragmatic attitude, and shows Kant's rationalistic predilections, is not logically germane to the problem he is here discussing. The tedious repetitions of Kant's own work are likely to encumber our comparative study, but it seems necessary to say that it would be idle to deny the error of Kant and his followers of the Hegelian school in disregarding the psychological aspects of the categories and in seeking to » Studies in Humanism, p. 468. > Prolegomena, p. 36. * ^^'> PS^* THE mind's construction OF NATURE ig remain on the inner side of cognitive processes for a special theory of knowledge. The separation of stuff and form smacks of the outworn theory of separate soul-capacities, as well as of sensation-atomism. Pragmatists have rightly asked in what sense the categories are a priori -whether m a logical or psychological sense. Schiller has suggested that the Kantian categories as well as the forms of perception could show their exclusive validity only if the truth of his table of categories itself shows an a priori necessity of thought. If empirically they are verified before all others, they may be allowed to stand. But all subsequent research has shown just the opposite. It is far from our purpose to defend his table of categories or the artificial system of them and that is not the point. Pragmatism constructs the categories as well as the forms of space and time as psychological facts, that is, as facts that do not contain a solution of the problems of knowledge, but are themselves the proper objects of psychological investigation. It recognizes the validity of no one table of categories alone. Their number and nature must depend upon our experience. They grow out from human personality and its needs as their starting-point, with the possibility of further future de- velopment. But it is doubtful if certain pragmatists, in their considera- tion of the categories, have done full justice to Kant's meaning, have seen his essential kinship with them in placing himself upon the phenomenal- istic standpoint. Kant holds that if nature were a connection of real things, we could arrive at a knowledge of the laws of this connection in two ways only; either because we should find these connections in experience or because, while we construct them out of our own forms of synthesis it is so arranged that we get a knowledge of reality itself in the process The second alternative assumes the pre-established harmony which Kant once for all repudiates. The nature with which Kant deals is just the sum total of phenomena, a number of mental representations held together by the mind's own laws. To be sure, in the background of his thought stand the Dinge an sich as the ultimate cause of our sensations but they are negligible for his purposes here. The universal laws of nature are really the laws of thought which we discover in experience only because we have constructed that experience in accordance with them. This, at any rate, approximates the statement of our constructive (and possibly our purposive) mental activity as it is given by pragmatic - thmkers. As to the first alternative, it ignores a critical examination of what a connection of red things could be apart from their entrance into our organic life, and the difficulty is the seeming implication that these real things might be found if we knew how to go after them. 30 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY Pragmatists, in their handling of postulates, have explained away the Kantian criteria for valid a priori truth— his necessity and uni- versality. They regard necessity as simply the expression of a need on our part. We need the postulate and must have it as a means to our ends. **If we make a demand that a certain principle shall hold, we naturally extend our demand to all cases without distinction of time past, present, and to come."' But is this essentially different from Kant's meaning? His universality and necessity are virtually one, for the former depends upon the latter. It is difficult to see in the *'a priori necessity" of judgments or categories an import vitally distinct from the pragmatic recognition that "no experience can upset them because they are now a part of the structure of our mind." Indeed, if we may linger here just a moment, whatever difference there is in the two statements might be claimed for Kant's credit, for while "the structure of the mind" might conceivably be modified by a change of diet or climate affecting the nervous mechanism, Kant's criteria set forth the necessary conditions of experience. Experience may cease to be, but so long as we do business at all in the world of thinking we shall have to deal in such manner as to be understood. Kant presupposes an objective common test. Pragmatists have given more attention to the supposed derivation of categories in the experience of the race, but we have already indicated that Kant was not concerned with the evolutionary aspect of them. Again we concede his limitations. He does not pause to inquire enough as to the relative stability of the concepts with which thought must operate. Professor A. W. Moore has well said: "The certainty of the categories is even more fatally universal than the tides or the eclipses.''^* Kant says explicitly: "So there arose the pure concepts of the understanding, concerning which I could make certain that these and this exact number only constitute our whole cognition of things from pure understanding."^ In working over his concepts according to the Aristotelian tradition he took his resultant table much too seriously. His reality is not fluid and plastic enough for the prag- matist, but his conception of the relation of thinking to truth and reality leans directly toward pragmatism. While he held the conception of deductive certainty as the ideal of science and was still burdened with the view of final, unmodifiable knowledge, yet we may recognize the value » Schiller, Personal Idealism, "Axioms as Postulates," p. 69. « Pragmatism and Its Critics, p. 73. » Prolegomena, p. 85. THE mind's construction OF NATURE 32 Of his position for scientific procedure for all time. In the language ofDeLaguna: ^ ^ We arc in possession of a number of very general principles, to which we attribute a truth that is not conceived as open to correction by ai^y experLnce masn^uch as all the particulars of experience are interpreted in accordrce "Th these principles, and any observation which apparently contradicted them would rather Itself be denied than cause a modification in these princ pl^ These principles are obviously synthetic, and thus open to formal questioning and no demonstration of their truth can be given; but they constitute the most comprehensive organization of our experience, and it is in this function no toher assignable meaning than their conformity to these most general conditions of experience.^ KC"crdi Schiller gives the statement: "The a priori axioms are facts-real, solid observable, mental facts-and woe betide the philosopher who collides with them. In one word they are psychical facts of the most indubitable kind. Such expressions are hardly a forced paraphrase of Kant's statement, if we are looking for his real meaning. There is every reason to believe that he would have welcomed Darwin's discoveries and all the adjustments of thinking that flow from them, for no thinker was more hospitable than Kant to every desirable advance in scientific procedure. It is exceedingly difficult, from our modern standpoint, in considering the categories, to eliminate the genetic and even the chronological aspects of the.r development and keep the attention focused on their purely logical nature. This is but another way of saying that the lines of sheer demarkation between psychology, logic, and epistemology have broken down. The whole problem is one that essentially involves psychology. Kant is seeking to describe what actually takes place in an act of knowing-a matter of psychological fact. Logic may then claim the task of evaluating these processes, of ascertaining whether our judgments attain the truth at which they aim. If epistemology is to have any legitimate field of its own, it must embrace these two aspects rather than assume an attitude of indifference toward either of them' Had there been in Kant's day a body of genetic psychology and had he found as ready at hand the means to resort to its aid as do the prag- matists, the kinship between his purposes and theirs would be more easy ' Dogmatism and Evolution, p. 213. * Personal Idealism, p. 79. 22 PIL\GMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY k ill ii of establishment and the implied functional leaning of his thought would be nearer to explicit statement. He desired, as he would phrase it, to keep his Critique clear of all doubtful opinions regarding the descriptive and explanatory science of cognition. Can we wonder at this when we remember the unsatisfactory character of the attempts of Locke and Berkeley, when we recall particularly Hume's difficulties in reducing the self to ''nothing but a bundle of different perceptions," "all probable reasoning to nothing but a species of sensation," and his utter failure to account for what knowledge we do possess? It was the faulty psy- chology of his predecessors that alienated Kant from the psychological standpoint. But he failed to see that his own epistemology involved those same faults on the other side. Hume left experience, to borrow a homely metaphor, as a tableful of detached pieces of cloth. Kant put them together with exaggerated emphasis upon the seams. Neither of them grasped the truth that experience is just one seamless garment, one whole within which the distinctions are set up between subject and object, between mind and the quality which it perceives. Hume's limitation was not, as Kant supposed, in the excess of his psychology but in the superficiality of his psychology. Kant's effort to divorce the theory of knowledge from a critical opinion upon questions in the psychology of knowledge was not only impossible but incompatible with his original purpose. To apply the critical method to his naive assump- tions is only to follow him in the spirit, if it does seem to contradict him in the letter. Pragmatists would say that human knolwedge from the beginning must have developed just in the way we now see it going forward; or rather, being obligated to deal only with knowledge as we now possess it, they would imply that, so far as reference is made to the past, it must obviously be in accordance with our present method of knowing. Funda- mentally this is quite in harmony with Kant's Critique. It was precisely his theme that if we think at all we must think in a certain way, according to certain conditions. This is the gist of his whole deduction of the categories. It has long been a truth trite to the student of Kant that by a priori he did not mean chronologically a priori. Yet this fact is forgotten by some of his critics. James and Schiller have stressed the view that the method of growth in human knowledge from the earliest stages of mental life, from the first given stuff of immediate and unanalyzed consciousness— if one may speak tentatively of "given stuff"— to an ordered world of thought and conduct, has been the adoption of postulates. Such postulates on their primitive level were THE mind's construction OF NATURE ^, scarcely more than the tentative proving of new general perceptions as compared w,th the conceptual hypothesizing of present-day science' James gathers the matter up in these effective words: live Iv'Thl?!"''"'''; "°' I T'"°""''"^ *'"'"*'°"- °f ^» those that we now generalization hke those more recent ones of the atom, of inertia of reflex action, or of fitness to survive. The notions of one time and one Ice as matter and mind; between permanent subjects and changing attributes- the from regularly caused connections; surely all these were once definite con quests made at historic dates by our ancestors in their attempts to git the We^ oe r'^ '"''ir T'^"^- '"'° ^ -- shareable and m': age! able shape. They proved of such sovereign use as DenkmiUel that they are Th them ° NoVr-^'™""" '' °" "'"''• ^' "^^"""^ P'^y f-t -d 10 - with them. No experience can upset them. On the contrary thev aooer ceive every experience and assign it to its place.' ^^ The categories of Kant stand on the same level with perceptions of so-called common-sense, with thing, body, attribute, spirit. They were set up as principles for the comprehension and organization of the mmediately given material of life, even before the conception of a postu- late or a hypothesis was abstractly or consciously formulated. Every new vindication which a hypothesis found in experience brought 7t nearer the range of certain truth. Every new verification helped to harden the original beliefs into knowledge. These general perceptions and categories have now served their purpose for untold generations assisting in the establishment of an ordered reality. Small wonder tha they should finally come to be regarded as possessions of pure reason independently of all experience. In reality the difference between these degree. They differ not in the manner of their arising, but by their age Kant s categories like all others are a collection of successful postulates. They have been verified from age to age until our whole speech now eS^sXhs. ' "' '""''^ ^""^^^ "'•"'' ""'"""y '" ^°y °ther Accepting this account as substantially correct, we believe that it is not ar removed from Kant's own meaning. In his "Ideas of Reason" Kant hints at all this through his mechanical and technical terminology and even in the "Analytic" itself we come upon plain suggestions of t£ ' The Meaning of Truth, p. 62. 4. t M 24 PRAGBiATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT*S PHILOSOPHY functional character of all the categories. We have said that he would have profited by a genetic investigation of the relation of thinking to other modes of experience and by an inquiry into the specific conditions under which thought-processes arise. Specific conditions he disclaimed any treatment of except to say emphatically that definite, specific laws cannot be determined by pure reason. His persistence in keeping to the general conditions has aroused in some minds the suspicion that the organic and functional character of thinking was wholly unappreciated by him. It is, however, neither necessary nor just to regard his episte- mology as an outworn relic of rationalism. It has a forward as well as a backward look and value. To summarize, then, Kant's doctrine of nature, before proceeding to a more minute study of the worth of his categories, we have found him approximating a distinctively dynamic explanation of our actual world and life. The mind, with its forms and categories, working with concrete material, constructs its phenomenal world governed by its own laws. It does not find an external world of nature to be merely copied or represented by its ideas— thus he disposes of realism. Nor does it, on the other hand, create and evolve the world of nature out of its own pure activity — this should have forewarned and prevented the systems of pantheistic idealism that offered themselves as the completion of his thought. It supplies the forms only, co-operating with an element from ultimate things. The latter is a residual element involving an assump- tion from which he was unable to escape. His approach to pragmatic attitudes appears in the fact that mind does furnish these constituent factors, that it functions in the upbuilding and systematic ordering of the only world of nature which it knows or with which it has anything to do. Mind and nature develop from within experience itself. I THE SCHEMATISM OF THE CATEGORIES We wish to inquire first if, in the ''Schematism of the Categories " it does not appear that these connecting principles of Kant, to have any real significance, are really functional, limited to their cash value in arranging, correcting, reorganizing concrete experience. The very fact that Kant finds it necessary to ask, ''How can the categories be applied to phenomena?" and to find "some third thing homogeneous on the one side with the category and on the other side with the phenomenon, that renders the application of the former to the latter possible," shows that they must be taken functionally to make sense He explicitly says that the purpose of the schema is to confine the concept to its "restricted application." "For concepts are quite impossible and cannot have any meaning unless there be an object given either to them, or at least to some of the elements of which they consist, and they can never refer to things-in-themselves."' He con- tinues: "These schemata therefore of the understanding are the true and only conditions by which these concepts can gain a relation to objects, that is a significance :'' In the second edition, especially, Kant added some significant words regarding special laws that bear upon our comparative study, as indicating the reduction of the transcendental to the functional. He added: "The pure faculty of the understanding is not competent by means of mere categories to prescribe any a priori laws to phenomena, except those which form the foundation of nature in general, as a uniform system of phenomena in space and time. Special laws, inasmuch as they relate to empirically determined phenomena, cannot be fully deduced from pure laws, although they all stand in a body under them."3 Empirical laws, then, are not derived from pure understanding. Empirically given facts or objects are required for the application of these principles. The real value of the categories is limited to their scientific employment. ^ "The schema of the triangle is simply a rule for the synthesis of the imagination, in the determination of pure figures in space." That is to say, "triangle" is merely a way the mind takes of constructing its experience that will be dependable for all phenomena requiring treatment m a certain way. What kind of synthesis can it be if not functional ? ' MueUer's trans., p. 114. 2 /^^^ p „^ » Mahaffy's trans., p. 26, end (2d ed.). 25 26 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY illi We should have mere verbiage. The same statement might be made of the concept of a tree or of any other object. ''The concept of dog means a rule according to which my imagination can always draw a general outline of a four-footed animal, without being restricted to any particular figure supplied by experience."' This simply means that general ideas or concepts are as necessary for rational experience as are the images of particular ideas. They do not exist off in a world by themselves. Kant is particularly careful here to show that categories are for use in response to the highest intellectual need of our lives, namely, unity. He says: "The schema of a pure concept is nothing but the pure synthesis deter- mined by a rule of unity. It amounts to nothing else but to the unity of the manifold and therefore indirectly to the unity of apperception, as an active function corresponding to the internal sense."* ** The categories are thus in the end of no other but a possible empirical use."^ He proceeds: "The schema of substance is the permanence of the real in time — persisting while all else changes." As we should say, it is a means of determining what we can find, what will stay put, what can be depended on in a changing order or series. Its application involves empirical objects and empirical change. When Kant undertakes in another place the scientific treatment of matter or substance, he regards it, as did Leibnitz, not as something dead, inert, but as energy, force; he shows that it is a something which affects our senses. But, as our senses can be affected only by motion, immediately we come to the functional determination of matter as motion. Substance or matter is that which is movable in space — das Bewegliche in Raume.* This may be taken not unfairly as illustrative of what Kant means in his schema- tism of the concept. Cause is a way of getting regularity of succession under conditions of time. It is a conception to be used of the particular objects of experience in relation to each other, but perfectly meaningless if applied to experi- ence as a whole. The postulate that every event must have its cause verifies itself, as the pragma tist would say, in its successful application as an instrument for controlling the world of experience. It serv^es us because we wish to be in position to call forth or arrest its influence. "The concept of cause implies a rule, according to which one state follows another necessarily." Kant immediately adds its hypothetical character in the admission, "but experience can only show us that one » Mueller's trans., p. ii6. »/W(/., p. 119. ilbid. * Meiaphysische AnfangsgrUnde der Naiurwissenschaft, p. 320. 1 THE SCHEMATISM OF THE CATEGORIES jy State Of things often, or at most, commonly follows another, and therefore aflords neither strict universality nor necessity."' In his treatment of cause Kant undoubtedly took himself too seriously m holding that he had added materially to Hume's account. What he has added, and what brings out clearly the implied pragmatic character of all his categories, is that cause must be hypothecated to render experience orderly, satisfactory-to give us a rational world. Hume s problematical concept," as he calls it, becomes his own hypo- thetical concept and the only real difference is that he sees better than Hume that the hypothesis must be held if we are to have an experience that mil hold together. It is simply a human need that changes the judgment of perception, "If the sun shines long enough upon a body it grows warm, mto the judgment of experience, "The sun is by its light the cause of heat." Experience is more than a mere aggregate of per- ceptions. It requires thoroughly and necessarily valid rules. But Kant forgets at times wherein consists the test of their validity. Yet in the same place quoted from above he adds distinctly: "I do not at all comprehend the possibility of a thing generally as a cause, because the concept of cause denotes a condition not at all belonging to things but to experience."' Referring again to space under this special chapter, Kant hints that this form Itself must be schematized and seen in its functional aspects to afford meamng. "Space is the pure image of all quantities before the external sense." In the Dialectic he again says: "Space, though it is only a principle of sensibility, yet serves originally to make all forms possible, there being only limitations of it. For that very reason however, it is mistaken for something necessary and independent, nay' for an object a priori existing in itself. Thus a regulative principle has been changed into a constitutive principle."' We might add, in illustra- tion of Its regulative or practical use and of the criterion of its validity that the Euclidean conception of space and the corresponding geometr^ built upon the postulate of plane rather than spherical triangles has been held true and has to this day refused to be displaced by some competidve conception simply because it has satisfied human needs or, at any rate men have thought that it did. It enabled the astronomers, for example' to calculate with approximate and satisfactory accuracy the dimensions of the farthest systems of suns and other matters of scientific interest involving Its application. ' Mueller's trans., p. 74. ' Prolegomena, p. 70. ' Mueller's trans., p. 499. jl 28 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT's PHILOSOPHY J \i 1 Thus all the categories when schematized appear as rules or guides to practical conduct. They have what the pragmatist would call a purely instrumental character. What other '^deduction" have they? In the schematism, says Kant, thought moves under the conditions of time. When does thought ever move outside of these conditions? Kant's concepts are constitutive only when he gets out of time and ** rides his high horse." When applied practically they all reduce to dependability. Watson, in his later work, gathers the matter up admirably: Examination shows that the limitation of the categories to objects of sensible experience applies to every one of them. It is not possible to give a real definition of any category, or a single principle of the understanding, without schematizing it. The principle of substance, taken by itself, is merely the conception of that which is always subject and never predicate; but we have no possible knowledge of any actual object conforming to this definition except an object that is presented to us as that which, in contrast to its chan- ging accidents, is permanent in time. The categories, then, in every case are limited to phenomena.' We shall see later that in the ''Transcendental Dialectic" Kant really justifies the ideas of reason, even those which are demonstrated to have no value as purely speculative concepts, by the extension and application of this schematism. He virtually deduces them all as he deduces his main concepts— substance and causality. Kant's things-in-themselves deserve examination in a separate chapter, but so far as the schematism of the categories is concerned the matter may be disposed of by saying with Paulsen that Kant really has two tables of categories— " a pure conceptual one, and one reduced to sensuous terms; a purely logical, and a table of real categories."' The significant fact that we are stressing is that only the table of functional categories has any validity for the world as we know it, for actual experi- ence. Kant does unmistakably shift from one table to the other and does apply them to things-in-themselves. Yet again and again he comes back to their true practical use, and no one could state more forcefully than he the futility of any but functional categories. Under the "Discipline of Pure Reason" he summarizes the whole matter in these pragmatic words: As we cannot form the least conception of the possibility of a dynamical connection a priori, and as the categories of the pure understanding are not ' The Philosophy of Kant Explained (later work), p. 222. » ImmdHuel Kani, p. 184. THE SCHEMATISM OF THE CATEGORIES 20 intended to invent any such comiection, but only, when it is given in experience to understand U, we cannot by means of these categories invent one S object as endowed with a new quality not found in experience, or bas any permissible hypothesis on such a quality; otherwise wT should be suZyZ our reason with empty chimeras, and not with concepts of things S iUs not permissible to invent any new and original powers as, for instance an understanding capable of perceiving objects without the aid ^f the s nses ^r a xLT for insT'^'^ "''^^^ ^"^.r ^^^' ^ ^^- '''' ^' substance thatruld exist, for instance, in space, without being impenetrable, and consequently also, any com^ection of substances dififerent from that which is suppM by experience; no presence except in space, no duration except in time In one word our reason can only use the conditions of possible experfence as th conditions of the possibility of things; it cannot invent them independently ^^ aTo\S:r ' ''''-'' -' self-contradictory, would La^be Pragmatism would correct this statement only in the direction of recognizmg unambiguously the dynamic use of concepts. It is evident that by a dynamtcal connection a priori Kant is harboring his delusion as to possible ^ntelli,me conditions as contrasted with phenomenaUntil separating matter and form, not realizing that the word dynamical would admirably characterize just the actual work of his categories as he here describes or hints at it. Kant has felt the futility of this dis- tmction all along in trying to bridge the gap with a third term. What such thl: r " J^'i '''' ''"^ '' "^ ^^p ^^ ^^ ^^^^^^^' ^^-^ - - such thing as possible datum outside of meaning, of thought; what really exists is just the whole experience. From the phenomenal side however, his statement makes crystal clear the use of his concepts within the process o getting knowledge or experience as we have it, and that by no possibility can they be stretched to apply to outside ob ects In Kant s constant mania for schematizing, therefore, in the immedi- ate necessity which he feels to apply his categories, to find a bond of connection between them and phenomena, we have a virtual recognition savs'^TlTl •'?"?.'''" "' P""^^ '""^''^^ ^^^^^^"^^- As Paulsen says, A 1 kmds of devices and padding were invented to fill out the vacant places of the a priori scheme."^ His schematism practically means the reduction of his categories to terms of sense. It is instructive work and worth of our mental concepts even when his object is to remam on the mner side of mental life. The schematism is supposed by * Mueller's trans., p. 6i8. ' Immanuel Kant, p. 71. i%: [II 30 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT's PHILOSOPHY him to be "an art hidden away in the depths of the human soul, the secret of which we need not hope to drag forth to the light of day."' It is intrc^duced at tirst to show how a factor of "pure a priori imagination " unites with an empirical factor in the application of our understanding to phenomena. In the actual outcome, however, this "hidden art" becomes a way of hlling up empty concepts with real meaning. The various schemata arc virtually "belated dehnitions" of logical forms when they are no longer pure but really instrumental for experience, when they have some real work to do. In all of this Kant treats his transcendental elements not as antecedent to, ccmtrasted with, or actually separable from, the functional, but merely as sub])hases or factors in the functional process itself. Any real demarkation between the two aspects fades out in their application. « Watson, Selections, p. 87. i THE REGULATIVE USE OF REASON-THE ANTINOMIES Fr„m the very be^inninK of the pragmatic movement the .imilaritv of Kant s postulate, of the practical reason for moral and JiZ.^Z to certain features of the pragmatic attitude has been note' buT tl^l not always been observe. pu^es a^ teieoiog cdl bcarmgs. or, as the pragmatist would phrase it with a realuafon of the purposive character of all human thinking We may not, of course, in strict accord with pragmatic ways of hought and expression, recogni.^ any clear distinction betwerihei et.cal and practical reason; yet Kant's frequent resort toThe^ Imt t et,c terms makes it difT.cult to discuss his system without the^ Z are remmded, Uk., in this pragmatic comparison, of Professo LcTveiov'! to be trcaterl by that science, ust so may we indulge the hone Lt pragmatic thinkers, fairly understood, are not .eriousty at van „« as to their mam tenets. ^ vd,rid.nce as to Hoid!::r:::rtha witch^t^^^^^^^^ --■- — - which aids in the construction of a ^^:':jur::l.z::!:^:t:^ acfye bemg are harmonized; or if not a world-whole, specific woitto meet specific problems, for pragmatism is not as mu h conce^e.l " h he problem of a world-whole as are idealistic schemes of thought T^e theoretical reason also might be conceded the ri.ht to hold as true t^a which enables the intellect to govern its ordered world. CsMts- relation, u.th other parts of experience, to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual short cuts instead of foLing fh interminable succession of particular phenomena.- If we accept tL * PragMciism, p. 58. Pi 11 32 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANX'S PHILOSOPHY definition of truth which makes it that which works in its practical consequences, the theoretical and practical reason would seem to reduce to the same footing, and this is virtually the outcome of Kant s treatment of his "Ideas of Reason." . The critics of pragmatism have thought that there is a profound difference between the two. Practical reason, they would say, may claim the right, in questions that cannot be settled on intellectual grounds, to assist in bringing about a solution by practical belief, hypothe- sis But the case is different when we are dealing with objective facts or realities the truth of which does not depend on our attitude of faith. Here we move upon purely intellectual grounds, in the realm of the theoretical reason. Here the intellect ignores the interests of free will and the fteld is closed to voluntur>- hypotheses. This statement would probably stand from the vie«i)oint of either the realist or the idealist. Now it should be noted in passing that James nowhere mamtains that any sort of satisfactoriness suffices to establish the truth of a propo- sition and that in this connection he is dealing with cases where a I theoretic signs fail and where the will-t.vbelieve is invoked as an unavoid- able substitute. He detinitely expresses himself to this effect m a letter to a German contemporary- as well a., in other places. But James and other pragmatists do contend that the intellect-^ven theoretical intellects made up of practical interests, and therefore that the word theoretical in this sharp sense is a misnomer. This is practically wha is meant by the "instrumental" view of truth taught by Dewey and Moore at Chicago and promulgated by Schiller from O.xlord. James says: It is far too little recognized how entirely the inlcllect is bu.lt up of practical interests The theory of evolution is beginning to do good service m its eduction of all mentality to the type of reHex action. CognU ,on in this view is but a fleeting moment, a cross-section at a certain point, of what in its toti is mot'or phenomenon. In the lower forms of life no one will pretend hat cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. The germinal question concerning things brought lor the first time be^re con sciousness is not the theoretical, -What is that ?" but the practical, 'Who goes here "• or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, "What is to be done- Was fang kh anf In all our discussions about the intelhgence of lo,.er anvils, the only test we use is that of their ac.n,, as if for a purpose. Cognition, in short , is incomplete until discharged in act. Many of the grotesque interpretations or misinterpretations of the pragmatic definition of truth would have been spared us if its critics had » Kanl Stiidien, XIV, 24. a Will-to-Believe, p. 85. Ill I I THE REGULATIVE USE OF REASON— THE ANTINOMIES 33 gmsped fully the fact that pragmatism does not designate as true whatever is useful to our practical interests in the daily sense of the word Says James again: The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophical history. Schiller says the true is that which works. Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is that which gives satisfaction He is treated as one who believes in calling anything true which, if it were true would be pleasant.' * ^ Pragmatic doctrine is that the worth of a scientific hypothesis consists in most, if not in all cases, in its usefulness in striving for an ever-greater simphhcation and unity of our world of experience in all of its aspects or where that unity has been destroyed by new complications and differentiations, to overcome the destructive conflict and proceed by a better method of organization and control. Now with this let us compare Kant's explicit declaration that ''all interest is at last practical and what the speculative reason itself postulates is completed only in practical use."^ The atomic theory, to resume a former illustration, long cherished as indubitable scientific truth, was true in so far as it offered a workable basis for simplifying and understanding a mass of facts. Now that we have more facts, or facts of a different kind, we need a modification of that theory to restore satisfaction. In Dewey's decisive words, ''In every scientific inquiry there has been relegation of accepted meanings to the limbo of mere ideas; there has been a passage of some of the accepted facts to the region of mere hypothesis and opmion. Conversely there has been a continued issuing of ideas from the region of hypotheses and theories into that of facts, of accepted and meaningful contents."3 Now, the faithful expositor of Kant may contend that, while this is good rebuttal for the realist or the idealist as correcting static inclinations, it does not touch Kant's fundamental positions. Any suggested need of evolution in his principles is from the mark, for modern discoveries in biological and physical science- radmm, electrons, or what not-in no wise discredit or weaken the laws of experience as he laid them down. He was careful to say that only the general conditions of experience are to be regarded as a priori The uncompromising Kantianer may hold that Kant was merely dealing ' Pragmatism, p. 234. » Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic, II, 3 am Ende (Mahaffy). i Studies in Logical Theory, p. 12. 34 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT's PHILOSOPHY with the common necessity of connecting experience by cause and effect, of making a necessary distinction between substance and states so that we may think of something as changing without being involved in utter discontinuity; that whatever be the more particular problems with which he made no pretense of dealing, the same quality of necessity attaches to his general principles today as was clearly seen by him to belong to them at that time. If this contention be true, Kant is even more consistent with modern pragmatism than we had hoped to show. We have conceded the great value of these general principles, but it would seem, from the functional standpoint, that he was too much hemmed in by a mechanical conception of the world in entertaining the belief that for scientific unity and coherence certain concepts could be specified once for all, with no possibility of future questioning. As Paulsen has suggested, it is not quite inconceivable that there might be a future metamorphosis of the forms of perception and thought. Kant was, however, essentially correct in affirming that the demand for unity and continuity lies at the base of all the forms and ideas by which we aim to understand nature and the world. We believe that his whole statement of the regulative ideas of reason accords with the functional conception of the nature of truth in the domain of scientific thought and investigation as well as for moral and religious ends. Here again it is significant that in his contrast of constitutive and regulative principles of reason the only princii)les dogmatically assumed as constitutive are the mathematical. His etTort is to conceive of others after the analogy of these, never suspecting that mathematics is as empirical as biology. Now it is true that in mathematics we do proceed to a greater extent upon our own hypotheses than in biology, yet, as we have seen, geometry implies space, and space implies an arrangement of sense-perceptions. Once over this difficulty, however, Kant, in his treatment of the antinomies, reveals the instrumental character of the principles of reason. The whole difiiculty is shown to arise from the attempt to apply concepts that are limited to experience, to a world of ultimate things— to hypostasize them. At this point again the gap exists between him and the pragmatist, the latter having no ultimate objects standing off there in a region by themselves. We do not seek to make Kant more modern or self-consistent than he i>. These are due to his retention of assumptions. Yet, for logical purposes, these ultimate things are not an essential feature and they do not prevent him from elucidating the functional nature of his principles of reason: "Now it has been clearly enough shown that the principle of reason is not a con- the regulative use of reason— the antinomies 35 stitutive principle of objects in themselves but is merely a rule for the contmuation and extension of a possible experience. If we keep this steadily before our eyes, the conflict of reason with itself is at an end "' Agam, "Everythmg in the world of sense has an empirically conditioned existence and no property of a sensible object has unconditioned neces- sity. '^ He shows that a metaphysic of that which cannot be experienced IS impossible. In his discussion of the antinomies he indicates that the old mistake of Zeno's puzzles is repeated-the mistake of taking concepts m two different connotations. But he fails to see, after all that he repeats the same old error himself in admitting by implication' '^ objects beyond experience." He does not realize the uselessness of not limiting reality to the first and proper use of the categories. With tedious detail and reduplication he shows that the cosmological Ideas are fruitlessly making their dialectical plav because "they do not even admit of any adequate object being supplied to them in any possible experience, not even of reason treating them in accordance with the general laws of experience. "3 "Nevertheless," he says, "these ideas are not arbitrary fictions, but reason in the continuous progress of empirical synthesis is necessarily led on to them."4 That is to say, even ideas that are not scientilically valid are adopted or develop precisely out of certain inevitable problems. What then constitutes the difference between them and ideas that are valid ? Just the fact that they lack objects or experiences to verify them. Other ideas of reason, he proceeds to show do have a certain verification. ' Kant is concerned in this section as throughout his system that empiricism itself shall not become dogmatic, any more than rationalism and assume to "boldly deny what goes beyond the sphere of its intuitive knowledge.-s vVe are not to be deprived of our "intellectual presump- tions or of our faith in their influence upon our practical interests "^ How similar this is in sound to the will-to-believe. Such intellectual presumptions and faith must not, however, take "the pompous titles of science and rational insight, because true speculative knowledge can never have any other object but experience. "^ Could anything more be needed to show that Kant realized the practical and purposive character of mental actix'ity ? He removes knowledge (false knowledge) to save belief (belief that has significance for practical ends). Why does Kant ' Watson, Selections, p. 173. ■' Ibid., p. 193. 3 Mueller's trans., p. 379. * Ibid. ^ Ibid., p. 386. ^/6/^., p. 385. 'Ibid. 3* PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY SO laboriously examine these "transcendental problems of pure reason and why is it absolutely necessary that we find their solution ? Precisely in the interest of scientific and moral progress, that man may not oscillate constantly from one side to the other of opposed meanings or doctrines, but may have a definite criterion for the retention and use of these ideas. And what is that criterion as Kant here develops it? It is just the workableness of ideas for human satisfaction— ideas, let us observe, that are not dialectically subjected to or subject to contradiction by being stretched beyond their true functional application. That application is established by their critical examination and the careful elimination of all ideas that have no objects of experience, with yet a tolerant word in excuse of even invalid ideas that spring up as supposed— falsely supposed — solutions of problems. In* iilentally. in (his section, Kant seems to sustain the pragmatist as over against the realist and possibly as against the absolutist. He says: The objects of oxpcrioiice arc therefore never given by themselves, but in our experience only, and ilo not exist outside it. That there may be inhabitants in the moon, tlimigli no man has ever seen tlu in, must be admitted [living today it would be Mars]; but it means no more than that in the |H)Ssihlc progress of our experience, we may meet with thi'n\; lor everything is real thai hangs together with a perception, according to the laws of empirical progress. They are therefore real if they are empirically comiected with any real consciousness, although they are not therefore real by themselves; that is, apart from that progress of experience.' Dewey might well have used this as illustrative of his "present as absent" or "exiioricnced as absent," of the fact that the contrast of present and absent or ])rcsent and past must itself fall within exi)erieiKe. Where else can it fall ? It is noticeable also that Kant !' 'r" ""°" ^°"'^'"^ "°' °"'>- '^-^' but ideafs Ilso, «Hch hough they have not, like those of Plato, creative, yet have certainly A'-ac/.f^/ power (as regulative principles) and form the basis of the possible perfection of certain acts.- Kant proceeds in endless repetition to show the futility of trying to construct reality from pure concepts m the old rationalistic way. He has demonstrated the weakness of the ontological argument, the physico-theological argument ■ MucUer's trans., p. 642. ' /Wrf., p. 460. 39 40 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT's PHILOSOPHY THE IDEAL OF REASON 41 IP r.-i- and of all theology based on speculative principles of reason. Some of these expressions are pertinent for other purposes, but just here their scientific application is the issue. He says: ''I maintain, accordingly, that transcendental ideas ought never to be employed as constitutive. They have, however, a most admirable and indispensably necessary regulative use, in directing the understanding to a certain aim."* He practically says with the pragmatist that we are striving constantly for the unification of our knowledge and experience. He points out plainly the instrumental character of every common scientific concept. ''We must confess that pure earth, pure water, pure air, are hardly to be met with. Nevertheless we require the concepts of these in order to be able to determine properly the share which belongs to every one of these natural causes in phenomena."' Natural philosophers thus make use of concepts from reason ''to explain the mutual chemical workings of matter. The hypothetical use of reason, resting on ideas as prob- lematical concepts, is thus at work constantly in science to introduce unity into the particulars of knowledge."^ Unity, that is practical workability, is the very touchstone of the truth of these rules. Kant emphasizes the impossibility of changing such scientific rules into transcendental principles of reason. They are all tentative, subject to revision. He warns us that philosophers have unconsciously forgotten to keep this distinction and "the transcendental presupposition is con- cealed in their principles in the cleverest way.'"^ He mentions mani- foldness, variety, and unity as mere ideas for the guidance of reason in its empirical progress, "heuristic principles in the elaiK)ration of experience. "s Once more these dynamical principles (and here dynami- cal gets its true significance m Kant's thought) are falsely contrasted with constitutive, mathematical ])rinciples, but that is not the point. The point is that certain concepts or principle^ may be and must be used as scientific maxims in our progress toward systematical unity. It should be emphasized, at the cost of whatever repetition, that Kant is specific as to the scientific, purposive, hypothetical nature of these ideas of reason. They are "heuristic not ostensive." They enable u:, to make inquiries of nature and go forward. They do not afford an answer all ready made. The latter, says Kant, would be the reverse of scientific method. To suppo>e that l)y means of these ideas we could have knowledge oi real objects in the way of definite correspondence would be to dispense with the use of reason or to turn its activity in a wrong » Mueller's trans., 518. ' Ibid., p. 519. 3 Ibid., p. 520. < Ibid., p. 524. « Ibid., p. 533. direction. The dogmatist who assumes by pure a priori speculations to demonstrate the unity and immateriality of the soul, or the origin of all things in God.'s intelligence, is starting at the wrong end. He is turning away from pure empirical investigation, or he merely twists empirical facts to correspond with the results of his a priori reasoning. He imposes upon nature his external system of teleology and prevents himself from finding out the real nature of its unity. His argument moves in a circle, assuming the very thing it sets out to prove. While Kant recognizes the need of certain ideas to direct and sys- temarize experience, he breaks again with the pragmatist in regarding experience itself as inadequate for their realization or verification. Yet he practically proceeds to verify them or deduce them just as he has deduced his more certain categories. His "deduction" of these ideas illustrates the pragmatic notion of truth. Such concepts, ideas of the speculadve reason, have "a schema to which no object, not even a hypothetical one, corresponds directly, but which seems only to represent to ourselves indirectly other objects through their relation to those ideas, and according to their systematic unity."^ After all that he has said in criticism of the three transcendental ideas— the psychological, cosmological, and theological— his real deduction of them consists in showing that our experience is better arranged and improved by means of them than without them. It is significant here that he reiterates and illustrates what he has already indicated in his "Schematism of the Categ()ries," namely, that such concepts as substance, reality, and even causation "have no meaning, unless they are used to make the empirical knowledge of an object possible. They may be used to explain the pos- sibility of things in the world of sense, })ut not to explain the possibil- ity of a universe itself, because such an hvpothesis is outside the worid and could never be an object of possible experience."^ Kant is merely extending his schematism over the whole field of ideas and practically vindicating the ideas of reason on the same level with his necessary categories, namely, by their cogency in practical working. In the words of DeLaguna: They are never realized in any experience; that is to say, no analysis of a given experience can reveal them as verified in it. Yet they are essential to thought; for it is through their use that given experience becomes organized into the larger unity of experience as a whole. Their kinship with pragmatic postulates thus appears upon their face. Kant seems to say of them what the ' /^., p. 538- ' Ibid., p. 544. 42 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT S PHILOSOPHY THE IDEAL OF REASON 43 '1 pragmatist would say of all conceptions— that while they are never completely satisfied by any application of them, yet they serve to bring unity to our thought and in this service if in no other find their sanction.' Thus Kant would use the idea of the soul not in the Cartesian sense of substance (res) but merely as an instrumental hypothesis. In the Paralogisms of Pure Reason he has clearly shown that it is by confusion of the logical subject with a real substrate that the false rationalistic demonstration of the soul's substantiality proceeds, llie idea of the soul as an unconditioned unity is not a matter of proof or disproof. We can no more infer from the ego of which we are conscious, that is from our one and identical thought, the existence of the soul as a substance than we can infer a soul of the world from the unity of the universe. Yet thought does appear as one and identical. That is the condition of its very existence. The possibility of the corporeal world presupposes the thinking ego, the transcendental unity of apperception. All the categories, all the forms of thought, involve this as their first condition. They all have meaning and value because they are the means which produce the unity of consciousness. Kant schematizes the soul, as it were. In his same heavy way he says it is '' the concept of the empirical unity of all thought. Its object is merely to find principles of systematic unity for the explanation of the phenomena of the soul."'' He is explicit in stressing the [)sychological character of this idea. Mis expressions recall the statement of a leading contemporary psychologist that, in this connection, the soul as an entity is as extinct as the dodo. Yet even in legal science today we deal with souls — with individuals. So for purposes of unity— Kant would seem to say — all the grounds of e.xplanatii^i must be traced to one single principle. As if to guard against misconstruction he repeats: "It is quite permissible to represent to ourselves the soul as simple, in order, according to this idea, to use the complete and necessary unity of all the faculties of the soul, but to assume the soul as a simple substance (which is a transcendent concept) would be a proposition not only indemonstrable but purely arbitrary and rash."-* As Windclband well expresses it, "It is an heuristic principle for investigating the inter- connections of the psychical life."* In disclaiming in this place any consideration of its spiritual nature, Kant intimates that such a reference would immediately, by contrast with the corporeal, lift the concept out of its relations of experience and render it meaningless. This actualistic 'Op. cit.,p.S2. 3 /6/T)othesis for empirical satisfaction. Kant would seem to say that we need the idea of God as the chemist needs his atom or the physicist his idea of force. Atom, force, and God are all speculations, but they are necessary. Like Joseph Landor, Kant would hold that the presumption is in favor of the simplest hypothesis, and he fails to get any unity in his cosmos without the God idea. He has exposed and explained away the rationalistic fallacy of the ontological proof which would establish existence from mere concepts, of the physico-theological argument which results in a mere "Architect of the World," and of the » Imm^nuel Kant, p. 393. ^ Mueller's trans., p. 550. ' /fr^., p. 554. ' Ibid. s ibid. 44 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT S PHILOSOPHY cosmological proof which involves a petitio principii, seeking the ''first cause" of all that is contingent in an "absolutely necessary- existence'*; but, used as a functional idea this concept affords a needed motive for scientific investigation of groups of phenomena. To assume God as proven in the old sense is "to imagine the efforts of our reason as ended when we have really dispensed with its employment."' It would be just the reverse of true scientific method. If I begin i\ith a supreme ordaining Being, as the ground of all things, the unity of nature is really surrendered as being quite foreign to the nature of things, purely contingent, and not to be known from its own general laws. Thus arises a vicious circle by our presupposing what in reality ought to have been proved. But if we use the idea as a regulative principle for the sys- tematical unity in a teleological connection according to general laws — the principle can enlarge the use of reason with reference to experience.' We are not here concerned to add his moral proof but merely to see his justification ot this idea as a practical postulate. Not only is he prag- matic in the adoption of this postulate but he finds it verified in its efficient working, precisely as the pragmatist would contend. He adds: "As much of design, therefore, as you discover in the world, according to that principle, so much of confirmation has the legitimacy of your idea received. "^ In the Canon of Pure Reason Kant recurs to this idea in words and illustrations most significant for this comparative study. The point is slightly confused by the contrast of practical with doctrinal belief, both of which would fall legitimately under the pragmatic con- ception of practical. The existence of God is there assigned to the category of the doctrinal. The discussion, however, deserves, from the standpoint of this study, a careful analysis. Before we continue the consideration of this particular hypothesis, two points should be noted in Kant's treatment in this chapter — the limita- tion of the notion of truth to single judgments and his stand against the conception of truth as a mere copying relation. In both of these his handling of the matter is strikingly similar to expressions and illustra- tions of James. Kant had spoken in the preceding chapter of the possi- bility of a usable idea which does not, in the ordinary sense, correspond to an object. He now affords a better, and a decidedly pragmatic, conception of what real correspondence with an object must be to make sense. Kant does say, to be sure, that "truth depends upon agreement with its object,"^ but by clear illustration he interprets agreement in a sense more nearly related to that of the pragmatist than to that of the * Mueller's trans., p. 554. • Ibid., p. 556. » Ibid., p. 561. * Ibid., p. 658. THE IDEAL OF REASON 45 Instr to V • "I'" '"^ ^'^™^' ^^'' - P-^--tists in ans^^er to criticisms have shown, the absurdity of holding a thing true uZ7s:'' ""' "^'"'"'^' ^"'^*^^'^^'^ ^^^ '^ ^"^i-'tion persJlln" H T"V" ''' ^'^l^' f "^^'" '' ^'^ ^"^^'^^^ ^^'y^ ^' - ^-^-^ pe^uasion. If the judgment is valid for everybody, then the ground of it is objectively sufficient and the holding of it true is called conLion. Truth depends on agreement ^.ith the object, and with regard to iVthe judgments of every understanding must agree .ith each other An externa criterion, therefore, as to whether our holding a thing to be t'rue be and finding its truth to be valid for the reason of every man « We may compare this with Schiller, "To be really cerUin, a truth must show than an individual value. It must acquire social recognSion and change into a common property. "» It i.'^fffioT •'";? '''\^«r'""'"' ^""* ^'' '" '"^'1 '^ ^'^^"y significant. It ,s difficult .n this whole passage to read into his meaning the ter- m.nolog>. of Hegel who describes the idea as running over into the object, of the nofon as findmg itself again in objectivity, and of an etema system of notions built up as absolute truth. Far less can we find here the meanmg of the out-and-out realist. But let us first take James's Illustration of the agreement of ideas with their objects: According to the general view a true idea must copy its reality Like «her popular views, this one follows the analogy of the usual ejrience Our true ideas o sensible things do indeed copy them. Shut yourTes and think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true Jcture or copy of Its dial. But your idea of its works (unless you are a clock-maker) is much less of a copy yet it passes muster, for it in no way clashes with the rXy Even though It should shrink to the mere word works, that word stm ^r^es you truly and when you speak of the time-keeping function of the cSl o7o he spnng's elasticity, it is hard to see what your ideas can copy. S^ereto ands the truth of our assertion that the thing there on the waU is a cS^ \Ve use It as a clock, regulating the length of our lecture by it. The vei^fica^on of the assumption here means its leading to no frustraUon or contract on Ver,fiMuy of wheels and weights and pendulum is as good as vermcaS' For one truth process completed there are a miUion in our lives thatTunctTon m this state of nascency. They turn us toward direct verificlrion- lead us into the surroundings of the objects they envisage To i i^ the widest sense, with a reality can only mean to be guided either str^t'p to It or mto Its surroundmgs, or to be put into such working touch with it as o handle either it or something connected with it better ^an if we diH^^d - Ibid., p. 658. . Humanism, p. 58. , Praimatism, p. ,13. 46 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT's PHILOSOPHY In accordance with this it would appear that there are only single truths. There is no absolute truth ^\Titten with bold capital letters. Now Kant declares: "I cannot maintain anything, that is, affirm it as a judgment, necessarily valid for everybody except it work conviction."' If it does work conviction in its communication and be seen as valid for the reason of every man, " there is at least a presumption that the ground of the agreement of all judgments rests upon the common ground, namely, on the object with which they all agree, and thus proves the truth of the judgment."^ In the pages immediately following he gives an illuminating illustration of this kind of agreement with object. Trowing, believing, knowing are treated as degrees in the process of adopting and verifying a hypothesis. Trowing is a surmise in the face of a problem. "It is to hold true with the consciousness that it is insufficient both subjectively and objectively."^ Believing, an attitude to which we are driven by a problem— driven for a practical solution of some kind— occurs "if the holding true is sufficient subjectively, but is held to be insufficient objectively While, if it is sufficient both subjectively and objectively, it is called knowing."^ Now as to the real nature of this objective sufficiency follows an illustration that reads like a citation from one of the pragmatists. To accomplish ends which we are obliged to propose to ourselves "certain conditions are hypothetically necessary," or, as we should say, certain hypotheses are needed. The physician called suddenly to a case of illness must do something for the patient. He does not yet know the sickness. He looks at the symptoms and judges, because he knows nothing better, that it looks like phthisis. "His belief, according to his own judgment, is contingent only, and he knows that another might form a better judgment. It is this kind of contingent belief which, nevertheless, supplies a ground for the actual employment of means to certain actions, which I call pragmatic belief.''^ Here we have not only the word correctly used but the situation just as the pragmatist likes to sketch it— a problem calling for activity, necessi- tating a hypothesis, a belief growing out of the conditions and verifying itself— j75 truth, its agreement with its object— in its successful grappling with the conditions and solving the problem. Correspondence with object has, then, for Kant, by plain implication at least, the pragmatic significance of response to human needs, the keeping-step with our advance in knowledge and experience. » Mueller's trans., p. 659. » Ibid., p. 658. i Ibid., p. 659. *Ibid. ^Ibid., p. 661. THE IDEAL OF REASON 47 And now returning to our direct application, it is precisely thus that Kant proceeds to verify the idea of God as a scientific postuLe t i the usefulness of this idea as a workmg hypothesis for the investigat on of nature that furnishes its vindication. investigation examples of it. Of that unity of design, however, I know no other condition which would make It a guidance in my study of nature, but the suZS that a supreme intelligence has ordered all things according to the Zst pIh. namely, in order to have a guidance in the investigation of nature, it is necessai to admit a wise author of the world TK^ r^cu t necessary usefulness of ih\. c •. ^^""^^ ""^ "^^ experience confirms the P~i { Sl7 r"; T' " ' '■''^""^^ ^^^^-" Kant and the pragmatist that will not down. The very contrast throughout this section of constitutive and regulative principles involves a tacifrderence LTuMnV" ' T" ""' '^''' ^"^^ ""'' "° abiding-place in tru „ ! nZf th ??,^"^- , ' "'"""' '^' ''^'^'' ^'^h the affirmation and the conldt i ;?ndT? "'"" "^ "°^ ^" " '" ""^ ''"°^"^d«^ - Mind, XXXV, 548. » Dialectic 7 (Paulsen, Kant, p. 288). * Ibid., p. 549. PRACTICAL REASON FOR THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS LIFE 63 and intensified in the conviction that life and action are deeper than logical processes, or rather that logical processes take their rise from these. Thought begins when life furnishes the data and there is nothing deeper m cognition than the fundamental needs, interests, and instincts of the mmd or rather the life. " Religion does not originate in thought but in what we experience." Kant freed practical faith from rational- ism, as he planned to do, and opened to religion a free field for develop- ment m life and action. Pragmatism follows his lead in giving to our moral and religious instincts right of way. The growing conviction among religious thinkers that their chief concern is not in creedal statements but in conduct and that religion finds its great test there is in the direct line of Kant's influence. Value, need, endeavor-these are the words that ring the changes. There is scarcely anything farther from the truth than the feeling in some circles that the pragmatic attitude makes for irreverence toward "the eternal verities," however that phrase may be explained, or than the consequent disposition in the same circles to turn back to idealistic systems for a fancied support and refuge for waning orthodox standards of religious faith. It is pragmatism with Its open door for belief and strenuous effort— effort encouraged by the conviction that our earnest lives count for something, change some- thing, really establish something; that the worid is in the making and that part of that making is ours, that furnishes a true dynamic for moral and religious conduct. The one criticism upon Kant here is, again, that his distinction between matters of faith and understanding is too sharp, as it was in the contrast of sense and understanding. The separation is once more arbitrary and fictitious. Either knowledge will discredit belief or belief, verified in fact, in determining values, must ripen into knowledge The two are mutually interactive, parts of one and the same process of adjustment and growth. Beliefs as postulates lead to knowledge and practically, therefore, amount to knowledge. They do not occupy a realm to themselves. To say that we take the problem of God out of the cognitive sphere and place it over in the region of voluntarism may serve certam purposes by way of contrast or emphasis, but it discredits the cognitive process too much and does just what the whole pragmatic movement inveighs against and sets itself to correct. So-called prag- matists have themselves fallen into this error. It is possible that Kant meant merely to shift the emphasis from a false intellectualism and certamly his position will tend to check not only absolutism but every form of crude materialistic intellectualism. 64 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT's PHILOSOPHY Granting that Kant's system seems to point in two directions — toward idealism on one side and toward pragmatism on the other — the idealists, the system-builders who took the first path, confidently re-creating and explaining the world in terms of thought until they reached the denial of the very starting-point of criticism, courageous- ly holding that "in the self-comprehension of the idea in the form of a concept the entire evolution of the world has reached its goal," should have noted the later date of the second Critique. The second path which leads away from any "logical autocracy," which regards the intellect as only one of the factors in the life-process, which clears the way for the categories of our volitional nature, would seem to hold a more direct lineage from Kant in the maturity of his thought. THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES In Kant's contrast of things-in-themselves with appearances we have the climax of the contradiction between the transcendental and the functional and the most serious gap between him and modern prag- matism. It IS hopeless to seek to eliminate the transcendental or even the transcendent from Kant's system without eliminating Kant himself That Dmge an sich exist as the background of reality and the real cause of our sensations was undoubtedly his thought. Yet it is doubtful if because of this fact, full justice has been done to the impetus which the Kantian movement gave to the modern functional conception of reality Kant holds that all knowable reality, all objects dependable for verificauon, fall within experience. His own criticism of ontology would apply legitimately to his Dinge an sich, for in accordance with his whole examination of knowledge he would agree with the pragmatist m asking what really significant and verifiable meaning can things objects, existences have if the pragmatic meaning is rejected ? As Kant would phrase it, if the categories cannot be applied to things-in- themselves, what meaning can they have ? He never consciously and explicitly looked this question in the face in its positive aspect or he would have realized that true reality may be given in just this experience which he has labored to account for; that real objects as well as phe- nomenal exist only as they enter into our activity, our experience. Now it might conceivably be held, as Raub suggested,- that some pragmatists would not deny the existence of things-in-themselves and in that case, there would be no break, for Kant teaches throughout that we do not, m our intellectual activity, deal with them at all, expect in a negative way. Such pragmatists would scarcely be advanced one whit beyond the great German. Kant was alive to the fact that the problem of knowledge, as he inherited it, involved two distinct questions— the possibihty of a reference to reality lying beyond the experience of the one who knows and existing on its own account and, on the other hand the nature of knowledge as an experience and the peculiar part played within It by the sensuous data and the governing principles of thought respectively. We have assumed throughout this study that pragmatic standards necessitate the uniting of the two. ■ Studies in Phil, and Psych. (Carman Memorial Volume), p. 214. 65 66 PRAGMATIC ELEBiENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES To say, "Pragmatism does not deny their existence, but it does not discuss the question,"^ that we know nothing of ultimate realities and turn them over to metaphysics, is a cavalier dodge of real difficulties and would, of course, square up Kant immediately. Unfortunately, this does not suffice. Pragmatism, no more than Kant, can leave the metaphysical question alone. To place external reality as a "chaos" off by itself gets no farther than to leave it as an "unknown." Just as with Kant, so with such pragmatists one may ask: If the mind is incapable of judging as to the nature of external reality, on what grounds can such a "chaos" be posited? To turn over to metaphysics any residual question would seem to mean, if we analyze out the attitude expressed by the phrase, that there is, after all, some distinct, separate region of thought and existence, some sphere of ontology, beyond the range of our problems. But this would be to continue the false separa- tion of worlds against which the pragmatic movement has launched its whole force. It would be Kant's mistake implicitly repeated. As a pause in reading is as significant, for meaning, as the pronouncing and grouping of phrases, so in our systematic treatment of problems of philosophy a break or abrupt stopping-place, with the implication that we should go on if we could, would imply again an ultimate reality non-experiential. If Raub and those he represents mean simply that Kant and pragmatists alike have turned away from empty debates about the void where thinking ceases, very good, but we have moved no farther than we were. For pragmatists who " do not deny their existence but do not discuss the matter" no better statement could be asked than Kant's. Indeed his position has well been cited as fortifying an attitude of antipathy to pure intellectualism : The conception of a noumenon is not self -contradictory ; for we cannot say that sense is the only possible mode of perception We give the name of noumena to all objects to which sensuous perception does not extend, just for the purpose of showing that such knowledge is not all that the understanding can think. Yet in the end we have to acknowledge that we cannot understand even the possibility of such noumena, and that the sphere of knowledge which we thus reserve beyond the sphere of phenomena is for us quite empty. In short, we have an understanding that problematically extends beyond the phenomenal, but no perception and not even the conception of a possible perception of objects beyond the sphere of sense, on which the understanding might be used assertorially If we choose to call it a noumenon, in order to show that we do not represent it as sensuous, we are at liberty to do so. But » Studies in Phil, and Psych. (Carman Memorial Volume), p. 214. 67 as we cannot apply to it any one of the categories, the conception of it is for us quite empty and meaningless.^ Just to leave things-in-themselves alone, what more is needed than this? But, as Bergson remarks, if we know nothing of things-in- themselves, "How can we affirm their existence even as problematic? If the unknowable reality projects into our perceptive faculty a sensuous manifold, capable of fitting into it exactly, is it not by that very fact in part known ?"2 Again, as to our possible attitude toward these unwieldy things-in- themselves, opponents of pragmatism might defend the view that certain pragmatists-notably James-maintain at times a naive realism and that in this respect Kant has the advantage of them for an ultimate philosophical system. Such expressions in the pragmatist may, how- ever, justly be regarded as terminology inspired by their perfervid opposition to absolutism. The real connection of pragmatism at this pomt IS probably to be found in its voluntaristic elements, the historical transmission of which may be taken as coming from Kant through Schopenhauer. As for realism and idealism, neither Kant nor the pragmatist need deny his obligation to the former for the working distmction between thing and idea nor to the latter for the conception of the dependence of our reality upon our thought. Pragmatism is only "a new name for old ways of thinking." The pragmatist would insist, however, that this dependence of reality upon our thought be under- stood in a voluntaristic sense. In the doctrine of a constructed experience we have the starting- point, at least, of a conception of reality which, while it has not been thoroughly elaborated, may justly be attributed in large measure to Kant's influence. The legitimate consequences of Kant's position would prevent his making any assertions— positive or negative- lending strength to either a realistic or absolutistic definition of reality It may be proper to mention again that Kant disowned "idealism proper," regarding it as an "extravagant" doctrine. He held that we cannot determine reality by the understanding alone: The position of all true idealists, from the Eleatics down to Bishop Berkeley is contamed in the following statement: AU knowledge acquired through the senses is a mere illusion, and the truth exists only in the ideas furnished by pure understanding and reason. The principle that governs and determines the ' Meiklejohn's trans., pp. 187, 206. ' Op. cit.f p. 205. I 68 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT's PHILOSOPHY whole of my idealism is, on the contrary, that any knowledge of things that proceeds from pure understanding or reason is a mere illusion, and that truth is found in experience alone. ^ In thus disclaiming the power of ideas to reach intuitively real being, as Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz held, and limiting them to a formal application, the function of merely providing the laws which connect phenomena and bring unity into the multiplicity of experience, he gives us a point of differentiation from absolute idealism and starts us on the road to pragmatism, at any rate. Caird was right in saying: The legitimate development of Criticism involves the final rejection of the thing-in-itself. How can anything come within consciousness which is essen- tially different from consciousness ? How can we think that which, ex hypo- thesis is unthinkable? How can thought discern its own absolute limits without emancipating itself from them ? How can it know the phenomenal as such, without a glimpse of the noumenon ?» But the pragmatist would deny that it necessarily follows that we are ** carried onward from transcendental to absolute idealism."^ The truth is that the problem of things-in-themselves is not Kant^s real problem at all. It is a rationalistic heirioom which, for the com- parison of Kant with pragmatism or for any significant study, must be locked away in the "Museum of Curios." Yet to draw as near as possible to the real meaning of Kant as against the absolutist we may notice that his handling of matter or substance (formeriy about synony- mous with the ultimate substrate) is more dynamic, even when we hold him to the literal word, than that of precedent absolutists like Spinoza or modern idealists like Hegel or Bradley. We have already seen his functional treatment of the ego or soul which Descartes made a part of real substance. When he comes to deal with matter in a scientific way he gives a dynamic theory of it. The laws of matter and motion cor- respond to the laws of thought established in his first Critique— \aiv,'s of conservation, inertia, action and reaction, and continuity.^ It seems highly significant that in dealing with substance he treats these not as laws of an absolute reality at all, of a material substance outside the mind, but merely as constant relations between phenomena in space and time. Here, too, the mind, by its forms and categories, constructs an objective worid governed by its own laws. When we contrast this ^ Prolegomena, p. 147. ' The Philosophy of Kant (one vol. work), p. 652. * Metaphysische Anfangsgrtinde der Wissemchaft, HI, "Mechanics." THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 69 treatment of substance itself with that of the metaphysicians of his dav we seen, to get means of differentiation that afford food for tLght as sutTtr " r'^' '^TI"" ^^"^ ^^ P^^'^^^*^^' '' - - -king to under- stand the real spirit of his philosophy. Kant and the pragmatist agree that the only reality we can definitely ma^sm ^f"'"'' ^-^''^ '''''' ^^ ^^ ^^^^^^^^^^ ^ 'xperience. Pra^ aTbut' trT^: r ''''r^r''''' '^ ^^^^^ ^^^^ -^ ^«- ^^anty at Knni "'"' ^""^^'^^' ^^ "^^ ^^ '^' f^^^tions in reality Knowledge is not a process of referring to something external It is a process going on within the object. And we have been se king to S wh" tlLflTl '^^' ''^'^ '"^ contradistinction from the r2n! ahsts who made light of experience as confused knowledge, or as mere ST^'V? T u"'^'^' ^'""' ^^^^ '^ -^"y concerned to pTov us the reality of the world as it appears to.us. His point of view i SenolT"' "^'"' ^^ ''''''''' ''^ ^^'"'^'y ^' -' ^owledge ol In connection with this is the further fact, also pregnant with lectuahsm that had been current since the dawn of the Renaissance In contending for the worth of man as determined more by his S than by the understanding, he foreshadowed the attitude of the prrgmS and suggested hints, not elaborated to be sure, of the rea^ dSc character of reality. It was from him that Schopenhauer toTTi interpretation of the relations between Din.e an sL and phelmena which IS approached by the viewpoint of such thinkers as SchUler It was notably Fichte who showed that things-in-themselves are really inconsistent with Kant's presuppositions, 'in comrenrupon without thmgs-in-themselves and we cannot remain in it if we retain them. The atter remarked with pungent wit that Kant's thing-in- Uself; as in itself real, but unknown and unknowable by us enjoys a position of ouum cum dignitatem- We may add that it is little betted Xt'Thtr^- b^^T "^^^ ^^^^ ^^'^^^^^•- ''^^^ transcendental object which may be the ground of this appearance which we call matter IS a mere somewhat, and we could not understand what it is Y2LTz:^rr'\ "" "•"; ^^"^ ^^"^^ ^^- '^ ^^^^^ toT.f' n only external world about which it can be profitable to talk at all is an external worid revealed in experience."3 Pragmatism ' Werke, III, 74. • Mdklejohn's trans., p. 380. , Mind, XXXIV, 380. 70 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT S PHILOSOPHY scarcely goes farther than to assume that an external world about which it is not profitable even to talk does not exist for any inquiry or interest. How shall we, on Kant's own principles, pass from ideas to things- in-themselves ? Kant assumes that the latter affect us and that sensa- tions as effects point back to ultimate things as causes. But he has himself made this impossible by granting to the law of causality only empirical validity. Absolute phenomenalism, rather than absolute idealism, would be a truer inference from his system if we must be pushed on to absolutism of any sort. As Raub says, "In the final analysis the phenomena are really noumena. Truth with Kant as with the pragmatist is necessarily a relation between different parts of experi- ence."^ Our world of ideas constitutes our only reality. But this does not involve Berkeleyan idealism or any other kind necessarily. It remained for pragmatism to clear up some of the obscurity in this word ideaSy combining with it, as did Schopenhauer, the significance of the end-striving or volitional aspects of our mental life. Ideas are not entities with an existence of their own. There are no such things as pure mental states. Ideas are a part of the practical life-process, or in other words of developing reality itself. The meaning of ideas is to be sought in the conditions, actual or prospective, of our struggle to live and develop. Similarly our judgments arise from activity and are true if they work for the attainment or the alteration of experienced values. "The truth of a state of mind means the function of a leading that is worth while." This is what ideas, thinking, are for. Consequently no object may properly be said to exist except as it enters or may enter into our experience for good or ill. Pragmatism shows that our knowledge is not, to use Kant's own unfortunate illustration, like an island standing in a boundless and impenetrable ocean of reality, from which it is forever shut off by a mist or fog. Our ever-growing experience and our experienced relations with other beings are reality itself. The real is just what we experience it as in our absorption and assimilation of it as our knowledge and life expand. Schiller holds, as did Kant, that we help make the outer world known to us. Do we also make or alter therewith a reality independent of our knowing? Not independent, the pragmatist would answer. We do alter the world. The outer world, whatever that expression may con- tain, is no more unrelated to us, generally speaking, than is a refreshing summer shower unrelated to the parched vegetation and the suffering humanity to whose relief it comes. Indeed has it not been seriously held ^Op. cit., p. 215. THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 71 that the restoration of our northern forests might help to bring back and multiply the refreshmg showers by the very establishment of need on altered. Thmkmg is a mode of interacting. We, after knowing, influence the course of the world in other ways than we would have done without our knowledge. The known object is changed by the fact of its bemg known. It passes by that fact into new relations with other objects. It was one of Kant's great services to show that knowing is not a mere process of revealing objects but rather an act in which we think about them, reflect upon them, and consequently an act partly constitutive and determinative of their character as objects We cannot speak of independent reality that is merely discovered by our t^dll'' • AT"' ^' T '" ^"^^"^^^^^1 abstraction but a "prelude to do ng. Schiller says the marmots reveal themselves by their anxious whistling before they are as yet really known to the Alpine intruder. They fear being known because this is merely a phase in the course of action that may mvolve death to them. Even so-called inanimate objects are subject to the same criterion. The awareness of a stone consists m, and is brought about by, its capacity for use in human Kant's inherited presuppositions led him to retain a supposed separation of object and ideas, of experience as we have it and reality Itself. He retamed this separation as an empty form back in his thought much as people who have outgrown their religious creeds retain them in an isolated region of their minds, if we may be allowed so faulty an expression. Technically, with Kant, thought remains a merely sub- jective principle whose function is exhausted in bringing order and unity into consciousness-order and unity assumed without a standard Ideas are restricted to phenomena. Technically, such an experience as this affords would not be real experience at all, but a matter of mere representations. But the spirit of Kant's philosophy goes beyond this separation. It is through the interpretation, criticism, and completion of his doctrme that we have come to see the true nature of experience, the true function of ideas as that of connecting mind with objects. We do not have a subject here and an object there, the mind on one side and things on the other. Experience is a real thing itself, a concrete expres- sion of reality, in which subject and object play their organic parts. In the language of J. E. Creighton: * Studies in Humanism, p. 443. 19 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY Not only is there no object without a subject, but it is equally true that there is no subject without an object. There is no independent object outside of thought, and there is no thought-in-itselj standing apart and in abstraction from the contents of experience and entering into only occasional relations to this content. We do not have first a mind and then become conscious of our relations to objects, but to have a mind is just to stand in those self-conscious relations to the objective realities ?^ We can readily understand how hard it was for Kant to break away from this dualism when we see not only the representational theory of knowledge that goes with crude realism but also the interaction view of mind in modern psychology harboring the same conception of a ''con- sciousness thing, shut up within itself, and related to other independently existing things." Even the theory of parallelism in psychology, while seeking to avoid metaphysical difficulties, still treasures unconsciously the view of two separate entities. Pragmatism, while not claiming absolute novelty in this respect, has done good service in revising all philosophical presuppositions regarding the functions of subject and object in experience. And it is just one of Kant's permanent contri- butions to have shown that subject and object develop from within experience itself. His failure to give to experience the extensive range which properly belongs to it as embracing reality in itself does not lessen the value of this contribution, for it is evident that the experience which he really treasured in his deepest meaning is the same experience which modern pragmatism accepts, not merely as phenomenal, but as reality itself. Kant's real center of gravity falls, as does that of the pragmatist, within the mind's activity, or better, within the activity of social indi- viduals, with objects entering as real and constitutive elements into its nature. Pragmatism is indebted in some measure, as has been said, to Schopenhauer, whose voluntaristic terminology strove at least to separate freedom, causality, and the unity of all life from rationalistic or intellectualistic ingredients — to recognize purposive factors in our mental life. Pragmatists are even more averse than was he to the Hegelian tise of ideas, as the wrong line of development from Kant, to evolve and perfect his true meaning. Pragmatism accepts voluntarism, but combines it with empiricism, with a true scientific attitude. This is not the old materialistic empiricism which in its way was as dogmatic as rationalism, for pragmatism recognizes no real bodies as fixed data any more than it accepts categories forged and " fulminated before nature began." Pragmatism constantly introduces the criteria of values. Indeed all existential judgments are subjected by its method to this ' Philosophical Review, XII, 600. THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 73 touchstone and become in the end judgments of value. It is in bridging the gap between Kant and empiricism that one of the chief services of pragmatism is to consist. Empiricism has always labored hard over Kant s position and has never been able to concede that the outer world is not found by and taken up into our consciousness fixed and given but t T L^'^T"^ ^^ ''''' apparatus of perception. Empiricism' has fostered the illusion of the tabula rasa. It has failed to do justice to the activity of the organism in the act of knowing, to the fact that we do not merely receive and record but that we react in modes decided by our own nature and directed toward the accomplishment of our own ends or Ideals. It was this fault that led Kant to abandon the attitude of empiricism which for a time he had espoused, and to look for its cor- rective. In swinging too far toward the other pole he was unable to appreciate the dynamic and changing character of the mind's reaction and the fact that it reacts as one whole. The functional view of mind and reality dissolves the parallelism or dualism that prevailed a quarter of a century ago, but not by again assuming a fixed datum to which all else must adjust itself and leaving unsolved the old question of how this can be related to mind. Pragmatism essays the interpretation of reality in terms of the whole circle of human needs and ideals. It is Dewey's reflex-arc concept again, carried out to its completest application. To do this. It msists we need not have resort to absolute idealism with its speculative entities. Pragmatism would turn to social psychology for an attempt to define reality, if reality must be defined. Our ideas are social products, our recognized realities are social achievements and they are just what they are to the social consciousness. 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