PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 197 



for those who accepted his points of view, his method of philo- 

 sophizing, and his results, much greater success in "removing know- 

 ledge" than in "finding room for faith." For he seemed to have 

 left the positive truths of Ethics so involved in the negative posi- 

 tions of his critique of knowledge as greatly to endanger them; and 

 to have entangled the conceptions of religion with those of morality 

 in a manner to throw doubt upon them both. 



The breach between the human cognitive faculties and the onto- 

 logical doctrines and conceptions on which morality and religion 

 had been supposed to rest firmly, the elaborately argued distrust 

 and skepticism which had been aimed against the ability of human 

 reason to reach reality, and the consequent danger which threatened 

 the most precious judgments of worth and the ontological value 

 of ethical and aBSthetical sentiments, could not remain unnoticed, 

 or fail to promote ceaseless and earnest efforts to heal it. The hitherto 

 accepted solutions of the problems of cognition, of being, and of 

 man's ethico-religious experience, could not survive the critical 

 philosophy. But the solutions which the critical philosophy itself 

 offered could not fail to excite opposition and to stimulate further 

 criticism. Moreover, certain factors in human nature, certain inter- 

 ests in human social life, and certain needs of humanity, not fully 

 recognized and indeed scarcely noticed by criticism, could not 

 fail to revive and to enforce their ancient, perennial, and valid 

 claims. 



In a word, Kant left the main problems of philosophy involved 

 in numerous contradictions. The result of his penetrating but ex- 

 cessive analysis was unwarrantably to contrast sense with under- 

 standing; to divide reason as constitutive from reason as regulative; 

 to divorce the moral law from our concrete experience of the results 

 of good and bad conduct, true morality from many of the noblest 

 desires and sentiments, and to set in opposition phenomena and 

 noumerta, order and freedom, knowledge and faith, science and 

 religion. Now the highest aim of philosophy is reconciliation. What 

 wonder, then, that the beginning of the last century felt the stimu- 

 lus of the unreconciled condition of the problems of philosophy at 

 the end of the preceding century! The greatest, most stimulating 

 inheritance of the philosophy of the nineteenth century from the 

 philosophy of the eighteenth century was the "post-Kantian pro- 

 blems." 



II. The lines of the movement of philosophical thought and the 

 principal contributory influences which belong to the nineteenth 

 century may be roughly divided into two classes; namely, (1) 

 those which tended in the direction of carrying to the utmost ex- 

 treme the negative and destructive criticism of Kant, and (2) those 

 which, either mainly favoring or mainly antagonizing the con- 



