196 PHILOSOPHY 



In the epistemological problem as offered by the Kantian philo- 

 sophy of cognition there is involved the subordinate but highly 

 important question as to the proper method of philosophy. Is the 

 method of criticism, as that method was employed in the three 

 Critiques of Kant, the exclusive, the sole appropriate and product- 

 ive way of advancing human philosophical thought? I do not 

 think that the experience of the nineteenth century warrants an 

 affirmative answer to this question of method. This experience has 

 certainly, however, resulted in demonstrating the need of a more 

 thorough, consistent, and fundamental use of the critical method 

 than that in which it was employed by Kant. And this improved use 

 of the critical method has induced a more profound study of the 

 psychology of cognition, and of the historical development of philo- 

 sophy in the branch of epistemology. More especially, however, it 

 has led to the reinstatement of the value-judgments, as means of 

 cognition, in their right relations of harmony with the judgments 

 of fact and of law. 



The second of the greater problems which the critical philosophy 

 of the eighteenth handed on to the nineteenth century is the onto- 

 logical problem. This problem, even far more than the epistemo- 

 logical, has excited the intensest interest, and called for the pro- 

 foundest thought, of reflective minds during the last hundred years. 

 This problem engages in the inquiry as to what Reality is; for to 

 define philosophy from the ontological point of view renders it 

 "the rational science of reality;" or, at least, "the science of the 

 supreme and most important realities." In spite of the fact that 

 the period immediately following the conclusion of the Kantian 

 criticism was the age when the people were singing 



" Da die Metaphysik vor Kurzem unbeerbt abging, 

 Werden die Dinge an sich jetzo sub hasta verkauft," 



the cultivation of the ontological problem, and the growth of sys- 

 tematic metaphysics in the nineteenth century, had never pre- 

 viously been surpassed. In spite of, or rather because of, the fact 

 that Kant left the ancient body of metaphysics so dismembered and 

 discredited, and his own ontological structure in such hopeless con- 

 fusion, all the several buildings both of Idealism and of Realism 

 either rose quickly or were erected upon the foundations made bare 

 by the critical philosophy. 



But especially unsatisfactory to the thought of the first quarter 

 of the nineteenth century was the Kantian position with reference 

 to the problem in which, after all, both the few who cultivate philo- 

 sophy and the multitude who share in its fruits are always most 

 truly interested; and this is the ethico-religious problem. In the 

 judgment of the generation which followed him, Kant had achieved 



