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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE PKOGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



IMMANUEL KANT. 



The centenary of the death of Kant 

 was commemorated on February 12. 

 There was a special celebration at 

 Konigsberg, where the philosopher 

 spent his whole life; a monument is 

 planned for Berlin, and a Kant Society 

 has been formed in Germany. It 

 would probably be difficult for most 

 readers of a scientific journal to ex- 

 plain why Kant is one of the great 

 men of the world, and next to Aristotle 

 the most honored philosopher. In the 

 preface to his ' Kritik der reinen 

 Vernunft ' Kant expressed his own view 

 of the service he hoped to accomplish 

 in the following words: "In meta- 

 physical speculation it has always been 

 assumed that all our knowledge must 

 conform to objects; but all attempts 

 from this point of view to extend our 

 knowledge of objects a priori by means 

 of conception have ended in failure. 

 It is well to ask, therefore, whether 

 greater progress may not be made by 

 supposing that objects must conform 

 to our knowledge. This would clearly 

 agree better with the desired possi- 

 bility of such an c priori knowledge 

 of objects that could establish some- 

 thing about them before they are pre- 

 sented. Our suggestion is similar to 

 that of Copernicus in astronomy, who, 

 finding it impossible to explain the 

 movements of the heavenly bodies on 

 the supposition that they turned round 

 the spectator, tried whether he might 

 not succeed better by supposing the 

 spectator to revolve and the stars to 

 remain at rest. Let us make a simi- 

 lar experiment in metaphysics with 

 perception." 



Kant's rather remarkable lack of ap- 

 preciation of the work of his predeces- 

 sors led him to emphasize unduly the 

 novelty of his own point of view. Yet 



subsequent philosophers have tended 

 quite generally to regard him as its 

 most representative exponent. And he 

 forced the issue with such energy as to 

 make himself the most prominent fig- 

 ure in the philosophy of the last cen- 

 tury. He asserted repeatedly that we 

 do possess knowledge of objects which 

 is universal and necessary, and he as- 

 serted with no less frequency that in 

 all such cases our knowledge has not 

 conformed to objects, but objects have 

 conformed to the necessities of thought. 

 Just because we find that we must 

 think of objects in a certain way, we 

 must admit that this necessity springs 

 from thought itself. In spite of the 

 fact that this assumption is far from 

 self-evident, Kant succeeded in impo- 

 sing it upon his time with remarkable 

 success. The philosophy of the nine- 

 teenth century witnessed as a result 

 many noteworthy attempts to deter- 

 mine what reality must be by reference 

 to the necessities of thought alone. 

 The absurdities of Schelling and the 

 subtleties of Hegel mark, perhaps, the 

 extremes of this tendency. 



But the significance of Kant is not 

 seen only in this new inspiration given 

 to the attempt to determine, not what 

 reality is, but what it must be. For 

 his philosophy had its negative side, 

 which contained an equally important 

 emphasis. Just because what we must 

 think is due to the necessities of 

 thought, we have no right, he urged, to 

 extend the results of such thinking be- 

 yond thought itself and so pass to 

 things as they are. Exterior to 

 thought, beyond its controlling in- 

 fluence, they escape us utterly. The 

 significance of this important limita- 

 tion Kant exhibited most crucially 

 when he criticized all attempts of 

 speculative thinking to establish the 



