192 PHILOSOPHY 



whether the procedure be read as a leveling down or a leveling up. 

 Distributing the titles conferred by Pure Reason in this democratic 

 fashion reminds us too much, unhappily for Kant, of the Cartesian 

 performances with Substance; whereby God, mind, and matter be- 

 came alike "substances," though only God could in truth be said to 

 "require nothing for his existence save himself," while mind and 

 matter, though absolutely dependent on God, and derivative from 

 him, were still to be called substances in the "modified" and Pick- 

 wickian sense of being underived from each other. 



But if Kant's naming his third syllogistic postulate the Idea of 

 God is inconsequent upon his analysis; or if, when the analysis is 

 made consequent by taking the third Idea to mean the whole Self, 

 the first and second postulates sink in conceptual rank, so that they 

 cannot with any pertinence be called Ideas, unless we are willing to 

 keep the same name when its meaning must be changed in genere, 

 a procedure that can only encumber philosophy instead of clearing 

 its way, -- these difficulties do not close the account; we shall find 

 other curious things in this noted passage, upon which part of the 

 characteristic outcome of Kant's philosophizing so much depends. 

 Besides the misnaming of the third Idea, we have already had to 

 question, in view of the path by which he reaches it, the fitness of 

 his calling the first by the title of the Soul; and likewise, though for 

 other and higher reasons, of his calling the second by the name of the 

 World. In fact, it comes home to us that all of the Ideas are, in one 

 way or another, misnomers; Kant's whole procedure with them, in 

 fine, has already appeared inexact, inconsistent, and therefore uncrit- 

 ical. But now we shall become aware of certain other inconsistencies. 

 In coming to the Subject, as the postulate of categorical syllogizing, 

 Kant, you remember, does so by the path of the relation Subject and 

 Predicate, arguing that the chain of categorical prosyllogisms has 

 for its limiting concept and logical motor the notion of an absolute 

 subject that cannot be a predicate; and as no subject of a judgment 

 can of itself give assurance of fulfilling this condition, he concludes 

 this motor-limit of judgment-subjects to be identical with the Subject 

 as thinker, upon whom, at the last, all judgments depend, and who, 

 therefore, and who alone, can never be a predicate merely. In similar 

 fashion, he finds as the motor-limit of the series of conditional 

 prosyllogisms, which is governed by the relation Cause and Effect, 

 the notion of an absolute cause --a cause, that is, incapable of being 

 an effect; and this, as undiscoverable in the chain of phenomenal 

 causes, which are all in turn effects, he concludes is a pure Idea, the 

 reason's native conception of a necessary linkage among all changes 

 in Space, or of a Cosmic Unity among physical phenomena. In both 

 conceptions, then, whether of the unity of the Subject or of the 

 World, we seem to have a case of the unconditioned, as each, surely, 



