THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM 

 OF KNOWLEDGE l 



TT is now something over a century since Kant 

 1 called upon philosophers to cease their discus 

 sion regarding the nature of the world and the 

 principles of existence until they had arrived at 

 some conclusion regarding the nature of the know 

 ing process. But students of philosophy know 

 that Kant formulated the question &quot; how knowl 

 edge is possible &quot; rather than created it. As mat 

 ter of fact, reflective thought for two centuries 

 before Kant had been principally interested in just 

 this problem, although it had not generalized its 

 own interest. Kant brought to consciousness the 

 controlling motive. The discussion, both in Kant 

 himself and in his successors, often seems scholas 

 tic, lost in useless subtlety, scholastic argument, 

 and technical distinctions. Within the last decade 

 in particular there have been signs of a growing 

 weariness as to epistemology, and a tendency to 



delivered before the Philosophical Club of the Univer 

 sity of Michigan, in the winter of 1897, and reprinted with 

 slight change from a monograph in the &quot; University of Chi 

 cago Contributions to Philosophy,&quot; 1897. 

 271 



