OP THE SOUL. 245 



speaks of intuition (Anschauung), understanding, and 

 reason, and of reason again as theoretical and practical, 

 and of judgment, as if they were independent agencies, 

 working together on separate lines and by definite laws 

 in the production of all mental life and work. To these 

 two tendencies, the tendency to divide rigidly mental 

 phenomena and to personify independently mental 

 processes or powers, we must add, as a third important 

 factor, an extreme reliance upon the power of the human 

 intellect to decide as to its own capabilities, and this not, 

 as with Locke, by a psychological or historical investigation 

 of the genesis of the thinking process, but by an analysis 

 of general statements made in the form of language. 



The very title of Kant's first and most important great 

 work, ' The Critique of Pure Reason,' suggests the idea that 

 it was possible to abstract from the actual and concrete ex- 

 isting examples of reasoning a definite pure form or scheme 

 which existed as it were somewhere in the human mind 

 anterior to the practical use of the reasoning faculties ; 

 that one could by analysis of what is given in the 

 crystallised knowledge of experience and of the sciences 

 find out that something, that quid proprium, of which 

 the thinking mind must be possessed before it made any 

 practical use of its faculties. It was an attempt to step 

 beyond the purely descriptive or psychological position. 

 This attempt to overstep the limits of a purely descriptive 

 process Kant termed characteristically the transcendental 

 method. This term has been variously criticised, and 

 had no doubt a deterrent effect upon those students of 

 his philosophy who approached it from a common-sense 

 point of view and with realistic habits of thought. The 



